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.
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.
Sooner or later the current war in Lebanon will come to an end. Israel will survive, lick its wounds, recharge its diminished energies and return, with revitalized enthusiasm, to its television shows and vacations. Hezbollah probably will have suffered some damage, and Israel perhaps will have been able to buy itself a fake, temporary peace,…
Of the more than 50 international peacekeeping forces established or authorized by the United Nations since its inception, half a dozen have patrolled Israel’s borders with its Arab neighbors. Before another international force comes into existence and is deployed in southern Lebanon, it might be helpful to inquire what has made for the handful of…
Edwin Black’s August 4 opinion article puts him seemingly at odds with the world’s leading Holocaust scholars, most of whom have taken advantage of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s research center and its open access research policy (“History Demands an Uncompromised Home for Shoah Archive”). It would go without saying, were it not for…
Last week the United Nations secretary general, Kofi Annan, proposed sending a 24,000-strong peacekeeping force to Darfur and called for international efforts to secure the Sudanese government’s consent to the plan. However, he knows full well that U.N. member states are unlikely to deploy troops to Sudan without the Sudanese government’s consent. The situation, in…
According to all reports, synagogues in America were unusually well-attended this Tisha B’Av, which fell this year on August 3. It’s the day on which Jews — some, anyway — remember to mourn the destruction of the First Temple, and then, according to the tradition, a number of other calamities that befell our people through…
A great deal has been lost in this summer of fear and death, much of it irretrievably. Hundreds of innocent Israelis and Lebanese have lost their lives; thousands more have lost limbs, loved ones, homes, a livelihood. Millions of others around the world have lost something very nearly as precious: hope. As Oz Almog, the…
As the national media focus on Connecticut and on Senator Joseph Lieberman’s defeat in the Democratic primary Tuesday, another important political drama is unfolding in Tennessee’s ninth congressional district. State Senator Steve Cohen beat out a crowded Democratic primary field last week to secure the party’s nomination in the race to replace Rep. Harold Ford…
Three weeks into Israel’s latest Lebanon War, Israelis and their friends and allies around the world remain united in the certainty that this is a just war. They know that Israel had a right to respond as it did to Hezbollah’s provocations, and they believe that Israel’s future safety requires a clear victory over the…
There are real terrorists in our world, people who sow fear and death and exult in what they do. And Hezbollah is prominent, perhaps even preeminent, among them. It has killed Jews in Buenos Aires and U.S. Marines in Beirut and on and on and now, of course, it has launched rockets all over Israel’s…
Earlier this summer, a group of Israeli academics attended a conference here in Vienna. Half of their visit was spent complaining about the heat. To be fair, the air conditioning system in the newly built conference hall was, in fact, unable to cope with the 90-degree temperatures outside. But given that generations of Viennese had…
The world’s largest Holocaust archive, the secretive International Tracing Service in Bad Arolsen, Germany, has finally agreed to open its files to researchers and journalists. The long-awaited access follows years of acrimonious contention between the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and the International Committee of the Red Cross, which manages the repository. The opening of…