In the Forward’s opinion section, you’ll find analysis and essays from diverse corners of the Jewish world.
To pitch an opinion piece, email our Opinion Editor, Talya Zax.
Opinion
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Letters
Letter | My beloved rabbi was accused of sexual abuse. Now what?
To the editor, My heart is breaking, because Rabbi Sheldon Zimmerman, this week accused of “sexually predatory behavior,” is my beloved rabbi and teacher, a mentor who helped me on the road to my career as a rabbi. (“Reform Rabbinic giant disciplined for inappropriate relationships now accused of ‘sexually predatory behavior.’”) As a congregant at…
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Opinion We’re Jewish advocates for refugees. Biden’s inertia means Congress must act.
While President Biden made mention of immigration reform in his first address to Congress this week, the fate of refugees was conspicuously absent. After weeks of whiplash for refugees and their advocates, we’re still waiting for clarity on a path forward. On April 16, President Biden announced he would maintain the limit on the number…
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Opinion It may not seem like it, but justice was done in the Sarah Halimi case
What happened in Paris on April 4, 2017 was unspeakable. Kobili Traoré, an immigrant from Mali, burst into the apartment of his neighbor, Sarah Halimi, a 65-year-old retired doctor. Shouting antisemitic invective, Traoré battered Halimi and then threw her to her death from the window of her third-story apartment, exclaiming “Allahu akhbar” and that he…
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Opinion We are all Lag B’Omer pilgrims on Mount Meron
This is an adaptation of Looking Forward, a weekly email from our editor-in-chief sent on Friday afternoons. Sign up here to get the Forward’s free newsletters delivered to your inbox. And click here for a PDF of stories to savor over Shabbat and Sunday that you can download and print. My daughter nudged me as…
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Opinion They’re Palestinians facing eviction in east Jerusalem. They may have helped save my family.
I heard the story countless times. My great-grandfather Raphael, an Arab Jew who was born in Jerusalem, died when my grandfather was 13. Raphael had two business partners. One partner, who was a European Jew, took advantage of the bereft widow, and stole our family’s livelihood. The other partner, an Arab and fellow Jerusalemite, saved…
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Opinion Even ‘apartheid’ doesn’t capture fullness of our Palestinian suffering. But it helps.
In a recent meeting with a representative of the United Nations, I was asked to suggest concepts that would capture the suffering my family and loved ones in Gaza endure. I froze for a moment, not only because of the surprise of a legal scholar unsuccessfully looking for a concept that would precisely capture Gaza’s…
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Opinion I left apartheid South Africa. Applying the term to Israel is disingenous.
Human Rights Watch could do with a new pair of glasses. The organization’s new report, “A Threshold Crossed — Israeli Authorities and the Crimes of Apartheid and Persecution,” is blind to fact and reality. Every paragraph in the 213-page diatribe serves one goal: brand Israel as an apartheid state. I left South Africa as a…
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Opinion Debate | Should we use the term ‘apartheid’ in discussing Israel?
Human Rights Watch, a major international advocacy group, on Tuesday issued a report alleging Israeli officials are committing the crime of apartheid. Conversations about the ways in which that term may or may not apply to Israel have become more prominent in recent years. With this latest development, we asked contributing columnists Joel Swanson and…
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Opinion For Jews and Armenians, two victories in the war on hate
When your vocation is dealing with prejudice, hatred and antisemitism you don’t win many battles. Yet this past week, there were two moments that allowed for momentary rejoicing. Interestingly, both dealt with words and reminded us of the enduring power of speech. First, Joe Biden became the first American president to recognize the Armenian Genocide….
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Opinion Say Israel is committing apartheid? It’s not a decision we reached lightly.
When I arrived in Jerusalem in 1989 as Human Rights Watch’s first Israel-Palestine researcher, I did not imagine the word “apartheid” applying to the Israeli and Palestinian context. But this week, HRW published a report that I edited, as the organization’s acting Middle East director, finding that Israeli officials are committing the crimes of apartheid…
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Opinion HRW report on Israel likely to cause more problems than it solves
Human Rights Watch, the world’s preeminent monitor of how governments treat people within their borders, has found that Israelis are guilty of apartheid. This is far more than a rhetorical charge, detailed over 213 pages in the language of a legal dossier. Long associated with white oppression of Blacks in South Africa apartheid is, in…
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Opinion The ‘Hymietown’ affair degraded Black-Jewish relations. Jesse Jackson wasn’t the real culprit
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