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
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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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Opinion The Evolving Involvement of American Jews
An essay by a newly Orthodox Jewish writer provoked plenty of ire not so long ago, when she criticized the fictional characters created by various authors whom she said had “renounced Orthodox Judaism.” Leaving aside questions about her literary judgment, what intrigued me was the writer’s own new-found religion, pointing as it does to something…
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Opinion My Self-imposed Exile From Israel
I am not always welcome in Jewish circles here in Chicago. A handful of people won’t talk to me; some won’t even look at my children. I was told by one Jewish communal official that I’ve supplied weapons to the enemy, and a prominent member of my community accused me, in a letter sent to…
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Opinion An Island of Empowerment
From the air, the many islands off the Andaman Sea coast of southern Thailand’s Trang Province look like Shangri-La: luxuriantly green, white beaches, aqua sea. Last week I visited the small village of Koh Muuk on one of them, Muuk Island. Early and misleading reports following the tsunami of December 26 — a date referred…
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Opinion Democracy and Peace In the Middle East
Those who have been wondering when the worldwide march of democracy would finally reach the Middle East got the beginnings of an answer this week. In a scene reminiscent of the velvet revolutions that swept Eastern Europe more than a decade ago, the people of Lebanon took to the streets last Monday to protest Syrian…
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Opinion If It’s Saturday, This Must Be America
Of the Ten Commandments, the Fourth — Sabbath observance — had until recently received less respect than any of the other nine, among Jews and Christians alike. One joker has called it “the Rodney Dangerfield of the Decalogue.” America, however, is due for a Sabbath revival, and there is evidence in the culture that one…
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Letters March 4, 2005
‘Tug of War’ at Y.U. An Imagined Conflict The February 18 Viewpoint news analysis column posits that Yeshiva University President Richard “Joel stands at the center of a theological tug of war” between left and right at the university (“Y.U. Chief’s Quiet Gambit Creates Space for Change”). The Forward, however, omits reference to two innovative…
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