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
The first step to fighting anti-Semitism is recognizing how irrational it is
The following is testimony delivered by Deborah Lipstadt before the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom on January 8, 2020. Recently a well-educated, accomplished man, the CEO of a Fortune 500 company — one of America’s most successful corporate entities — attended a seminar I gave on antisemitism. After my presentation, he raised his…
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Opinion Cash bail criminalized poverty. Fears about bail reform are misguided.
After a string of anti-Semitic attacks in the New York area, some Orthodox Jews have criticized a new bail reform law which includes a ban on cash bail for nonviolent offenses, which was a major triumph for new Democratic legislators. But the immediate release of a woman named Tiffany Harris, who had slapped three Orthodox…
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Opinion Elizabeth Wurtzel’s tragic death should be a wakeup call for Ashkenazi Jewish women
If ever there were a Gen X Jewish woman writer who made meaning out of the intimate details and dark forces that wreaked havoc on her life, it was Elizabeth Wurtzel. The author of “Prozac Nation” and “More, Now, Again: A Memoir of Addiction”, Wurtzel died, far too young, on Tuesday from metastatic breast cancer;…
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Opinion What Jews can learn from the gay rights movement
This past Sunday, I proudly joined 25,000 others at the “No Hate No Fear” march across the Brooklyn Bridge to take a stand against the violence that has afflicted New York and New Jersey’s Orthodox Jewish communities this past month and beyond. In the last three weeks alone, 14 anti-semitic incidents were reported in New…
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Opinion Soviet Jews are the latest target of Israel’s Chief Rabbi’s bigotry
As anti-Semitism surges worldwide, Jews across the globe could sure use a little unity. Unfortunately, we just got the opposite, courtesy of Yitzhak Yosef, one of the two chief rabbis of Israel. During remarks at a rabbinical conference last week, Yosef exploded in a tirade against ex-Soviet Jews who had immigrated to Israel. Yosef’s remarks…
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Opinion Stop Calling Us Orthodox Women Who Study Talmud ‘Pioneers’
If you were to peek inside the window of a building in Crown Heights, Brooklyn on Sunday night, you would find a group of young Jews engrossed in Talmud study. Their clothing would be conservative, and their heads would be bent over volumes of densely printed Aramaic text. Hands would be gesticulating animatedly, and Talmudic…
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Opinion Attacks on Jewish community threaten our most basic democratic values
“May the children of the stock of Abraham, who dwell in this land, continue to merit and enjoy the goodwill of the other inhabitants while everyone shall sit in safety under his own vine and fig tree. And there shall be none to make him afraid.” These words are taken from a letter President George…
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Opinion Attacks against the Orthodox signal the return of ‘social anti-Semitism’
“We brought you to America to get away from this,” my mother called to say the night after the deadly attack in Jersey City against Hasidic Jews this past December. Her words rang in my ears as report after report came out of Jews being attacked, most of them Orthodox or Hasidic, on the streets…
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Opinion This year, let’s debate everything — except Israel
In 2020, Jews need to argue. We need to argue more than we have, but also differently. Here’s the formula: There should be fewer fights about Israel. There should be more fights about everything else. This might be difficult. Far too many American Jews have nothing to say that is not related to the Jewish…
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Opinion Calm down: Killing Qassem Soleimani made us safer
On Thursday night, in an act of escalation against Iran, U.S. drones struck a convoy of high-ranking Iranian and Iraqi commanders, killing Qassem Soleimani, the head of the foreign operations’ branch of Iran’s powerful and ideologically committed armed force. The strike represented an unprecedented act of aggression on the part of the U.S., at the…
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Opinion What the media got wrong about the Siyum Hashas
New Year’s Day presented America with a split-screen of Orthodox American Jewish life in 2020. A jubilant 90,000 souls gathered at the MetLife stadium on Wednesday, proudly celebrating the Talmud study which is the cornerstone of their lives. But while we listened to the words of rabbis, we were also receiving WhatsApp messages informing us…
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