Opinion

• Opinion

  Starvelings on Our Doorstep

  Jake, the hero of Mordecai Richler’s underappreciated 1971 novel, “St. Urbain’s Horseman,” “had expected the coming of the vandals. Above all, the injustice collectors. The concentration camp survivors. The emaciated millions of India. The starvelings of Africa…. The demented Red Guards of China are going to come, demanding theirs, followed by the black fanatics, who…

  By Leonard Fein

  4 min read
• Opinion

  Mars vs. the Mullahs

  Nothing so tests the ingenuity and will of humankind as the exploration of the unknown. That primordial drive explains, more than scientific or technological progress, the continuing grip of space travel on our imagination. It reminds us that we are, after all, human, specks floating in a limitless expanse that we are nonetheless commanded to…

  Mar 25, 2005 | 3 min read
• Opinion

  Increasing Joy

  Purim, the festive day celebrated by Jews around the world this weekend, is a children’s holiday with very adult undertones. Recalling the famous victory recounted in the biblical Book of Esther, in which the Jews of Persia foiled a plot by the wicked viceroy Haman to destroy them, it is celebrated with costumes, noisemakers and…

  Mar 25, 2005 | < 1 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

  Losing the Forest for the Trees

  For more than 100 years, the name Jewish National Fund — and the name of our primary agent in Israel, Keren Kayemeth LeIsrael — has stood for three things: uniting Jews everywhere with the land of Israel, developing that land into a thriving and vibrant home for the Jewish people, and promoting Zionism through education….

  By Russell Robinson Mar 25, 2005 | 3 min read
• Opinion

  In the Mideast’s Outpost of Democracy, Settlers Openly Flout the Law

  Israeli attorney Talia Sasson has delivered an interim report about illegal outposts, those settlements in the West Bank that have been built without official Israeli authorization for more than a decade. After months of research and frustration in dealing with stonewalling bureaucrats, she managed to document what Peace Now has been saying for years: The…

  By Dror Etkes Mar 25, 2005 | 3 min read
• Letters

  March 25, 2005

  N.Y. Politician Wrong To Demonstrate in Gaza The visit by New York State Assemblyman Dov Hikind and some 40 other Americans to offer support and solidarity to Gaza’s Jews reminds me, ironically, of the support and solidarity of the International Solidarity Movement for Gazan Palestinians (“U.S. Foes of Pullout Mobilize To Sink Plan,” March 11)….

  Mar 25, 2005 | 3 min read
• Opinion

  America Brandishes a ‘Big Carrot’ at Iran

  President Bush appears to have encountered the limits of American power. Hence, his approach to extremist elements in the Middle East has become more nuanced in his second term, and the results are increasingly confusing. Take Iran. While continuing now and then to threaten Tehran over its alleged nuclear weapons program, Bush is looking for…

  By Yossi Alpher Mar 18, 2005 | 3 min read
• Opinion

  Bush’s Budget Runs Up a Moral Deficit

  Congress just started work on the 2006 federal budget, and the sound you hear coming from Washington is the other shoe dropping. The first shoe was the large tax cuts Congress and President Bush enacted in 2001 and 2003, which helped push federal revenues down to their lowest level since the 1950s when measured as…

  By Isaac Shapiro and John Springer Mar 18, 2005 | 4 min read
• Opinion

  The Paper That Rewrote Catholic-Jewish Relations

  Forty years ago, the Catholic Church revolutionized attitudes within the Christian world toward Jews and Judaism with the declaration known as Nostra Aetate, a document that emerged from the Second Vatican Ecumenical Council. Prior to this document, the perception that had prevailed within the Christian world over the centuries was that Jews had been rejected…

  By David Rosen Mar 18, 2005 | 3 min read
• Opinion

  The Bomb-thrower as Diplomat

  Whatever its substantive merits or flaws, the nomination of John Bolton as America’s next ambassador to the United Nations encapsulates with excruciating precision the dilemma facing Jewish liberals in the Bush era. On one hand, Bolton’s acid-laced neoconservatism embodies pretty much all the things liberals dislike about President Bush’s foreign policy: high-handed unilateralism, disdain for…

  Mar 11, 2005 | 2 min read
• Opinion

  Max Fisher

  It’s commonplace to greet a hero’s passing with extravagant claims that the mold has been broken, that his like will not be seen again. In the case of Max Fisher, the Detroit philanthropist who died March 3 at age 96, every word of that would be true. Fisher towered genially over American Jewish communal life…

  Mar 11, 2005 | 2 min read