In the Forward’s opinion section, you’ll find analysis and essays from diverse corners of the Jewish world.
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Opinion
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Opinion
With Mary Robinson Fracas, Picking the Wrong Battle
The Jewish community has good reason to be disappointed by President Obama awarding the presidential medal of freedom to Mary Robinson. But our communal response to the award has unfortunately done more harm than good. Robinson, a former president of Ireland, forfeited any claim to accolades by presiding over the 2001 Durban World Conference Against…
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Opinion On Pay Day, Women Are Still Not Equal
On August 26 we celebrated Women’s Equality Day — the 89th anniversary of the date on which women gained the right to vote through ratification of the 19th Amendment to the Constitution. Since then, women have sought economic equality, too, achieving a great victory in 1963 with the passage of the Equal Pay Act. But…
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Opinion What if Rabbis Heed Obama’s High Holy Day Appeal?
In the hands of Obama the potter, American Jews are but clay. In his recent telephonic pep talk to a reported 1,000 American rabbis, the president invoked some of the most memorable (and theologically challenging) passages from the Rosh Hashanah liturgy to support his health policy agenda. He spoke about the new month of Elul,…
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Opinion A Counter-Revolution in Jewish-Catholic Ties
Forty-four years of Catholic-Jewish reconciliation, set in motion by the Second Vatican Council in 1965 and nudged forward by thousands of hours of dialogue and theological review, appear to be in jeopardy right now, threatened by an ideological battle inside the Catholic Church. The crisis was sparked by a church statement on Catholic-Jewish relations, issued…
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Opinion Sweden’s Jews
Since 1980, Jackie Jakubowski has been the chief editor of Judisk Kronika, the “Jewish Chronicle,” a respected Jewish cultural magazine with stories about literature, theater, politics and the like, published six times a year and read by a sizable number of Sweden’s Jews. Having fled antisemitism in his native Poland, and having witnessed the mounting…
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Opinion Defender of a Dream
Of the many remarkable and laudable traits of the late Edward M. Kennedy, one stands out for us: his ability to understand those less fortunate and his desire to work tirelessly to improve their lives. On the surface, he had little in common with the poor and disabled, with African-Americans still stung by segregation, with…
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Opinion A Lion Who Roared for the Least Fortunate
There was no reason back then, none at all, to suppose that Edward Moore Kennedy — Teddy — would one day be thought not merely a distinguished United States senator but one of the all-time greats. In 1962, at the ripe age of 30, one brother the incumbent president, another the nation’s attorney general, Ted…
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Opinion The Swedish Press Exposes the Invasion of the Jewish Body-snatchers
Western culture reached a sort of a milestone August 17 with the publication in Sweden’s largest-circulation daily newspaper, the tabloid Aftonbladet, of an opinion essay suggesting that Israeli soldiers are killing Palestinians in order to harvest their organs. Here’s how Yediot Ahronot sums up the fray. The writer, photojournalist Donald Bolstrom, didn’t exactly say that…
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Opinion Which War To Tackle? ’48 or ’67?
Does history matter? At first blush, the question is — well, to blush for. Obviously, history matters. July Fourth is history, and so is Pesach, and Simon Bolivar and the Great Depression and Galileo and on and endlessly on. Still, much depends on how we define words. I leave for another time discussion of what…
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Opinion First Sheikh Jarrah, Then Baka?
Mike Huckabee recently made a virulently anti-Zionist remark — and the Jews who accompanied him on his tour of East Jerusalem cheered. “It concerns me when there are some in the United States who would want to tell Israel that it cannot allow people to live in their own country, wherever they want,” declared the…
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Opinion Our Free Rider Problem
In October 2007, I was invited to the third Professional Leaders Project ThinkTank. The conference took place in Santa Monica, Calif., where, as I recall, close to 200 young Jews were received warmly at a top-flight hotel with beautiful sushi spreads and told that we were the future leaders of American Jewry. It was the…
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