In the Forward’s opinion section, you’ll find analysis and essays from diverse corners of the Jewish world.
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Opinion
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Opinion
Preserve the Shards of the Shattered Glass Ceiling
Last week, 34 years after becoming the first woman ever ordained by a rabbinical seminary, Sally Priesand retired. Throughout her career, Priesand’s achievements have carried both personal and symbolic weight — and so, too, with her retirement. Since her ordination in 1972, Priesand and the more than 800 other women who have followed her into…
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Letters July 7, 2006
Be Proud of Wise Men’s Modernizing Influences Opinion columnist David Klinghoffer argues that Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud and Baruch Spinoza are “the individuals whose thoughts form the top three most lamentable cultural influences in modern times” (“Three Wise Men’s Unholy Influence,” June 30). We Jews, however, should be proud of Freud for his gift of…
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Opinion When No One Believes in Peace
It’s the juxtapositions that do it, every time. They beguile, they irritate, they disconcert, they seduce and confuse and fascinate without end. The evening sea breeze reaches the patio off the beach in southern Jaffa. On the beach, a scattering of families, the children mostly young. Arabs; that’s mostly who live in this part of…
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Opinion Jewish Cheers for Deutschland
Germany’s quest to become soccer world champion ended Tuesday with a last-minute loss to Italy, but the host country of the World Cup has won nonetheless. During the past month, the Germans presented a new image to the world: easy-going, tolerant, open-minded and funny. Germans seemed at ease with themselves and with the rest of…
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Opinion Thunder in Gaza
It’s hard not to notice the huge imbalance between Israel’s large-scale actions in Gaza in the past two weeks — bombing bridges, government offices and a university; leaving half the population without power; rounding up elected officials — and the ostensible goal of the operation, rescuing a single hostage. The actions have won Israel growing…
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Opinion Choosing Life, and Change
The Rabbinical Council of America, the leading body of Modern Orthodox rabbis, took a bold step last week with the issuance of a legal ruling that categorically bans smoking as a violation of the Torah. The council’s boldness is not in accepting four decades of mounting medical evidence, but in letting the findings of modern…
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Opinion Calls for Respect Don’t Pay Non-Orthodox Rabbis’ Bills
Why do so many of us rabbis seem so invested in whether Israeli President Moshe Katsav addresses Reform and Conservative rabbis by their title? So what if he insists on not giving due recognition to the Reform movement’s Rabbi Eric Yoffie. And so what if he then turns around and assures Rabbi Jerry Epstein that…
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Opinion Confront Ignorance of Diaspora Movements
It is stunning how little some of Israel’s leaders know about Diaspora Jewry in general, and about American Jewry in particular. Almost six decades after the establishment of the Jewish state, many of Israel’s senior politicians have had little contact with Diaspora Jews, and they know virtually nothing about the grassroots religious movements that are…
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Opinion Representative… of Big Industry
Not all the famous Roosevelts who graced the American political scene were Democrats. One of them, Theodore Roosevelt, was a Republican. He was a great enough president to merit immortalization, alongside George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln, on the monumental sculpture masterpiece at Mount Rushmore. We mention T.R. now because his views on the…
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Opinion A Talk With Tzipi
At the end of a week of meetings here in Jerusalem with, among others, five senior Cabinet ministers, sundry Knesset members and several Palestinians, it is not the sprawling nature of the issues nor even the matter of Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s unilateralist intentions that most concerns me. Quite to my surprise, it is an…
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Opinion Combustible
As is common in the Middle East, the armed thugs who attacked a pair of Israeli army posts near Kibbutz Kerem Shalom last Sunday morning, killing two soldiers and kidnapping a third, were actually aiming at a different target altogether. Back in Gaza, the squabbling leaders of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas of Fatah, the…
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