In the Forward’s opinion section, you’ll find analysis and essays from diverse corners of the Jewish world.
To pitch an opinion piece, email our Opinion Editor, Talya Zax.
Opinion
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Opinion
Were Rosen and Weissman Guilty Only of Being Right Too Early?
Instead of being grounds for prosecution, perhaps the influence Steven Rosen and Keith Weissman were trying to exert — making officials and the public aware of the danger from Iran — should be heralded. Last week, federal judge T.S. Ellis III declared that the law under which the two former American Israel Public Affairs Committee…
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Opinion We Are One, But Not the Same
Relations between Israel and American Jews, by now an old and recurring subject for discussion, have come to the surface again, this time on the editorial page of the Forward (“The Third Front,” August 4). Writing about the conflict in Lebanon, the Forward calls for a greater role for American Jews in Israeli decision-making because…
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Opinion Seeking Visions in a Contradictory Time
Since the beginning of the second intifada, American Jews have bumped along like an old tin can tied to the back of Israel’s jeep as it veers along the dusty road to who knows where. It’s been hard — but mind you, never as difficult as what Israelis go through — to adjust to the…
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Opinion The Courage To Be Humble
Now that the shooting’s over (one hopes), the postmortems, quite literally, begin. And they are already ugly, very ugly. By and large, the growing conviction in Israel is that the entire affair was a costly fiasco. A people accustomed to lightning victory — think the Six Day War of 1967, think the Entebbe rescue in…
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Opinion Asking the Right Question
Angered at the meager results of their latest Lebanon war, Israelis are furiously debating a host of piercing questions this month to understand what went wrong. Was it poor military planning? Inept political leadership? Erosion of their famed army reserve system? A deeper culture of shortcuts and buck-passing? All of these? Why, they ask insistently,…
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Opinion The Mullahs’ Gambit
Iran’s Islamic leaders, faced with an August 31 United Nations deadline to give up their nuclear program, came back nine days early with a dodge. Tehran insists on its right to develop nuclear power — for peaceful purposes, the mullahs artfully say — but it wants to continue talking about ways of making its plans…
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Opinion Closing the Door on Moderation, One Seat at a Time
Senator Joseph Lieberman’s loss in Connecticut’s Democratic primary last week is symptomatic of a larger problem facing those who seek to govern the United States. The shock over a politician as prominent as Lieberman losing a primary for renomination, as well as the depth of feeling over the war in Iraq and the focus on…
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Opinion A Judgment Observed Does Not a Theocracy Make
Some members of America’s political and cultural elite have been having a tough time lately distinguishing between the political philosophy of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and that of our country’s religious conservatives. Ahmadinejad is a classic theocrat whose regime subjects his country to religious law. Can we say the same of a Christian like George…
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Opinion Glatt Kosher Meat Is Not All It Is Cut Out To Be
Due in no small part to the recent controversy at the AgriProcessors slaughterhouse in Postville, Iowa, there has been a lot of talk of late about how glatt kosher meat is produced. Yet for all the sensational headlines about whether the standards of kashrut are being met, little attention has been paid to how those…
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Opinion A Word Liberals Dare Not Speak
What is it about the left that causes such instinctive antipathy toward Israel? It wasn’t always that way. Years back, Israel was in fact a favorite of the left, the more so of what I will call here left-liberals. What happened? Has the left changed? Or has Israel? Or have both? Of course Israel has…
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Opinion Time To Change the Tune
As Israelis began trying this week to make sense of their bruising five-week war in Lebanon, discussion has returned again and again to the traumatic Yom Kippur War of 1973. Then as now, Israel’s vaunted military machine was caught with its pants down, locked into a strategic concept — static defense lines then, air dominance…
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