In the Forward’s opinion section, you’ll find analysis and essays from diverse corners of the Jewish world.
To pitch an opinion piece, email our Opinion Editor, Talya Zax.
In the Forward’s opinion section, you’ll find analysis and essays from diverse corners of the Jewish world.
To pitch an opinion piece, email our Opinion Editor, Talya Zax.
China’s violent repression of Tibetan freedom protesters over the past few weeks is turning into a test of the world community’s ability to act with even a modicum of conscience in the face of outrageous injustice. So far, the results are dismal. The crisis began with a protest march by Buddhist monks March 10, the…
With the collapse of Bear Stearns, the cocky, hard-charging Wall Street investment bank, America and the world have turned a new page in their understanding of the financial and economic troubles unfolding around us. Ever since the so-called sub-prime mortgage crisis erupted last year, discussion has been centered mostly on questions of how long it…
Jerusalem has seen plenty of terrorist attacks, this month’s massacre at the Mercaz Harav yeshiva being only the latest. Every attack has stirred the emotions of the city’s Jewish residents, and sometimes Arabs have been indiscriminately beaten. I remember a story about two Arab employees of the Jerusalem Municipality who in the wake of an…
With the Supreme Court opening this week the first extensive examination of the constitutional right to bear arms in nearly 70 years, now seems a pretty good time to ask a question that’s been perplexing me for nearly as long: Why is that American Jews are so overwhelmingly anti-gun? I’ve been stumped by this communal…
Last month Princeton University announced plans for a year-abroad program to enable students to work overseas before ever setting foot on the college campus. The idea, according to the university’s president, is to give students an international perspective while adding maturity, giving them a break from academic pressures and “cleansing the palate of high school.”…
Spitzer Disregarded the Health of His Family Eliot Spitzer’s actions were reprehensible not just for the immorality of it, nor simply because of the inherent hypocrisy of his public positions, but for an altogether different reason as well — one that opinion writer Alan Dershowitz missed entirely (“Spitzer Has Sinned, But It’s Our Sex Obsession…
Next month at Seder, we will recall how Egypt made the lives of the Children of Israel “bitter.” We will remember how “the children of Israel groaned… and cried out” and that “God heard their moaning.” But this week we heard the groaning of the Tibetan people. The Tibetans have no Seder, but they commemorate…
The Bible says that the sins of the parents will be punished on the children, yea unto the seventh generation. The “sins” we are committing are embodied in the ever-mounting debt that our generation is incurring that will have to be paid off by our kids and their kids and so on and on. The…
Meanwhile, the war. Iraq, that is, driven from the front pages by the economy, by the presidential campaign, by Eliot Spitzer, driven from public consciousness by all those plus the lies, the deceptions, most of all the pointlessness of thinking about it since President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney and the rest are plainly…
The American economy is in trouble. It is not the first time. In the 1930s, the American economy sank into a depression. As a candidate for president, Franklin D. Roosevelt described the situation with “one third of the nation ill fed, ill clothed, ill-housed.” He took steps to revive the economy by creating jobs. They…
This month Austria marked the 70th anniversary of the Anschluss, the onset of the country’s occupation by Nazi Germany. The commemorations were appropriately somber, save for discussion of a chronically unresolved chapter in Austria’s history: the restitution of artworks that were stolen from Austrian Jews and never returned to their rightful owners. The issue of…
דער אינצידענט איז פֿאָרגעקומען בעת אַ ממשותדיקן וווּקס פֿון אַנטיסעמיטיזם אין פֿראַנקרײַך
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