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 Secret Friendship Behind Israel’s Support Of Kurdish Independence
“We have no friends but the mountains,” is an old Kurdish saying. No friends but the mountains — and Israel — is the reality. There is a deep affinity between Israel and the Kurds. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was alone among world leaders when he endorsed Kurds preparing to vote in an independence referendum….
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Opinion I Spent The Past Year Bailing People Out Of Jail. This Is My Prayer
The journey to “The Boat” — a prison barge floating in the East River of New York City — is long. The Bx6 bus winds through the most industrial parts of Hunts Point. I get off at the head of a road flanked on either side by a wastewater treatment facility and the fish market….
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Opinion When Roy Moore Compared Gay Marriage To The Holocaust
Roy Moore has won a primary election to run as the Republican candidate for U.S. Senate from Alabama. Two years ago, he compared gay marriage to the Holocaust to explain why he refused to accept a Supreme Court decision on the issue. If you’d even consider asking “What’s the difference?” between Nazi Germany’s systematic murder…
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Opinion Bernie Sanders Should Just Keep His Mouth Shut On The High Holidays
Last week, Bernie Sanders gave a much-touted foreign policy speech at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri, the same location where Winston Churchill delivered his famous “Iron Curtain” address in 1946. The contents of the speech were intriguing. So was its timing. Sanders delivered it on the first day of Rosh Hashanah. This has become a…
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Opinion How Israel Got It Right On Monuments
On Tel Aviv’s Frishman Beach stands a statue of Israel’s founding father, David Ben Gurion — on its head. Wearing only blue briefs branded ‘Tel Aviv’, Israel’s first prime minister performs a handstand in the sand in the iconic pose made famous in a photograph from 1955. This flippant tribute to Ben Gurion is the…
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Opinion As a Soviet Jew, Yom Kippur Makes Me Feel Like An Outsider
For many years, I had my own personal tradition that I would observe on Yom Kippur. The day before, I would go to the big supermarket in our neighborhood in Southern Jerusalem and buy myself a watermelon. On the morning of Yom Kippur, I would split the watermelon in half, and declare the official beginning…
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Opinion The Campus Israel Wars Are Not About Israel
Last month, American parents across the country drove their daughters and sons to college to begin a new academic year. These parents had little to temper their excitement and optimism, except maybe some concerns about costs, or academic performance, or perhaps their beloved offspring’s choice of extra-curricular activities. American Jewish parents, however, were not quite…
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Opinion Israel Has Created A Palestinian Ghetto In Hebron
A small group of children stand behind the fence in the early morning. They are waiting for the gate to be unlocked. In their hands are empty plastic jugs their mothers have given them to fill for the day’s cooking needs. The gate is supposed to be unlocked every day at 6 a.m. But this…
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Opinion Israeli Weapons Are Being Used To Ethnically Cleanse The Rohingya. This Must Stop.
As hundreds of thousands of Rohingya people are expelled from their homes in Myanmar in one of the most severe examples of ethnic cleansing in recent times, Myanmar has been getting weapons, military training, and skills from a dismaying source: Israel. I’m not the only one who feels dismay that the Jewish State is allowing…
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Opinion What A Rabbi With Cancer Wants To Say To John McCain
Sen. John McCain and Rabbi Rachel Cowan inhabit different universes politically, socially, economically and religiously. Cowan did not vote for McCain when he ran for president in 2008. In fact, she’s never voted for a Republican and — wild guess here — I bet he’s never participated in a meditation service led by a female…
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Opinion The Real Reason So Many Jews Can’t Stand Jared Kushner
Few in Donald Trump’s administration have elicited as much attention as his son-in-law, Jared Kushner. Since Trump’s surprise November election, the mainstream media has dropped a steady drumbeat of anti-Kushner reports. So sustained and unyielding has this onslaught been that when Steve Bannon was fired from his White House post and returned to Breitbart, there…
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