Opinion

• Opinion

  Renewal in Elul

  Elul, the lunar month that precedes the Jewish New Year, is by tradition a time of reflection and self-accounting. It is the warm-up to the spiritually grueling Ten Days of Awe and Penitence that run from Rosh Hashanah to Yom Kippur. As we scrub our homes each year in the days before Passover, so we…

  2 min read
• Opinion

  Pressure Russia To Reveal Looted Art’s Heritage

  Vladimir Putin, it seems, has finally gotten serious about stolen artworks. The theft reported last month of millions of dollars worth of objects from the Hermitage, the famed museum in St. Petersburg, has led to a frenzy of activity to inventory the artworks in Russia’s museums. On Putin’s order, the government set up an audit…

  By Marilyn Henry Sep 6, 2006 | 4 min read
• Opinion

  Beware Government’s Creeping Censorship of Scientific Inquiry

  Since at least the end of World War II, the United States has arguably been the major center for advanced research in science and technology. This has been possible, at least in part, because many of the best and brightest students and scholars have come to study or carry out research at our world-class research…

  By Lawrence Krauss Sep 2, 2006 | 4 min read

Columnists View All

• Alyssa Katz Class assignment: Get to know your murdered Jewish neighbors

  

• Rob Eshman Trump is backed into a corner on Iran. Get ready for him to start blaming Jews

  

• Dan Perry How Israel became a country where teenagers murder each other in cold blood

  

• Emily Tamkin American Jews have a Hasan Piker problem. Solving it is going to hurt

  

• Jay Michaelson Epstein and Iran are an antisemitism mega-crisis. Here’s what Jewish organizations should do about it. 

  

The Latest

• Opinion

  European Force for Lebanon Is a Feeble Mission

  With European countries preparing to supply more than half of the 15,000 troops bound to keep the peace in southern Lebanon, the Old World is embarking on one of its biggest military endeavours since 1945. The Lebanon mission will formally be under the United Nations umbrella, but European leaders see it as a chance to…

  By Eric Frey Sep 2, 2006 | 3 min read
• Opinion

  Regional Peace Requires Troops For Palestine

  ‘How can Israeli soldiers fight a 10-year-old boy who wants to die? Or a teenager at the wheel of an exploding truck, smiling because he knows that in 10 seconds he will be in Heaven? This is the generation I am afraid of!” These are the words not of an Israeli general warning of a…

  By Bernard Avishai Sep 2, 2006 | 5 min read
• Opinion

  Consumer Demand Drove Adoption of Glatt Standard

  In an August 18 opinion article, Marc Shapiro takes the Orthodox Union to task for, over the last 30 years, having “adopted a new standard in kashrut, one that defines only glatt kosher as acceptable” (“glatt Kosher Meat Is Not All It Is Cut Out to Be”). The era that Shapiro laments as having passed,…

  By Menachem Genack Sep 2, 2006 | 3 min read
• Opinion

  Spread The Good News

  ‘Summertime,” Gershwin used to say, “and the livin’ is easy.” Not the summer of 2006, though. The summer now fading was just about as uneasy as it gets. Still, through the fog of war, the contrails of the jets, the smoke and fire of the bombs, other and very different stories were unfolding. Here, two…

  By Leonard Fein Sep 2, 2006 | 4 min read
• Opinion

  A House Divided

  During his July 20 speech at the annual NAACP convention, President Bush acknowledged his party’s decades-long failure to win support from black Americans. “I understand that many African Americans distrust my political party,” Bush said. “I consider it a tragedy that the party of Abraham Lincoln let go of its historic ties with the African…

  Sep 2, 2006 | 3 min read
• Opinion

  Let Them Go

  The release this week of two Fox News journalists who had been kidnapped in Gaza by Palestinian terrorists is an occasion for joy and relief on the part of their families, their friends and their home governments. The Hamas-led government of the Palestinian Authority deserves acknowledgment for its role in bringing the two men home….

  Sep 2, 2006 | 2 min read
• Opinion

  Quit the Canard That American Policy Advances Israeli Security

  Rejection of hubris has become the defining characteristic of the post-Lebanon war mood and debate in Israel. That is understandable. Israel’s civilians in the north faced a daily dosage of 200 missiles, while the military met a surprisingly well-equipped and trained guerrilla force. The mood has been best captured by the Israeli military’s outgoing commander…

  By Daniel Levy Aug 25, 2006 | 3 min read
• Opinion

  Facing Down a Wounded Nation

  Between the inconclusive outcome of Israel’s war against Hezbollah and the widespread perception in Israel that the war was badly managed, it is far from clear that the Olmert government will survive. Most Israelis are in agreement that at no previous time in the country’s history have the two top positions in the government, prime…

  By Shlomo Avineri Aug 25, 2006 | 5 min read