Opinion

• 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…

  < 1 min read
• 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

Columnists View All

• Alyssa Katz Class assignment: Get to know your murdered Jewish neighbors

  

• Rob Eshman Liberal Zionists are under attack. A new book proves their work has never been more important

  

• Dan Perry How Israel became a country where teenagers murder each other in cold blood

  

• Emily Tamkin American Jews have a Hasan Piker problem. Solving it is going to hurt

  

• Jay Michaelson Epstein and Iran are an antisemitism mega-crisis. Here’s what Jewish organizations should do about it. 

  

The Latest

• 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 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…

  By Bethamie Horowitz Mar 11, 2005 | 4 min read
• 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…

  By Emily Hauser Mar 11, 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
• 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…

  Mar 4, 2005 | 5 min read