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
August 14, 2009
Let’s Not Let Norway Off Too Easy Your August 7 editorial “Norway and the Holocaust” cites Norway’s condemnation of Knut Hamsun, its pro-Nazi Nobel laureate in literature, in responding to critics of Norway’s chairmanship of the Task Force for International Cooperation on Holocaust Education, Remembrance, and Rebirth. But the history of Norway’s relationship to Jews…
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Opinion ‘Re-Brissening’ Jon Stewart and David Ben-Gurion
You may have read in our Bintel Blog recently about cultural critic Ron Rosenbaum and his July 24 manifesto in Slate, calling on Jon Stewart to show his ethnic pride and reclaim his birth name, Jonathan Leibowitz. It’s almost as if the Leibowitz in you is trying desperately to escape from behind the mask of…
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Opinion In Tel Aviv, a Special Place Comes Under Attack
The Youth Bar on Nachmani Street is a special place. Every Saturday night, gay teenagers gather in this residential apartment in the heart of Tel Aviv. The apartment, which was willed to the gay community by a local gay activist, has been a spot for gay teenagers to find companionship and support in a safe,…
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Opinion Kassin Family Tree
I could be off by a dozen or so, but I count 70 rabbis in the family, going back to the year 1540. That makes the Kassin rabbinic dynasty one of the oldest on record. The Syrian Jewish community, now in the news for exceedingly distasteful reasons, is fabled for its insularity, hence not much…
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Opinion Giving Life
Of all the repugnant images of Jews accompanying the recent arrests of rabbis and others accused of money laundering and public corruption, none was as repellent as the charges against Levy Izhak Rosenbaum for trafficking in human organs. Worse, federal authorities alleged, his business of buying and selling body parts had gone on for a…
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Letters August 8, 2009
In his July 17 column “Who Is an Israeli?” Leonard Fein states that “Israelis haven’t a clue as to how to think about, let alone deal with, their society’s diversity.” I would submit that there is indeed a clue, and it comes from a time and place where the proverbial shoe was on the proverbial…
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Opinion A Light Unto the Nations, or a Cautionary Tale?
The news that a slew of rabbis and politicians have been caught in a web of money laundering, corruption and even organ trafficking is providing grist for rabbis’ sermons across the country. It is taking its place in our synagogues among the things we mourn this Tisha B’Av. And understandably so. Even if some of…
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Opinion Summer of Hunger
For most children, summer means time to explore and discover, time for camp, or vacation, or other enriching out-of-classroom experiences. Time to learn through play. For many low-income children, however, summer means hunger. It means the glassed-over eyes and lethargy that accompany unfilled bellies. It means children consuming the empty but filling calories that contribute…
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Opinion Reports of Peace on the Horizon Are Exaggerated
The Obama administration’s resolute focus on the Israeli-Palestinian issue has generated a wave of predictions of an imminent end to the conflict. President Obama himself foresees a solution by the end of his first term and talks of setting a deadline. Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Salam Fayyad says the job can be done in two…
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Opinion On Obama and Israel, Rage Without Reason
Alarm bells have been ringing around the neighborhood pretty much nonstop since July 13, when President Obama sat down to talk Middle East policy at the White House with a pack of leaders from a dozen American Jewish organizations. The meeting was supposed to help buff up Obama’s relationship with the Jewish community, which is…
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Opinion Norway and the Holocaust
Norway is honoring the 150th anniversary of the birth of novelist and poet Knut Hamsun, who won the Nobel Prize in literature in 1920. So acclaimed was Hamsun’s work that Isaac Bashevis Singer declared that “the whole modern school of fiction in the 20th century stems from Hamsun.” But in his later years — he…
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