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
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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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Opinion Time for Tzedakah, Now More Than Ever
Charity (or tzedakah, if you prefer) is as December a phenomenon as Hanukkah, Christmas and (since 1966) Kwanzaa. The reason is not the jollity of the season so much as it is the imminent end of the calendar year and the tax-deductibility of charitable contributions. And perhaps, as well, our heightened awareness, in the dead…
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Letters December 12, 2008
A Community Liaison, Not a Special Pleader I read with interest your article about candidates vying for the Jewish liaison position in the Obama White House, a position I held under President Gerald Ford (“The Race Is on for Hot Job as Obama’s Liaison to Nation’s Jews,” December 5). With all due respect to those…
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Opinion Mumbai the Game-Changer
Until now, most of us thought of Mumbai, if at all, as just a name on a map. Now we have a clearer image. On November 26 a band of terrorists swept through the Indian port city, shooting and bombing, taking over buildings and combing them for people to kill. For three days the world…
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Opinion The Change We Need
It’s a requirement of electoral politics that candidates must present themselves as all things to all people. What looks like hypocrisy is actually just common sense: The more precisely you define yourself, the more potential voters you drive away. The smart politician campaigns by promising people what they want but then governs by giving them…
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