Opinion

• Opinion

  How To Keep Politicians Honest, Courtesy of the British Electorate

  From the Isle of Wight in the south to Leeds in the north, the Liberal Democrats seem to have captured the British public’s imagination. Long considered the United Kingdom’s “third party,” the Liberal Democrats are expected to pick up a number of seats in the general elections scheduled for May 5. The party’s campaign success…

  By Julia Neuberger

  5 min read
• Opinion

  Remembering Tomorrow

  Memory, as the scholar Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi once elegantly taught us, is different from history. History is, as far as we can make it so, a record of what happened. True, anything that happens is susceptible to a variety of interpretations, and the Sergeant Friday approach to history — “Just the facts, Ma’am” — is…

  By Leonard Fein Apr 29, 2005 | 4 min read
• Opinion

  Let the Remembering Begin

  In six days’ time, on the 26th of the Hebrew month of Nisan, Jewish communities in Israel and around the world will gather for the annual ritual of remembrance known as Yom HaShoah, or Holocaust Remembrance Day. Solemn assemblies will be held in synagogues, museums and government buildings. Around the world the ritual will be…

  Apr 29, 2005 | 3 min read

Columnists View All

• Jodi Rudoren This is my last column as editor of the Forward

  

• Jay Michaelson American Jews were played — now what?

  

• Rob Eshman Americans keep getting killed in the West Bank. Here’s how the US could fight that awful trend

  

• Nora Berman First Camp Auschwitz, now Alligator Alcatraz — why the right is obsessed with commodifying brutality

  

• Dan Perry What exactly is going on between Israel and Syria — and is the prospect of peace dead?

  

• Emily Tamkin Zohran Mamdani’s victory proves it: The ‘gotcha’ mode of fighting antisemitism has to go

  

The Latest

• Opinion

  Quiet, Dons

  Great Britain’s academic community brought shame on itself last week with the incomprehensible decision by the country’s largest college teachers’ union, the Association of University Teachers, to boycott two Israeli universities. The decision should be rescinded at once. The resolution, adopted Friday by a slim majority of the association’s council, charges the two Israeli institutions…

  Apr 29, 2005 | 2 min read
• Opinion

  Why This Week Shouldn’t Be Different From Others

  Last Saturday night, American Jews, their friends and their families sat down to the most widely observed tradition in our community, the Passover Seder. Like most rabbis, I am always happy to see people engaged with Jewish practice. But unless the practices and rituals that mark the celebrations and sacred moments of the collective calendar…

  By Rabbi Brad Hirschfield Apr 29, 2005 | 4 min read
• Opinion

  Who Remembers the Armenians?

  Adolf Hitler was confident that the world would remain indifferent to the plight of the Jewish people he was planning to exterminate. After all, he reportedly told Nazi commanders before the outbreak of World War II, who remembers the Armenians? The answer to Hitler’s rhetorical question remained much the same as the 90th anniversary of…

  By Christine Thomassian and Shabtai Gold Apr 29, 2005 | 3 min read
• Opinion

  Social Research: Out From Under the Organizational Umbrella

  Jewish social research, to judge by a series of recent developments, is shifting its base from the organizational world to the academy. Earlier this month, Michael Steinhardt, chairman of Jewish Life Network/Steinhardt Foundation, donated $12 million to establish the Steinhardt Social Research Institute at Brandeis University. The gift forms the endowment for the institute, whose…

  By Bethamie Horowitz Apr 29, 2005 | 4 min read
• Opinion

  Crossing to The Promised Land

  Passover is on my mind. Some language — and some ideas — for the Seder: Each cup we raise tonight is an act of memory and of reverence. The story we tell, this year as every year, is not yet done. It begins with them, then; it continues with us, now. We remember not out…

  By Leonard Fein Apr 22, 2005 | 4 min read
• Opinion

  The Next Pope

  In selecting Joseph Ratzinger as their 265th pope, the cardinals of the Roman Catholic Church were not seeking to break new ground, but opting for continuity. They were voting to carry on the work of the last pope, the charismatic and long-serving John Paul II. Despite all the pre-election rumors of an African, Latin American…

  Apr 22, 2005 | 4 min read
• Opinion

  The Season of Freedom

  This weekend, at dinner tables around the world, Jews and their loved ones will sit together and reenact one of history’s earliest recorded struggles for human rights, the Exodus from Egypt. No Jewish ritual is more ancient, more widely honored or more relevant today. In telling the story of their ancestors’ flight to freedom, celebrants…

  Apr 22, 2005 | < 1 min read
• Opinion

  Thou Shalt Not Revile the Judges

  Several politicians have spent the past month insulting my religious beliefs and the religious beliefs of millions of Americans. What’s far worse, they are trying to impose their own religion on us by imposing it on lifetime federal judges. No, they didn’t call for the outlawing of Judaism or Unitarianism or Methodism. But they are…

  By Arthur Waskow Apr 22, 2005 | 3 min read