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
Those Inalienable Rights
Eleven score and seven years ago, an unlikely collection of lawyers, businessmen and plantation owners gathered in Philadelphia and brought forth what remains one of the most remarkable social experiments in human history: the United States of America. The new nation, as envisioned in the declaration signed that July day in 1776, was to be…
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Opinion ‘Who Is a Jew’ Redux
In announcing this week that the Jewish state would grant equal status to Reform and Conservative conversion ceremonies for purposes of citizenship and population registry, Israel’s interior minister took one of those political steps that shouldn’t have been necessary, but was. The unilateral declaration by the minister, Avraham Poraz of the secularist Shinui party, is…
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Opinion Sanctity of Union an Article of Faith
In a rare instance of agreement, the liberal New York Times editorial page agreed with reknowned conservative Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia — both found last week’s Supreme Court decision legalizing sodomy to be inconsistent. The brilliant and ornery Scalia, in dissenting from Justice Anthony Kennedy’s majority opinion, noted that the court had hastened to…
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Opinion Missing the ‘Experience’ of a Lifetime
One of the direct outcomes of the intifada has been the dramatic decline in the numbers of Jewish visitors to Israel. The most striking of all was the collapse of the “Israel Experience,” as the youth trips to Israel were commonly called during the 1990s. From the summer of 2000, when a record 10,000 North…
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Opinion Liberty, Justice and Marriage for All
On June 26, the Supreme Court overturned its infamous Bowers v. Hardwick decision of 1986, which ruled that gay people’s private sexual intimacy did not warrant constitutional protection in the bedroom because there is “no connection between family, marriage or procreation on the one hand,” and gay people on the other. Sixteen days earlier, Canada…
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Opinion Our Suburban Superficiality
The first generations of American Jews earned a reputation as progressive politically but morally disciplined. The current generation of young Jews, though, lacks those ethical foundations. We have raised a generation of super-consumers often contemptuous of Judaism — because it offers no alternative to suburban superficiality — and addicted to modern America’s vices. A Hillel…
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Letters June 27, 2003
Recognize Reform In Lutheran Church I was disturbed to read in an otherwise cogent opinion column by David Klinghoffer some dangerous and morally dubious generalizations about Lutheranism (“Keep Taboo on Conversion to Christianity, June 13”). It behooves us, especially in the shadow of Jewish historical experience, to at least fulfill Hillel’s dictum, “what is hateful…
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Opinion A Time To Act in Ethiopia
When Israel first threw open its doors in 1984 to Jewish immigration from Ethiopia, the move was rightly hailed as a watershed moment in Zionist history. The Jewish state had become, as Israeli officials and Jewish activists justly boasted, the only country in human history to welcome masses of African immigrants as brothers, not slaves….
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Opinion California Scheming
Beyond the grim specter of the most populous state in the union experiencing political and fiscal meltdown, what’s most frightening about the gubernatorial recall effort now underway in California is the sense that in the Golden State we may be witnessing, as we so often do, our future. California, which gave us the movies, theme…
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Opinion 1,000 Days
It was 1,000 days ago this week, on September 28, 2000, that Palestinian rioting first broke out in Jerusalem, setting off a cycle of murderous violence that hasn’t stopped yet. While the rioting was at first a momentary event — described by Palestinians as a reaction to Ariel Sharon’s Temple Mount visit that day, though…
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Opinion Higher Education’s ‘Iron Law of Admissions’
All the talk surrounding this week’s Supreme Court ruling upholding affirmative action at the University of Michigan’s law school has ignored one fact of higher education: White students with low grades also get in. The focus on racial preferences usually obscures the many elite preferences for upper class supporters of higher education. Obeying the “Iron…
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