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
Accepting a 73-Year-Old Invitation
On one side of the faded but well-preserved invitation it is written that the groom’s parents “tienen el agrado de invitar a Usted”; on the other side the bride’s parents “hobn dem koved aykh ayntsulaydn” to the wedding of their children, Chanale and Baruch. The date of the nuptials: “el 1 de Diciembre de 1934,…
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Opinion For Israel’s Sake, Replace Politics of Either/Or With Both/And
Dualism is built into us — perhaps part of our neural make up, surely part of our cultural inheritance: light/dark, war/peace, hot/cold, wet/dry, joy/sorrow. Fortunately, we know that there’s a continuum between the antipodes, that things can sometimes be neither hot nor cold but simply lukewarm, neither wet nor dry but simply moist. And in…
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Letters November 2, 2007
For Jerusalem’s Sake The letter sent last month by the Orthodox Union to Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert with regard to the possibility of his government ceding sections of Jerusalem to the Palestinian Authority was not, as your editorial asserts, motivated by “anger and insecurity” (“Holier Than Thou,” October 26). Rather, it was a reflection…
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Opinion One People
Reports from Jerusalem, where the Jewish Agency for Israel was holding its quarterly board meeting this past week, indicate a spike in tensions within the institution designated under Israeli law as the formal link between Israelis and their Diaspora Jewish cousins. A group of wealthy American philanthropists is reportedly threatening to cut off support to…
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Letters October 26, 2007
I Say Pizze, You Say Pizzi As a long-time fan and admirer of Philologos, I am thrilled to have caught him on a minor inaccuracy (“One Bagel, Two Bagel?”, September 28). The plurals of Italian pizza and pasta are not pizzi and pasti, but pizze and paste. Being myself a very small-scale linguist of the…
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Opinion Trial and Error
A mistrial is not the same as an acquittal. Five men escaped conviction in Texas this week on federal charges of financing terrorism through a Muslim charity, but they were not found innocent. The jury failed to agree on a verdict, and the judge declared a mistrial. The government charged that the men’s charity, the…
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Opinion Newly Discovered Tunnel May Once Have Carried Dead Sea Scrolls
Accounts released last month of a newly discovered Jerusalem tunnel state that the passage was the very one used by those fleeing Jerusalem during the siege of 70 C.E., as described by Josephus. However, Josephus identifies not one tunnel but an elaborate network of them. That said, this most recent discovery, and others like it,…
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Opinion Western Europe’s Reluctant Lurch Toward Bush on Iran
When France’s foreign minister, Bernard Kouchner, suggested last month that war may be the only way to stop Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons, he sounded more like a Washington hawk than your typical French politician. Kouchner is not the only top European official who is changing his tune on Iran. The obstinacy of Iranian President…
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Opinion ‘Israel Lobby’ Writers Miss the Real Jewish Conflict
Among the (many) things that John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt get wrong in their controversial book, “The Israel Lobby,” is their characterization of the American Jewish community. According to their understanding, there’s a substantial contrast between the policies “the lobby” espouses and the more dovish views of the community at large. For the most part,…
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Opinion Holier Than Thou
Leaders of Israeli society are always welcome visitors on these shores. As representatives of the Jewish state, they speak for an elemental, transformative reality in the emotional and spiritual life of modern Jewry. That said, last week’s visit by the Sephardic chief rabbi of Israel, Rabbi Shlomo Amar, must be seen as the latest and…
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Letters October 19, 2007
Archbishop Tutu’s Words Speak for Themselves An October 12 editorial argues that an examination of South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu’s actual remarks shows that he said nothing about Israel being racist, that he did not compare Israel to Hitler and that he is not even remotely antisemitic (“The Tutu Heave-Ho”). But in fact, the full…
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