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
Vote SpongeBob SquarePants for California Governor
Democrats need not panic over the runaway train that is Arnold Schwarzenegger’s candidacy for the California governorship. They need only to borrow a page from Hollywood and field their own media-friendly candidate. So here, forthwith, a list of nominees for the Democratic nod: • Ronald McDonald. Name recognition, Q ratings and positive feedback off the…
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Opinion Leaders Must Speak Truth To Power, Without Delay
House Majority Leader Tom DeLay undoubtedly wants to help Israel. Presumably he will say so when he visits New York next week and meets with the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations. His trip comes at a critical time, in the wake of this week’s terror attacks and with the American-sponsored road map…
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Opinion Damaged and Desensitized
One of the more remarkable aspects of the human species is our capacity to become inured. What begins as a shock comes eventually to feel quite routine, if repeated often enough. Think, for example, of airport security, each new upward ratcheting disconcerting at first but soon enough absorbed, no longer worthy of comment. So also…
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Opinion Bush’s Quagmire, and Ours
Even the most determinedly partisan critics of the Bush administration have been taken aback lately — dumbfounded is more like it — by the spectacular unraveling of the administration’s Iraq strategy. For all the doubts about the wisdom of the president’s plans, few of us thought they would collapse this utterly or this fast. Now…
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Opinion The Numbers Game
The sharks are already circling the waters in anticipation of next week’s planned release of the long-awaited National Jewish Population Survey, or NJPS. The $6 million study, originally scheduled for release in 2000, has been delayed repeatedly while scholars argued arcane questions of survey methodology. Now, it appears, one side has won the battle, and…
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Opinion Israeli Economists’ Dangerous Minds
In discussions of the Israeli government’s economic program in various forums in the economics department at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, the students expressed firm opinions against the poor who don’t work, against the welfare state and against the public sector. In a conversation with the professors, the students said, “What do you want? We…
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Opinion How Pride Beat Hate in Montreal
Summer is ending and students are returning to campus. Many Jewish students, however, will be returning not only to seminars and syllabi, but also to the anti-Israel protests and propaganda that have plagued many North American campuses since the Palestinians launched their intifada in the fall of 2000. Montreal’s Concordia University, in particular, has become…
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Letters September 5, 2003
Impassioned Warning Or Confused Criticism? Former Knesset speaker Avraham Burg’s scathing critique of the present state of Zionism is as painful as it is true (“A Failed Israeli Society Collapses While Its Leaders Remain Silent,” August 29). Burg discloses what seems so obvious yet so unspoken in the Jewish media — that we are committing…
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Opinion L’Chaim
The latest news from Harvard Medical School appears to confirm something that rabbis and French chefs have been saying for centuries: Red wine is good for you. According to a study by Harvard scientists, announced this week in the online journal Nature, red wine contains a chemical that mimics the life-extending qualities of a low-calorie…
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Opinion Finding a Niche, Mameloshn Goes Mainstream
So “oy” and “bubkes” are now in Merriam-Webster’s dictionary, as the Forward reported last month. Should we kvell or should we kvetch? And what do the terms’ entries into the American lexicon tell us about Jews in America? Probably not what you think. To begin with, these words and the 100 or so others like…
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Opinion Atop the Ivory Towers
A few weeks ago I went out to dinner with Bob and Anita Summers, two distinguished economists who long taught at the University of Pennsylvania. Afterward they invited me back to their lovely home in the hills of Truro, one of the most beautiful towns on Cape Cod. In the course of the evening, as…
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Culture He works at a Holocaust museum by day. How’d he end up in ‘Marty Supreme’?
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Antisemitism Decoded How an ‘all-American boy’ became a Mississippi synagogue arson suspect
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Opinion Is the ‘Board of Peace’ just another Trump scam, or a real move toward Middle East peace?
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Fast Forward Penn calls Trump administration demand for list of Jewish employees ‘disturbing and unconstitutional’
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