Opinion

• Opinion

  If Torture Isn’t News, What Does That Say?

  On December 10, 1948, the General Assembly of the United Nations adopted and proclaimed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. So just the other day, the declaration’s 60th anniversary was celebrated. It may well have escaped your attention; though people engaged in human rights work marked the occasion, the anniversary flew in, then out, below…

  By Leonard Fein

  3 min read
• Opinion

  Hebron and the Rule of Law

  Israel got a taste recently of what to expect from West Bank settlers in the event of a peace agreement with the Palestinians. On the morning of December 4, some 600 border police staged a surprise raid on a disputed house in Hebron to evict nine Jewish families living there illegally. Removed with the families…

  Dec 11, 2008 | 3 min read
• Opinion

  Never Again, Really

  Right there, on the third page of a new report issued by the bi-partisan Genocide Prevention Task Force and co-authored by former secretary of state Madeline Albright and former defense secretary William S. Cohen, is this stunning acknowledgement: The United States government “does not have an established, coherent policy for preventing and responding to genocide…

  Dec 11, 2008 | 2 min read

Columnists View All

• Jodi Rudoren This is my last column as editor of the Forward

  

• Jay Michaelson American Jews were played — now what?

  

• Rob Eshman Charlie Kirk and Alan Berg: 2 murders, 41 years apart, show the painful perils of polarization

  

• Nora Berman ‘A long record of failure’: Is it time to put the two-state solution to rest?

  

• Dan Perry Israel’s strike in Qatar: An audacious bid for victory, or just another foolhardy provocation?

  

• Emily Tamkin Trump’s attack on George Soros is ludicrous. It also endangers Jews (and everyone else)

  

The Latest

• Letters

  December 19, 2008

  No Need To Hear Tyrants Pontificate In deciding whether or not to attend the Durban II conference, the new president should take a cue from the Bush administration and spare taxpayers the expense of sending representatives to hear the usual claptrap about racism and discrimination from some of the worst human rights offenders on the…

  Dec 11, 2008 | < 1 min read
• 
  Opinion

  Profaning a Holy City

  Hebron this month resembled nothing so much as Jerusalem in the summer of 70 C.E. Then, as now, Jewish extremists battled the duly constituted leadership of the people, taking the law into their own hands and throwing morality to the wind. When Jewish hatred desecrated Jerusalem that fateful summer 1,938 years ago, the Jewish people…

  By Haim Watzman Dec 11, 2008 | 3 min read
• Opinion

  Hasmoneans, Hellenism and Us

  This is Hanukkah season. In Hebrew schools across the country the Hanukkah story will be told, and the story usually goes like this: The wicked king Antiochus IV Epiphanes attacked the innocent and pious Jews of Judaea, imposing Greek ways, proscribing the observance of Jewish practices and profaning the Temple of Jerusalem. Judah the Maccabee…

  By Shaye J.D. Cohen Dec 11, 2008 | 4 min read
• Opinion

  A Year To Celebrate, and Reflect

  In May, the State of Israel celebrated the 60th anniversary of its independence. Earlier this month, we marked another momentous 60th anniversary: On December 10, 1948, the United Nations General Assembly adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Both anniversaries offer cause for celebration. That these two monumental events are inherently connected makes their commemoration…

  By Maya Sabatello Dec 11, 2008 | 3 min read
• Opinion

  Yesterday We Dreamt of a Better Tomorrow

  Let’s start with Mark Erlich, executive secretary-treasurer of the 24,000-member New England Regional Council of Carpenters. Set to the side for now that Erlich is the great-grandson of Simon Dubnow, the great Jewish historian and founder of YIVO, murdered by the Nazis, and that his grandfather was Henryk Erlich, a leader of the Jewish Labor…

  By Leonard Fein Dec 11, 2008 | 4 min read
• 
  Opinion

  Targeting Tolerance in Mumbai

  When my Indian Jewish grandmother married my Indian Muslim grandfather in the 1930s, their marriage was unusual in some ways. But in others it was commonplace. Theirs was a romance of pre-Partition India, and their courtship and early marriage, like so many in Mumbai, unfolded in the grand and intimate spaces of the Taj Hotel…

  By Sadia Shepard Dec 4, 2008 | 4 min read
• Opinion

  Where Would Darwin Daven?

  Depending upon your perspective, Jewish spiritual communities are either calcifying into pillars of salt, or experiencing a renaissance unlike anything since the havurah movement of the early 1970s. The view from 30,000 feet is one of institutional religious Judaism, where membership in synagogues (at least in the non-Orthodox world) is both aging and diminishing. These…

  By Joshua Avedon Dec 4, 2008 | 4 min read
• Opinion

  Spoiling for a Fight in Washington

  In a post-election Internet posting, M.J. Rosenberg of the Israel Policy Forum neatly summed up the sentiments of the Jewish left. Responding to rattlings on the Web that Rahm Emanuel, President-elect Barack Obama’s future chief of staff, might be, as Rosenberg put it, “an AIPAC stooge, Likudnik, or whatever,” the IPF’s director of policy analysis…

  By Jonathan S. Tobin Dec 4, 2008 | 3 min read