Opinion

• Opinion

  Want To Defend Ivanka Against Sexist Language? Start With ‘Daddy’ Donald.

  First, I defended Ivanka Trump against what I considered was the use of sexist, insulting language about her in a New York Times story. Then, her father the president used nearly the same words in a speech in North Dakota. And she clearly didn’t mind. What’s a feminist to do? As the chain of events…

  By Jane Eisner

  3 min read
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  Opinion

  The One Weird Thing That Birthright And JVP Have In Common

  When you get down to it, Jewish Voice for Peace, the pro-Palestinian gadfly, probably doesn’t get enough credit from the mainstream Jewish community. The activist group does more than just about any other presence on the American scene to get young Jews passionately engaged with Israel. It’s not necessarily the sort of Israel engagement that…

  By J.J. Goldberg Sep 6, 2017 | 4 min read
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  Opinion

  My Father, Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, Was A Dreamer, Too

  I cannot bear the word “deportation.” My father, Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, was living in Frankfurt, Germany, in October 1938 in a rented room from a Jewish family in the leafy suburb of Eschersheim. My father was born and raised in Warsaw, Poland, the child of great Hasidic rebbes, and had gone in 1927 to…

  By Susannah Heschel Sep 5, 2017 | 3 min read

Columnists View All

• Jodi Rudoren This is my last column as editor of the Forward

  

• Jay Michaelson Being Jewish in America today feels like walking multiple tightropes at once

  

• Rob Eshman My brother-in-law’s kibbutz weathered Oct. 7. Then came the Iranian missile strikes

  

• Nora Berman Greta Thunberg’s Gaza flotilla was never going to help Palestinians

  

• Dan Perry Celebrating my daughter’s birthday in a bomb shelter, as missiles struck Tel Aviv

  

• Emily Tamkin Trump’s latest move makes Mahmoud Khalil a Joseph for our times

  

The Latest

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  Opinion

  We Jews Were Once Dreamers. We Must Stand Up For DACA.

  A few days before Donald Trump chose to demolish the Deferred Action for Chilhdood Arrivals program that provided legal refuge for young, undocumented immigrants, I happened to be reading through the rather copious file on anti-Semitism maintained by the Minnesota Jewish Council in the 1940s. My interest was historical research for a book, but one…

  By Samuel G. Freedman Sep 5, 2017 | 4 min read
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  Opinion

  Israel And The Palestinian Authority Finally Agree — About Jailing Peace Activist Issa Amro

  “Mahmoud Abbas is serving the 12th year of a four term.” I’ve heard the line countless times from hawkish American Jews. It’s often accompanied by a smug grin. The message is clear: Stop haranguing Israel. It’s the Palestinians who don’t believe in democracy. The assumption is that the Palestinian Authority is an independent country with…

  By Peter Beinart Sep 5, 2017 | 3 min read
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  Opinion

  Jewish Students Just Want You To Stop Talking About Israel

  If you’re a sentient American Jew, you’ve heard the claim that college campus is a warzone. It’s beyond a well-rehearsed truism at this point. It’s become reigning orthodoxy to view Jewish college students as beset by anti-Semitic harassment in liberal, Israel-hating college campuses, which are themselves seen as volatile surrogate battlefields to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict….

  By Ari Y. Kelman Sep 5, 2017 | 3 min read
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  Opinion

  Glenn Greenwald’s Takedown Of Jewish Editor Shows How Not To Disagree With Someone

  Nothing contributed to the rise of Donald Trump quite like the infamous echo chamber. By now we are all too familiar with the way that Facebook and other media — and our own passions and insecurities — allowed us to see only what we wanted to see, to hear only what we wanted to hear,…

  By Batya Ungar-Sargon Sep 5, 2017 | 5 min read
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  Opinion

  Charlie Hebdo Turns On Harvey ‘Neo Nazis’ Upsetting Conservative Snowflakes

  If there is one thing that I’ve learned about those on the right, it’s that having feelings about marganlized groups tends to be frowned upon. Whenever issues such as racism, sexism, transphobia or Islamophiba come up, self-proclaimed Deplorables will often sneer and say, “Get over it, snowflake.” What’s ironic is that while these same people…

  By @Freeyourmindkid Sep 1, 2017 | 3 min read
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  Letters

  Israeli MK’s Mockery of Modern Orthodox Misses The Mark

  MK Aryeh Deri derided Modern Orthodoxy as “Borderline Reform” as reported by Israel TV’s Channel 2. This head of the Haredi Sefardic political party, Shas, has served a prison term for criminal corruption, hardly a badge of honor for an Orthodox spokesman we would expect to be committed as a matter of conscience to “doing…

  By Alan J. Yuter Aug 31, 2017 | 2 min read
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  Opinion

  Our Western Wall Victory Is A Win For All Jewish Women Seeking To Pray

  Thursday morning, my Women of the Wall (WOW) sisters and I gathered not at the Western Wall, but at another location in Jerusalem: the Supreme Court. We’d been waiting for this day for months, and it finally came. In June, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu reneged on an agreement to create a space at the Western…

  By Anat Hoffman Aug 31, 2017 | 3 min read
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  Opinion

  What The Forward Really Said About Gorka — And Why We’re Proud We Did

  Sebastian Gorka, who left his post as deputy special assistant to the president last week, is using interviews with friendly media outlets to lambast liberal American Jews and the Forward, claiming that we attacked him solely because of his views on Israel. The Forward has written a lot about Gorka, but we have never attacked…

  By Jane Eisner Aug 31, 2017 | 2 min read