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 | Israel Isn’t Conducting Archaeological Warfare With Muslim History. Rather It’s The Other Way Around.
To the Editor: In their piece “Israel Is Using Archaeology To Erase Non-Jewish History,” Talya Ezrahi and Yonathan Mizrachi attempt to portray Israel as the “bad guy” while ignoring certain crucial realities. First and foremost, the word Jerusalem does not appear in the Koran. Not once. It appears approximately 700 times in the Old Testament…
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Opinion This Was A Week Of Jewish Blessings: Gay, Orthodox Ordination, An 80-Person B’nei Mitzvah, And A Spelling Bee
It was a huge week for world news: Robert Mueller celebrated an eerie last day of school, Israel made plans to hold a Groundhog Day-style election, and in the biggest upset, Guy Ritchie revealed impressive conversational Hebrew skills. Let’s get to the good stuff. Blessings: The world can be a dark and a dangerous place,…
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Opinion New Israeli Elections Could Force Netanyahu To Annex The West Bank. Americans Must Protest.
Prime Minister Netanyahu’s failure to assemble a new rightwing coalition government has averted the danger that Israel will soon begin formally annexing parts of the West Bank. But this danger has not disappeared entirely. It has only been postponed. A few days before Israel’s April election, Netanyahu made a bold pledge in an interview on…
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Opinion Humor | I Am a White Male of Modest Accomplishment. I Want to Be Your President.
As a white male who has done some stuff, but not really that much stuff, I am proud to announce that I am running for the Democratic nomination of President of the United States. I dearly love this country, and I believe in the principles set down in the Constitution by our Founding Fathers, especially…
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Opinion Yeshivas Aren’t Teaching Secular Studies. It’s A Shonda For The Jews And Democracy.
Over generations, no matter their religious practice, Jews have shared a commitment to educating their children. In New York, the government has set the standards for that education and taken the legal responsibility to ensure that every child in every school, whether public, private or religious, receives an education that meets those standards. And yet,…
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Opinion The Secret To Jewish Continuity? Hard Conversations About Israel
In an op-ed last week in these pages, Rabbi Elliot Cosgrove argued that American Jews focus on Israel as a coping mechanism to distract us from “the endangered condition of our Judaism” caused by assimilation and intermarriage. If we could only allocate our resources to Jewish education and communal institutions and away from the constant…
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Opinion I Was Kicked Out Of A Restaurant In Israel For Being Gay. It Made Me More Zionist Than Ever.
A year and a half ago, I was thrown out of a pizza shop in Jerusalem for being gay. I was celebrating the LGBTQ+ Pride weekend with three fellow rabbinical students, and wearing a T-shirt with rainbow colored lettering. After entering the pizza shop, an employee asked me if I was gay. I said yes….
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Opinion Israel Is Using Archeology To Erase Non-Jewish History
Every Jerusalem Day, thousands of people descend on Jerusalem, waving flags as they march through the Old City in what is known as the “flag parade” to celebrate the Six-Day war victory in Jerusalem. Dancing through the streets of the Muslim Quarter, the crowd, a large proportion of whom are Yeshiva students, are often heard…
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Opinion Good News For The Jews This Week: Boozing, And Breaking The Glass Ceiling
Great news: the air is warm, it’s the season of low-commitment Jewish holidays, and Shabbat is here. Let’s recap the good Jewish news of the week — because there is good news every week, if only we know where to look for it. If you have a tip for a Jewish news story that brought…
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Opinion Trump’s ‘Peace’ Team Shows Its Hand In Off-The-Record Meeting
Jason Greenblatt, the Trump administration’s envoy for the Middle East peace process, could have picked from a number of Jewish communities and organizations at which to speak during his stop in New York this week. That he chose the Young Israel of Kew Gardens Hills, and under the sponsorship of Jexodus and the hard-right Coalition…
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Opinion When American Jews Talk About Israel, We’re Really Talking About Ourselves.
The great Jewish debates of the 1950s and 1960s revolved around whether the Bible was or was not divine. It wasn’t a new conversation for Jews, but it took on new meaning in the wake of the Holocaust. We weren’t just arguing over whether God wrote the Bible, but over whether God was in Auschwitz,…
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Opinion The Gaza hostage crisis could forever change how American Jews relate to Israel — but it’s not too late to fix that
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Yiddish ווידעאָ: היסטאָריקערין וויווי לאַקס באַשרײַבט געשיכטע פֿון לאָנדאָנער ייִדישער פּרעסעVIDEO: Historian Vivi Laks tells history of the London Yiddish Press
שבֿע צוקער פֿירט דעם שמועס מיט וויווי לאַקס און ביידע לייענען פֿאָר עטלעכע פֿעליעטאָנען פֿון יענע צײַטן.
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Yiddish World Puppet Monty Pickle is guest on the Forward’s ‘Yiddish Word of the Day’
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News Who is Bruce Blakeman, the ‘Almost Orthodox’ Jew running for New York governor?
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