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 Trump Served Us An Extra Helping Of Fear This Passover
Rosa spent five years of her young life being hunted by the Nazis and their accomplices in Eastern Europe. When Nazi troops entered her native town of Lublin, Poland, in 1939, she escaped to Ukraine. Along with her sister and an in-law, she then fled the Kolomiia ghetto in south-western Ukraine in 1941. Many others…
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Opinion Why Can’t This White House Get The Holocaust Right?
(JTA) — We interrupt this Passover to bring you two news bulletins: Bashar Assad is worse than Hitler. The “Soup Nazi” was almost a real Nazi. Let’s start with the second revelation, since Sean Spicer’s Hitler gaffe about Hitler is probably better known. Entertainment Weekly reported that, according to a former writer-producer for the sitcom…
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Letters Letter To The Editor: Why Sean Spicer’s Holocaust Gaffe Should So Worry Jews
Trump administration Press Secretary Spicer’s recent Holocaust gaffe seemed an honest mistake, and that’s what, as a Jew, worries me most. In condemning Syria’s President Assad, Spicer somehow said, “even Hitler didn’t gas his own people.” Spicer’s statement reinforced Hitler’s narrative that the German Jews were not, in fact, “his own people,” that their citizenship…
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Opinion How The Shunned Jews Of Egypt Found A Warm Welcome In Brazil
I am an immigrant. In fact, if you consider that adjusting to new habits, embracing new cultures, learning new languages, and adapting to different ways of life are all part of the immigration experience, I have emigrated three times. I have lived in four countries on four continents — Egypt, Brazil, France, and the United…
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Opinion Grave Matter: Rising Sea Levels Threaten Jewish Cemeteries
It is for Shmuel ben Shimson and Pauline Bernstein, among others, that I am marching. Shimshon lived in Italy in the 14th century, Pauline in Texas in the 19th. Though their lives were separated by centuries and by thousands of miles, they have something in common: They are buried in Jewish cemeteries that are threatened…
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Opinion What The Humble Olive Tree Teaches Us About Israel’s Past And Future
In springtime, when the flowers of olive trees open in Jerusalem, pollen catches the Mediterranean winds and sails east. The pollen travels over the walls of the Old City, across the Kidron Valley to the Mount of Olives. It flies over walls, villages and settlements, then down from the hills and across the caves at…
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Opinion 3 Things Politico Got Wrong In Tying Chabad To Trump’s Russia Scandal
(JTA) — Has Chabad “taken on an outsize importance” in the Trump-Russia scandal? That’s a claim of a recent Politico article detailing a web of connections between Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin and a vast network of Chabad benefactors and their associates. It’s long been known that a set of Russian oligarchs are also Chabad mega-donors,…
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Opinion A Very Klingon Passover — Starting With The 4 Questions
Michael Burstein kindly provided the Four Questions in Klingon to those of his readers in the Federation of Planets celebrating Pesach (Passover). The Four Questions In Klingon qatlh pImlaw’ ramvam rammey latlh je? qaStaHvIS Hoch rammey “Hametz” “Matza” je DISop, ‘ach qaStaHvIS ramvam’e’, “Matza” neH wISop. qaStaHvIS Hoch rammey, Hoch tI wISop, ‘ach qaStaHvIS ramvam’e’,…
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Opinion IfNotNow And The Challenge Of The Millennial Left
In a column last week, I compared IfNotNow, the Millennial-powered movement challenging American Jewish complicity in Palestinian repression, to Black Lives Matter. That upset some people,including IfNotNow itself, which issued a statement rejecting the comparison. That’s fine. I’m a fan of IfNotNow’s, but the movement has no obligation to agree with everything I write, just…
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Opinion What Does It Mean To Be Jewish And Pro-Life?
Recently at March For Life, an annual rally held in Washington, D.C., I hoped to meet and write about other pro-life Jewish marchers. The record-setting crowd was thick and palpably upbeat after the election of Donald Trump and his nomination of Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court. With Donald Trump’s latest threats to defund the…
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Opinion Anti-Semitism Continues In America — And Trump Is Silent Again
What kind of president looks for an excuse not to condemn anti-Semitism? And what kind of administration points to the apprehension of one depraved suspect in Israel, among scores of recent perpetrators, as the pretext for denying the epidemic of anti-Semitism on the president’s watch? The answer: A presidency out of touch with the spread…
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