Opinion

• Letters

  February 23, 2007

  Must Our Own Level Blood Libel Charge? Nearly 100 years ago, my grandfather Mendel Beilis was accused of blood libel in Kiev, Ukraine (“Scholar Pulls Book Revisiting Blood Libel,” February 16). After being dragged out of his house by the police in the middle of the night and placed in prison for 27 months, he…

  4 min read
• Opinion

  Frankly, a Shameful Record

  The recent discovery that the family of Anne Frank had unsuccessfully attempted to obtain an American visa before being captured by the Nazis shines light on the failure of the United States to do enough to save Jews from the Holocaust. In reaction to the news, Rep. Steve Israel has reintroduced a bill to make…

  Feb 23, 2007 | 2 min read
• Letters

  February 16, 2007

  Resolution on Iraq War To Incorporate Feedback A February 2 article distorts the process by which the Union for Reform Judaism is going about deciding how to update its 2005 biennial convention resolution criticizing the war in Iraq in light of changing circumstances (“Reform Considers Call for Full Iraq Pullout”). This decision will be made…

  Feb 16, 2007 | 3 min read

Columnists View All

• Jay Michaelson What can really be done to prevent antisemitic attacks like Bondi Beach?

  

• Rob Eshman A year after the LA fires, the lesson is clear: Our greatest disasters are often self-inflicted

  

• Nora Berman Did crypto-Jews invent the modern tarot deck?

  

• Dan Perry A quiet diplomatic shift in the Middle East, with monumental consequences for Israel

  

• Emily Tamkin Is Mamdani bad or good for Jews? Here’s how to tell

  

The Latest

• Opinion

  Let’s Mecca Deal

  You might not know it from all the second-guessing, but the world got some good news from Beijing this week with the announcement of a breakthrough in North Korea nuclear talks. After years of broken deals and apocalyptic threats, America and its partners finally got the world’s most paranoid dictatorship to agree to freeze its…

  Feb 16, 2007 | 3 min read
• Opinion

  We Have Nothing To Fear But Fear Itself

  Addictions come in numerous varieties: drugs, alcohol, food, sex. How about fear? Many Americans seem almost addicted to the feeling of being afraid, whether of the apocalypse or the common cold. You see evidence of this in the way the news media serve up terrors to their customers. In comments trumpeted around the world, astrophysicist…

  By David Klinghoffer Feb 16, 2007 | 3 min read
• Opinion

  Led Astray By a Dead Sea Latrine

  Recently, Israeli paleopathologist Joseph Zias and American biblical scholar James Tabor claimed that primitive latrines they discovered close to the ancient city of Qumran confirm that Essenes had lived in the area. In doing so, they stepped knee-deep into the controversy about the authorship of the Dead Sea Scrolls, which were discovered near Khirbet Qumran…

  By Jürgen Zangenberg and Katharina Galor Feb 16, 2007 | 4 min read
• Opinion

  World Music

  Perhaps nowhere was the joy more heartfelt than here at the Forward this week, when the Klezmatics won a Grammy award for “Wonder Wheel,” their tour-de-force rendering of Woody Guthrie’s Brooklyn songs. The award was a well-deserved tribute to the band and to the old-new music that it champions — and pushes to ever-more surprising…

  By J.J. Goldberg Feb 16, 2007 | 3 min read
• Opinion

  What If the Conflict Went to Arbitration?

  This is not the most propitious week in which to propose the exercise I am about to recommend, but when dealing with the Arab-Israeli conflict, waiting for the stars to align is pointless. This week’s particular misalignment? The remarks of a delusional man named Nizar Rayyam, a spokesman for Hamas: “We will never recognize Israel….

  By Leonard Fein Feb 16, 2007 | 4 min read
• Opinion

  We Palestinians Will Honor Our Word

  I know of no way to measure suffering, no mechanism to quantify pain. All I know is that we Palestinians are not children of a lesser God. Had I been a Jew or a Gypsy, I would consider the Holocaust to be the most atrocious event in history. Had I been a Native American, it…

  By Afif Safieh Feb 16, 2007 | 4 min read
• Opinion

  A Plea for Peace From a Bereaved Palestinian Father

  I fought with my daughter on the day she was shot. On her way out the door to school, Abir announced, in that way children have of doing, that she would be playing with a friend that afternoon rather than coming straight home to study for an exam scheduled for the next day. She was…

  By Bassam Aramin Feb 9, 2007 | 3 min read
• Opinion

  Laughing About Hitler All the Way to the Bank

  Jews are known to poke fun at themselves and at their worst enemies alike. But for some of his co-religionists, movie director Dani Levy’s last joke went too far. His comedy about Adolf Hitler earned negative reviews in the German-speaking media, and generated indignation among Jewish community leaders and some well-known intellectuals. The result was…

  By Eric Frey Feb 9, 2007 | 3 min read