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
Give Protestants Stake in Peace By Investing in Interfaith Efforts
Last week’s vote by the Episcopal Church of America to reject divestment from Israel didn’t simply happen in a vacuum. It was the culmination of renewed efforts by Jewish organizations to engage the mainline Protestant churches. Last month I traveled to Israel with a group of Christians for the first time. The experience has convinced…
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Opinion So Help Us God
Finally, proof that belief in the biblical God poses a toxic danger! An American sociological journal has posed a challenge to religious faith that is being heralded by secularists across the English-speaking world. The sociologist at the center of the controversy, Gregory Paul, writes in the Journal of Religion & Society that compared to other,…
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Letters October 21, 2005
Don’t Turn Communal Back on Jewish Felons I am very disappointed that no one in the Jewish community seems willing to help Barry Gibbs (“Out of Jail, Mob Fall Guy Pines for a Shul and Some Shellfish,” October 7). After all, we help Israel, Holocaust victims, Jewish arts and culture, Jewish education, hurricane and tsunami…
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Opinion A Poverty Of Leadership
Here is a story. It is a story about what the media can accomplish and what intellectual curiosity in high places can produce, and how a crisis that is not an “Act of God” comes to be recognized and to galvanize a nation. In 1960, during his campaign for the presidency, John Kennedy visited the…
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Opinion The Miers Test
It’s a sure sign of how low President Bush’s fortunes have sunk that the Supreme Court nomination of Harriet Miers, clearly intended as a deft feint to circumvent Senate mud-wrestling, is instead turning into a first-class political debacle. In its desperation to find some traction, however, the administration appears to have crossed a constitutional line…
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Opinion Storming the Gates
The baroque scenes that unfolded on the Mediterranean coast of North Africa over the last two weeks, described by Marc Perelman in his Page 1 report, seem as though they were lifted from some futuristic end-of-the-world movie epic rather than from today’s headlines. But they are real. In two separate assaults a week apart, hundreds…
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Opinion The One-and-a-half-state Solution
Anyone who has followed the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in recent decades knows that mainstream thinking on both sides has evolved considerably, to a point where Jerusalem and Ramallah (and Washington, too) endorse a two-state solution. The advocates of Greater Israel or Greater Palestine — a single Israeli or Palestinian state between the Jordan River and the…
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Opinion We the Individuals
For a generation of American Jewish baby boomers who grew up looking east toward Zion from the West’s leafy suburbs, Israel has always come off as the poorer relation enduring scrappier circumstances. America had what Israel lacked: a Constitution, and good plumbing. American bathrooms were tidy and porcelain, with soft rolls of Charmin; the typical…
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Letters October 14, 2005
Atone for Editorial Sin The October 7 pre-Yom Kippur editorial outlining the Forward’s regrets for journalistic sins committed this past year overlooked your most egregious misstep (“Begging Pardon”). I refer to the recent front-page nonstory about a gifted former educator’s personal struggle to come to terms with his sexual identity and his place in a…
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Letters October 7, 2005
Torah Values Remain Mandell Ganchrow and his supporters need not be concerned that Yeshiva University is any less committed to the values of Torah u-Madda than it has been in the past (“Yeshiva University Catching Flak For Dropping Old Hebrew Slogan,” September 30). On the contrary, the Center for the Jewish Future was established by…
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Opinion Systematic Acts Of Kindness
Perhaps the most moving prayer of the High Holiday services is the Unetaneh Tokef, the prayer in which we recite that on Rosh Hashanah it is inscribed and on Yom Kippur sealed “who shall live and who shall die, who in the fullness of time and who before his time,” who by water and who…
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Sports This year’s biggest World Cup upset came from its most ‘Jew-ish’ team
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Fast Forward Trump nominee defends college cartoon of Jewish student with devil horns at Senate hearing
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Opinion How Israel’s strongest partisans destroyed global support for Israel