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
First the PLO, Now Hamas?
Just over 20 years ago, as Ronald Reagan passed the presidential baton to George H.W. Bush, the United States reversed a decades-long policy by initiating open diplomatic contacts with a group that it had long decried as a terrorist organization. The announcement in December 1988 by Reagan’s secretary of state, George Schultz, that American diplomats…
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Opinion Our Next President’s Debt to a King
Oh happy coincidence: The congruence of this year’s Martin Luther King Day on the 19th of January and the inauguration of Barack Hussein Obama as president of the United States on the 20th offers so rich, if too brief, a respite from the grim headlines of these times. Truth be told, without Dr. King there…
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Opinion Hebrew School for All?
New York is about to witness a historic experiment in the nature of Jewish engagement in American society: the planned opening in August 2009 of the city’s first Hebrew-themed public school. The school, to be known as the Hebrew Language Academy, will be organized as a charter school, publicly funded but operated by a private…
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Opinion Numbering the Dead
On January 14, day 19 of the Gaza war, United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon faced a press conference in Cairo and flatly declared it “intolerable that civilians bear the brunt of this conflict.” Writing the next morning in an Arabic-language British newspaper, Al-Quds Al-Arabi, Ban pressed the point. “Many have died and the civilians are…
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Opinion Swearing on Lincoln’s Bible
On February 12, less than a month after Barack Obama takes the oath of office, we will celebrate the 200th anniversary of Abraham Lincoln’s birth. How fitting that the two events will occur so close in time — the bicentennial of the birth of the man from Illinois who emancipated the slaves and the inauguration…
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Opinion Eyeless in Israel
Since the start of the current Gaza campaign, the Israeli government and army have repeatedly said that they learned many lessons from the Second Lebanon War. Ostensibly, they are referring to the tactical and political breakdown outlined in the devastating postwar report issued by the Winograd Commission. But it seems that the government also learned…
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Opinion Inviting International Intervention
The war in Gaza is moving into its “international” phase, with a host of countries and institutions offering schemes for a cease-fire. Most of these involve the likely deployment at border crossing points into Gaza of third-party monitors, including the active participation in peacekeeping arrangements of two of Israel’s neighbors, Egypt and the West Bank-based…
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Opinion ‘There Is No Alternative’ Is No Answer
In August of 1973 I arrived in Israel as a guest of the Foreign Ministry. For reasons I no longer recall, the ministry had decided that trying to effect my conversion to its view of Israel’s policies regarding the Palestinians was a worthy investment. This was six years after Israel’s stunning victory in the Six…
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Opinion Grasping Gaza
When Israel first unleashed its bombs over Gaza on December 27, it was depicted around the world as a rogue state recklessly igniting an apocalypse. Televised images of warplanes and bloodied Palestinian children inflamed passions in foreign capitals and brought angry crowds into the streets of Europe and the Muslim world. Few beyond Israel’s strongest…
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Opinion Preserve, Protect, Defend
In his brilliant biography of the U.S. Constitution, Akhil Reed Amar notes that the document is a contract, a covenant between Americans and the government created to serve them. The Preamble’s lyrical framework bridges the personal (“We the People”) with the active promise (“do ordain and establish this Constitution”). And what the people had ordained…
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Letters January 16, 2009
Yoffie’s Right, Israel Needs Tough Doves Rabbi Eric Yoffie is right on target both in his affirmation of Israel’s need to respond to the rockets being fired from Gaza into Israel’s cities and in his critique of J Street and of a few Jewish doves who “have demonstrated an utter lack of empathy for Israel’s…
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Opinion The Iran war ended terribly for the US, and even worse for Israel
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Film & TV In ‘Disclosure Day,’ Steven Spielberg finds himself at odds with Jewish thought about aliens
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Opinion Cultural boycotts of Israel just reached peak absurdity
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Culture ‘My mayor Muslim, my bagel Jewish’ — the Knicks chant capturing New York’s soul
In Case You Missed It
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Culture The manosphere says women owe their husbands sex — Judaism says the opposite
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Fast Forward Georgia’s Jewish senator called his newly minted GOP opponent an antisemite. Why?
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Fast Forward Alex Bores’ supporters disagree on Israel. They agree on him.
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Fast Forward Organizers of London Israeli real estate fair apologize after West Bank properties surface despite denials