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
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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Opinion Delicious ‘Leber Days’
When I was a boy in Brooklyn, the words “Labor Day” carried much weight, but they meant different things to different members of my family. To my father’s socially conscious, intellectually curious, working immigrant parents, it was the day to be thankful for the unions, to stand and march with all working people. It was…
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Opinion ‘Spiritual Warfare’
Roy Moore, the chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court, has declared a religious war here in America. In what’s often seen as headline-mongering, Moore has refused for months to heed a federal court order to remove a 5,300-pound statue of the Ten Commandments from the state courthouse. Most dismiss it as a sideshow. This…
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Opinion A Tribute That Desecrates Rather Than Sanctifies
Creating a memorial to the 600,000 Jews murdered at the Belzec death camp in Poland is of the utmost importance. It is profoundly distressing, however, that the planned memorial will feature an enormous trench running through the entire camp. The project has already disturbed — and will continue to disturb — the ashes and bones…
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Opinion Belzec’s Victims Have Waited Long Enough for a Memorial
Between March and December 1942, more than 600,000 Jews were murdered in the Belzec killing camp in Poland. In 1943, to cover up the crime, the Nazis demolished the camp and dug up and burned hundreds of thousands of bodies. Ashes, bones and bodies were buried in chaotic fashion. Ever since, Belzec has been abused….
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Opinion A Texas-Sized Scandal
All eyes are fixed on — or averted from? — the ongoing debacle in California. But at least there, it’s all out in the open, for everyone to see and shake their heads at. Ever the contrarian, I have Texas on my mind even more than California. Texas in general, Houston in particular. The “in…
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Letters August 22, 2003
Stand Up for the Roma I read with great interest George Soros’s article on the situation of the Roma in Europe (“In Ever-Richer European Union, Roma Still Live in Abject Poverty,” August 15). While this issue is not widely known in the United States, it remains a difficult challenge for European society. Even the dark…
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Opinion The Blood Cries Out
The barbaric savagery of modern terrorism induces, as it intends to do, a strange combination of rage and numbness in the target population. We are at once inflamed and stupefied, aroused to action and yet unfocused in our reactions. Just when cool thinking is most needed we are least disposed to make fine distinctions. The…
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Opinion More Mystical, Less Statistical
What, after all, do we mean by the term “Jewish identity?” For a while, during the height of the Jewish continuity craze of the early 1990s, it seemed as if we were producing a whole category of people whose Jewish identity consisted principally of urging others to “have” a Jewish identity — not only as…
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