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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Letters
January 8, 2010
Laws of War Apply, Irrespective of an Occupation’s Legality In an otherwise insightful article, J.J. Goldberg makes a seriously erroneous assertion about international law as it relates to the Israeli-occupied territories (“Four Myths About the Mideast and Real Estate,” December 25). Goldberg claims that the broad consensus about the applicability of the Geneva Conventions to…
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Opinion A Right to Health Care
After all the horse-trading and grandstanding that marked the Senate’s health care debate, it’s easy to overlook the historic meaning of the chamber’s December 24 vote. The two houses of Congress have now endorsed the principle that access to decent medical care should be available by right to every citizen. America has finally ratified life…
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Opinion Despair, Israeli Style
When it’s not preoccupied with Gilad Schalit’s release-not-release, the settlement freeze-not-freeze, the never-ending Iran nightmare or Bibi Netanyahu’s offer/threat to bring Tsipi Livni’s Kadima into his coalition, in whole or in pieces, the Israeli press has lately been publishing a good deal of what can only be described as existential despair. Nobody has captured the…
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Opinion The Year in Verse
Who needs Santa when we can opine On Jews in the news, twenty-o’-nine? A year when Madoff became a verb, Larry David brought ‘Seinfeld’ to ‘Curb.’ Who needs reindeer when by the deli Are Bruno and Bar Refaeli? * The change in Washington gave the nod: A new job for David Axelrod, Another for Rahm…
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Opinion British Court, Jewish Dilemma
Britain’s Supreme Court has weighed in on the thorny question of Jewish identity. By a 5-4 vote on December 16, the judges upheld an earlier court ruling that publicly funded Jewish schools in Britain could not admit students by what it deemed to be ethnic considerations. Such schools, said the court, had to look beyond…
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Opinion The Aughts and Us
The End of the Peace Process By Elliott Abrams The Palestinian rejection of two Israeli prime ministers’ peace offers, one more generous than the other, transformed the Israeli view of relations with the Palestinians. These rejections — by Yasser Arafat of Ehud Barak’s offer and by Mahmoud Abbas of Ehud Olmert’s — plus the terrorist…
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Opinion A Year of Harsh Blows, and a Growing Divide
How to sum up 2009? For starters, recall that it capped the first decade of the new millennium, a decade that effectively began on September 11, 2001. A decade marked by a string of losses that would put the New York Mets to shame: the loss of America’s global respect and its economic stability, the…
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Opinion No Point in Prophecy, No Time for Despair
Who can foretell the things that will fell us, who can count them? What I mean is, why bother? It’s not just that prophecy for some millennia now (since the destruction of the Temple, R. Yohanan says in the Talmud) has been reserved for children and fools. It’s that 2010 begins sourly, and there is…
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Opinion What Joe Didn’t Know, and When He Didn’t Know It
Say it ain’t so, Joe! Just nine years ago, Senator Lieberman of Connecticut was a national symbol of moral integrity and punchy independence, the Senate’s very first openly observant Jew, the first Jew to appear on a major party presidential ticket, the first senior Democrat to rebuke President Bill Clinton’s naughty bits. Now, in less…
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Opinion ‘Religion Is Actually Spirituality’: An Exchange
Last month, our Jay Michaelson, in a column titled “Religion is Actually Spirituality,” argued that “even the most diehard, hyper-rational, Lithuanian Orthodox, High Reform, or otherwise non- or anti-spiritual religionists perform religious acts because they want to feel a certain way. In other words, religion is a form of spirituality.” Michaelson’s take on the relationship…
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Opinion A Netanyahu Conversion? The Case for Skepticism
Too transparent to be a scam, more nearly a farce. I refer to Prime Minister Netanyahu’s 10-month “freeze” in settlement construction on the West Bank, about as gummy a freeze as can be imagined, a freeze meant to change nothing, only to placate the Americans. That is, admittedly, an increasingly contrarian view. Many people, including…
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