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
Patriots and Intruders
In the furious debate over the USA Patriot Act, frequent reference is made to the First Amendment of the Constitution. The president’s critics maintain that the Patriot Act’s intrusive practices, including wiretapping, monitoring library use and more, amount to limitations on our freedom of speech. Armed with these new tools, Uncle Sam becomes an Orwellian…
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Opinion The Year Of the Camel
As this year runs quite unlamentably out, it is well to fill in some of its blanks — bits and pieces you may have missed. Once every 10 years or so, there takes place something called a White House Conference on Aging. The fifth such was from December 11 to December 14 of this year….
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Opinion Dover, Darwin and The Assault on Science
There was more at stake than legal or constitutional quibbles over church-state separation in that federal court ruling handed down last week in Pennsylvania, barring the pseudo-science known as Intelligent Design from public-school biology classes. Read carefully, the judge’s decision was a ringing defense of science itself, and of the empirical method of reasoning that…
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Opinion Promote National Pride in Germany, but Be Faithful to History
Years ago, I was told the joke about a boy who murders his parents and then begs the court for mercy on the basis of being an orphan. Today, a new version is circulating across Germany. It tells of a father who organizes a complex and comprehensive plan to murder all his children. Some of…
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Opinion When Reel Life Intrudes on the Mideast Conflict
People are more than edgy these days. Our careless, civilian ways are endangered — some say by Islamist terrorists, others by Republicans, or by Leftists, or madmen on strike. People are hunkering down; today they talk only to those with whom they already agree. Among Jews, however, nervousness seems to have been elevated to a…
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Opinion Our Role in Promoting Holocaust Denial
Last month, British historian David Irving was arrested in Austria for the crime of denying the Holocaust. When he goes on trial this February, facing up to a decade in prison, he could become a martyr for antisemitic kooks — kooks like Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. A couple of weeks ago, Ahmadinejad commented that, in…
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Opinion Gabi, the Baby Elephant, and Israel’s Political Zoo
Just think of it: creatures treading in excrement, sniffing at each other’s behinds and slinging mud at each other, occasionally sticking their long noses into matters they don’t understand — all while the crowd stands outside the arena, intently watching and incessantly making comments but having no impact whatsoever. Now, isn’t that the quintessence of…
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Letters December 30, 2005
A Kvetching Culture Is Anchored in Reality I suspect that Michael Wex’s book “Born To Kvetch: Yiddish Language and Culture in All of Its Moods” hits too close to home for Philologos (“Et tu, Wex?” December 23). The columnist confuses individual temperament and social phenomena. Wex was talking about what Emile Durkheim called a “social…
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Opinion A Cut Above?
Nauseating stories of what goes on in meatpacking plants — from those in Upton Sinclair’s “The Jungle” in 1906 to Eric Schlosser’s “Fast Food Nation” in 2002 — have caused us to pass up, if only temporarily, the occasional steak or hot dog. One year, I even forwent turkey on Thanksgiving. But while our stomachs…
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Opinion Spielberg’s List
the debate as it unfolds on screen is an Israeli disputation, framed almost entirely in the words and deeds of Israelis: carrying out their deadly mission, questioning whether it will make things better, wondering whether it squares with their Jewish values, talking endlessly of home and family and the need to defend them. Arabs hardly…
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Opinion And in Other News, Darfur
Suddenly, overload. Here, the president permits spying on American citizens. In the West Bank, Hamas scores big in local elections. Here, the prospect of a major shift in the Supreme Court. In Iran, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad calls the Holocaust “a myth,” says that Israel is “a tumor” that “must be wiped off the map.” Here,…
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Fast Forward NYC’s first Jewish City Council leader could govern as a check on Mamdani. Here’s her plan to fight antisemitism
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