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
At Long Last, Have You No Shame?
Seven years after the signing of the historic Swiss bank settlement, in which the Swiss banking industry agreed to give back money looted from Holocaust victims’ bank accounts, a handful of Florida-based Holocaust survivors and their hangers-on have filed an appeal to the United States Supreme Court that could undermine the settlement and threaten the…
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Opinion Conversion Is Not An Outreach Strategy
For more than a decade, a group of Jewish communal leaders has been arguing that the challenge of intermarriage can only be met by a policy of converting non-Jewish partners. They cite statistics indicating that among children raised in interfaith families in which the non-Jewish partner has not converted, only a small minority identify as…
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Letters Letter May 12, 2006
Conservative Seminary Lacks Rabbinic Leader Opinion writer Rabbi Elliot Cosgrove’s comparison of Arnold Eisen, the newly appointed chancellor of the Jewish Theological Seminary, to Solomon Schechter begs the question (“When a Scholar Became Chancellor,” May 5). Schechter possessed a profound understanding of Judaism in its rabbinic, theological formulation, as shown by his classic work, “Some…
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Opinion Can Peretz Conquer General Skepticism?
How symbolic that Amir Peretz’s first act as Israeli defense minister was to approve an air strike that killed five Palestinian terrorists in Gaza. The dovish former labor union leader, turned instant hawk. His second act, though, was to begin lifting the most recent closure strangling the West Bank. More than any other job in…
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Opinion Exploring the New Jewish Spiritualities
What is spirituality? For some, the word connotes the fantasies of the New Age, from harmless notions like astrology to dangerous ones like apocalyptic messianism. For others, the word means precisely the opposite: not seeing the imaginary, but seeing the real more clearly, from the stirrings of the heart to the infinitesimal miracles of everyday…
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Opinion March of Living Must Embrace Life
Each year in April, thousands of Jewish youngsters from Israel and the Diaspora make a pilgrimage to the sites of the Nazi death camps in Poland, to commemorate the millions murdered, to remember and never to forget. The March of the Living has become one of the most important international Jewish events, a practical implementation…
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Opinion When a Scholar Became Chancellor
Who is Arnold Eisen? Few of my colleagues in the Conservative rabbinate have ever met this Stanford University professor, who was named last month to replace Ismar Schorsch as chancellor of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America. The appointment is sure to shape the character of the premier American institution of Jewish studies and the…
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Opinion It’s Not Just the Economy, Stupid
At a international conference last month in Almaty, Kazakhstan, leading Russian political scientist Igor Panarin explained American policy toward Iran as follows: “Everybody knows that the real reason for American belligerence is not the Iranian nuclear program, but the June 2004 decision by the Tehran government to launch an Iranian oil bourse where oil will…
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Opinion Let Darfurian Refugees in Israel Go
As thousands, not a few of them Jews, assembled in Washington on Sunday on behalf of the victims of genocide in Darfur, more than a hundred Darfurian refugees languished in jails — in, of all places, Israel. As of the end of 2005, about 30 Sudanese had escaped persecution and violence in Darfur by fleeing…
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Opinion With Will The Kids Will Be
It was the kids that got to me. (The kids, and George Clooney’s father.) I hadn’t planned to write about Darfur this week, or even to mention it. But this is not about Darfur; it’s about the kids. I don’t know the numbers, but they were plainly the vast majority of those who came to…
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Opinion Memory, Mercy, Bureaucracy
Of all the human and inhuman dramas to emerge from the Darfur crisis, none is more cruelly ironic than the fate of the 160 Sudanese refugees incarcerated in Israel as, of all things, security prisoners. They should be hosted as refugees, not locked up as enemies, but Israel’s famous bureaucracy can’t seem to tell the…
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