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.
Congress showed courage and independence in passing legislation that would have significantly eased conditions for federal funding of stem-cell research. Sadly, President Bush yielded to his own worst instincts, both political and moralistic, in choosing to veto the bill. It was the first veto of his presidency, allowing him to please his rightwing base and…
If you’ve seen Al Gore’s global-warming scare movie, “An Inconvenient Truth,” you may have come away as I did, wondering about the highly partisan nature of the climate-change debate. Why is it partisan at all? If carbon-dioxide emissions are perilously raising global temperatures, surely that’s a problem which can be left to scientists and other…
Last Saturday night, 40 years after we graduated the Israel Air Force Flight Academy, the class of 1966 gathered for a reunion. We met near Herzliya, on the lawn of the spacious house belonging to one of our number, Kobi Richter. After graduation, this former kibbutznik had gone on to become one of the air…
The perfect storm that has broken over the Middle East since the back-to-back kidnappings by Hamas and Hezbollah was fed by converging developments, developments that might have been manageable individually but which proved disastrous in combination. A look at the conditions that merged to fuel the typhoon offers a sense of just what it will…
At first blush, it is a mystery. We’re talking about the tax receipts of the federal government; they are projected to total about $250 billion more this year than they did last year and, as a result, will bring down the budgetary deficit by about $150 billion more than was projected just six months ago….
Edwin Seligman, a founder of the American Economic Association, once wrote that there was nothing wrong with the property tax except that it was mistaken in theory and impossible in practice. So also, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s signature proposal, called in Hebrew “hitkansut,” rendered best in translation as “consolidation” or “convergence.” What Olmert has in…
The sudden escalation on Israel’s northern front this week added a disturbing complication to the three-week-old crisis in Gaza, but it also served, in the curious way of the Middle East, as a clarifying development. It was a reminder that there is, in the final analysis, no such thing as unilateral action. One may act…
Neither Israel nor the United States needs an “Israel’s right to exist” certificate from Hamas in order to have dealings with that movement. To insist on this precondition for contact not only places an unnecessary obstacle on the road to dealing with the Hamas-led government in the Palestinian Authority. It also sends a subtle and…
Rabbi Eric Yoffie accurately observes in a July 7 opinion article that many Israeli leaders do not fully understand Diaspora Jewry (“Confront Ignorance of Diaspora Movements”). However, he ignores the corresponding lack of appreciation for the nuances of Israeli society by an American Jewry that does not speak Hebrew and in the main has never…
Next week Senator Rick Santorum, a Pennsylvania Republican in the midst of a most difficult re-election campaign, is scheduled to host a “Jewish Leadership Forum.” The event is to feature a number of prominent Jewish Republican leaders, as well as representatives of two Jewish nonprofits, the Orthodox Union and the Jewish Institute for National Security…
In 1795, the homeland of the Oneida Indian Nation, located in upstate New York, was obtained by the State of New York in clear violation of federal law. Today, more than two centuries later, representatives of the state are trying to prevent the federal government from restoring a small part of that homeland to the…