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
Discrimination By Any Other Name
In a speech early last month, Reverend Rowan Williams, the archbishop of Canterbury and spiritual leader of the world’s 80 million Anglicans, was just a bit too Muslim-friendly. He spoke of the “inevitability” of some “constructive accommodation” between British law and Sharia. Williams’s use of the terms “accommodation” and “Sharia” in the same sentence freaked…
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Opinion Catholics Have a Right To Pray for Us
Israel prays for gentiles, so the other monotheists, the Catholic Church included, have the right to do the same — and no one should feel offended, as many have by Pope Benedict XVI’s recent revision of the Tridentine Mass. Any other policy toward gentiles would deny their access to the one God whom Israel knows…
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Opinion There Is More to the ‘Arab Jews’ Controversy Than Just Identity
A recent column in these pages by Philologos rejecting the term “Arab Jew” has sparked a spirited e-dialogue among Forward readers and led the columnist to write two follow-up articles (including one in this week’s Arts & Culture section). Philologos’s point of departure was a Reuters dispatch of January 20 that cited remarks made in…
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Opinion Thinking the Unthinkable
Israel is in a diplomatic and military jam that keeps getting worse, but has no obvious solution. It is rapidly approaching the demographic tipping point, when Palestinian Arabs outnumber Israeli Jews in the land now under Israeli control. When that happens, Israel will find that it has become a minority-rule state, and it will have…
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Letters February 29-March7, 2008
A Generosity of Spirit Rabbi Irwin Kula’s February 22 opinion article on the Tridentine Mass is a welcome voice of reason on this issue (“Enough Tridentine Mass Hysteria”). As a Catholic I have heard and read many disparaging comments, both within and without the Church, about the petition in the Good Friday prayers calling for…
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Opinion If Audacious Hope Turns Into Dispirited Cynicism
Of course there are risks; there always are. Let us be frank. It is by no means clear that the next president, no matter how skillful, will be adequate to the multiple challenges we face: ending a war, restoring American honor, dealing with the Medicare crisis (and the crisis of healthcare costs in general), reversing…
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Opinion Wooing the Jewish Vote
Representative Steve Cohen, a Tennessee Democrat, is in trouble again. One of Tennessee’s most liberal politicians, he represents a mostly black district in Memphis. Since he first ran for Congress in 2006, he’s faced periodic murmuring that the district should have a black representative, as it had for 30 years. In early February, however, the…
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Opinion There Can Only Be One Law of the Land
Earlier this month Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams stunned much of his own church and the rest of the world by saying that it seems unavoidable that elements of Sharia will be adopted into the British legal system. His argument was that doing so would make the law of the land more palatable to Muslims,…
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Opinion A Storied Sports Club in Vienna Scores One for the History Books
The Hakoah athletic club was founded by Viennese Jews in 1909 in reaction to a wave of antisemitism that kept Jews off of most regular sports teams. Hakoah grew to become one of the world’s largest amateur athletic clubs, even winning the Austrian soccer championship during the 1920s. The occupation of Austria by Nazi Germany…
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Opinion Enough Tridentine Mass Hysteria
In this day and age, Jews should not be overreacting to Pope Benedict XVI’s revision of the Good Friday prayer calling for our people “to acknowledge Jesus Christ the Savior of all men.” A very small minority of Catholics saying these words in 2008 is very different in its threat to Jews than every Catholic…
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Opinion The Poor Are With Us, But Are We With the Poor?
Different interpretations abound, but unexplained, there could hardly be a greater contrast than that between two sentences, one from the New Testament (Matthew 26:11), “The poor you will always have with you,” the other from Deuteronomy (15:4), “There will not be any poor among you.” Odds are that most people would accept the first of…
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