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
How Did Ashkenazi Jews End Up With Famous Non-Jewish Last Names?
It’s a fact: Ashkenazi Jews often bear surnames also used by Christians. What, if anything, does that tell us? Surnames used by a population often contain clues about the historical, linguistic and cultural past of the group. Certain names reveal migration patterns, others provide clues about the occupations of the ancestors and some names provide…
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Opinion TIME’s Honor Of Brave Journalists Shows What Happens When Our Leaders Embrace Despots
As a journalist, especially as a Jewish journalist, I was gratified that TIME magazine chose to honor the members of our profession who have displayed extraordinary courage, even at the cost of their own lives, simply to do their jobs. “The Guardians” is how editor Ed Felsenthal described the group of journalists, alive and dead,…
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Opinion Can The Occupation’s Cheerleader Win Over American Jews? Q&A With Naftali Bennett
It’s no secret that American Jews and their Israeli counterparts have less in common with every passing day. But where you locate the source of that chasm depends on which side of the Atlantic you’re standing on. For American Jews, Israel’s dispossession of Palestinian civil rights, the monopoly of the ultra-Orthodox over religious matters, and…
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Opinion Like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, My Latinx And Jewish Histories Intersect
At a Hanukkah party on Sunday night, Congresswoman-elect Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez shared that “generations and generations ago, my family consisted of Sephardic Jews.” In doing so, she publicly joined a vast community of people, including my family, in embracing the space where Jewish and Latinx identities intersect. It is a story that, sadly, has long sat…
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Opinion Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Is The Donald Trump Of The Left
It’s the age of identity on the left. But the lines of what that entails change daily. On one hand, your identity at birth is paramount. Intersectionality could not exist without it. Your sex, your race, your religion, your sexuality, it all plays a part in what claim to victimhood you can stake. On the…
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Opinion Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Is All Young American Jews
American Jewish life is witnessing a transformation. A new perspective, informed by intersectionality, inclusion and other left values, is replacing the old one marked by matrilineal heritage and religious ritual. On topics ranging from who is a Jew to where to stand on Israel to what policies domestically Jews should support, young American Jews are…
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Opinion Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Sephardic Story Is One Forgotten By White Jews
It happens at least once every semester: a student learns that I teach courses in Jewish studies at my university here in southeast Texas and comes to visit me during my office hours. In most cases, I have never met this student before, and at first, the conversation is hesitant, as if the student lacks…
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Opinion Jared Kushner’s Slavish Love For Fellow Princeling MBS
It started off like a fable, the two young princelings, one Jewish and one Arab, both modern and polished, both believing themselves to be their kingdoms great modernizers. But of course, it turned out to be something much more sinister. The bromance between Jared Kushner, President Trump’s son in law, and Mohammed bin Salman, the…
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Opinion Trump Just Accused Jews Of Loving Israel, Not America – And His Fans Cheered Anyway
President Trump’s two Hannukah addresses at the annual White House Hannukah Party included a number of moving tributes, one to a group of Holocaust survivors and a second to the Jews he calls family – Ivanka and Jared Kushner. He also issued a shocking insinuation that America was not the home of its Jewish citizens….
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Opinion Trump’s Hanukkah Party Reminded Me Why America Is Great For Jews
Several weeks ago, the Forward hosted a symposium about being Jewish in America in the wake of the Pittsburgh massacre. If I’m being honest, some of the responses annoyed me; we aren’t living in 1930s Europe, or 1900s Poland, or 1490s Spain. There is no need to keep bags packed waiting for a pogrom; we…
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Opinion Lena Dunham Embodies The Racism Of White Feminism
This Wednesday, Lena Dunham, creator of the HBO series “Girls,” published an open letter in which she apologized for lying to discredit a rape survivor. In November 2017, Aurora Perrineau, a biracial black woman, filed a police report claiming that “Girls” writer Murray Miller raped her when she was 17 — and he was 35….
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