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.
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
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…
“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…
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….
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,…
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…
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…
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…
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…
Liberalism, in its classic sense of a free society based on individual rights, intellectual pluralism, and democratic government, is in peril—as numerousvoices havewarned over the past two years. The common assumption is that the illiberal tide comes from the right: the xenophobic populism, nationalism, and authoritarianism represented by Donald Trump in the United States and…
Every day, Hillel brings Israel to the campus – and now, we are taking extra steps to bring the campus to Israel. That is why Hillel International is proud that The David Project and its effective Israel advocacy programs are now under the Hillel umbrella. Hillel International’s The David Project builds connections between Jewish and…
This morning I took a break from clearing my yard of the tree limbs and debris to google the name of the storm that caused the damage, along with the adjective “biblical”. The number of links that appeared—nearly seven million—rivaled the magnitude of the event. No doubt, many have nothing to do with the event…
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