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
Seeing the Obvious
The United States Senate acted last week with rare irony, verging on self-parody, when it abandoned efforts to pass a long-awaited, urgently needed measure on global warming. The legislators’ inaction was timed exquisitely, if unintentionally, to coincide with the latest wave of record-setting storms descending on us these days. While the senators were dithering over…
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Opinion Remember What Bobby Kennedy Died For
Several years ago, I had the unique blessing of sitting on the pulpit of the Ebenezer Baptist Church on Martin Luther King Day. For some reason, I wound up sitting next to Kerry Kennedy Cuomo, the daughter of the late Senator Robert Kennedy, and had the opportunity to exchange a few pleasantries with her. As…
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Opinion Proudly Israeli, Even With a Second Passport
One of the less talked-about aspects of Ehud Olmert’s envelopes-filled-with-dollars affair is the unsavory picture it presents of Israel-Diaspora relations. Here is the sycophantic Diaspora shnorer sucking up to his Israeli hero, buying a piece of Zionist glory by slipping him money. And here is the Israeli politician, turning with a mixture of disdain and…
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Opinion Beware the Ideological Guards of Academia
Earlier this month, as I got ready to address the graduating class of Jewish studies majors at the University of Maryland, I found myself acutely conscious of how much had changed in the university world since I entered it 40 years ago. Many of the assumptions and basic values that I brought with me into…
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Opinion Unto the Seventh Generation
In order to kick-start the sluggish economy, the federal government has decided to spend billions of dollars on tax rebates — that is, giving out cash to the public. The expectation was that with their newly found dollars, families would start buying things at the stores, putting money into circulation and stirring companies to hire…
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Opinion We Need Lots More Than the Holocaust
Let’s talk about Jeremiah. Well, not exactly about Jeremiah, but about Jeremiah’s mindset — specifically, about the prophet’s punishing predictions regarding the future history of our people. What makes the matter pertinent just now is the controversy surrounding Pastor John Hagee. I wrote in this space recently, and quite critically, of Hagee’s “explanation” of the…
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Letters June 13, 2008
The Archdiocese Didn’t Take This Window I used to live at 3060 Hull Avenue in the Bronx, right next door to the Mosholu Jewish Center (“A Bronx Tale: What Did the Archdiocese Do With Those Stained-Glass Windows?” May 30). My family and I were members from the early 1940s up until it closed. Rabbi Hershel…
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Opinion Delegates Behaving Badly
John McCain’s pugnacious address to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee in Washington this week may have given his presidential campaign a boost, but it ill served the pro-Israel lobbying organization that hosted him. As for the lobby, it didn’t do itself any favors with the hero’s reception it served up for the Arizona senator….
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Opinion Even the Scary and the Weird Have Rights
This is not the column I expected to write this week. I expected to cluck-cluck about the shameful, officially sanctioned kidnapping of the more than 450 children from the compound of the Fundamentalist LDS church in El Dorado, Texas, and to compare the deprivation of their rights to Guantanamo Bay. I expected to decry the…
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Opinion Peace Is Worth the Risk Of Withdrawing From the Golan
About this time last year, the Israeli media was buzzing with gloomy predictions of an impending war with Syria. Come summer, they said, the northern front would be ablaze. That, of course, didn’t come to pass. Nowadays, the buzz is all about the awful possibility that Israel will give up the Golan Heights in return…
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Opinion A Few Old Jews
“The fate of the world for the next four years,” a Florida rabbi said to The New York Times the other day. “It’s all going to boil down to a few old Jews in Century Village.” The rabbi was referring to the pitched battle for Jewish voter support that appears to be looming as the…
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