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
Prepare To Have Your Peace Disturbed
To watch “Disturbing the Peace” is to be challenged. Does the new documentary about the Israeli-Palestinian group Combatants for Peace, present a false moral equivalency between Israelis and Palestinians? Or is the apparent symmetry better understood as a tool to enable the film to speak to a wide audience in order to provoke fundamental change?…
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Opinion Donald Trump, Anti-Semitism and the New Socialism of Fools
Here’s a little history for those just joining us: What’s long distinguished anti-Semitism from most other forms of oppression is that this form of bigotry presents itself as an anti-oppression ideology. The anti-Semite doesn’t (in his or her view) hate Jews because ugh, Jews. Rather, the anti-Semite believes Jews to be an all-powerful force, a…
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Opinion How Did Donald Trump Happen?
How could this happen? What do I tell my kids? Fair questions. It’s fair to feel anything right now, especially fear. But, if it helps, consider that the Trump victory isn’t entirely surprising. America has changed very quickly in the last 20 years or so. We’ve become much more multicultural — and have officially said…
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Opinion After Kristallnacht, My Grandmother Hoped We’d Shatter a Different Glass on Election Day
November 9th, 1938 On this day, my grandmother, living in Leipzig, Germany woke up to shattered glass. It was the morning after Kristallnacht, the night where Nazi sympathizers burnt synagogues, smashed windows, and let the Jewish people know once and for all they were not welcome in Germany. My grandmother’s love for Germany and German…
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Opinion I Was in Denial — But My Fellow Russian Jews Knew Donald Trump Would Win
If there’s a mea culpa for me to issue this election season, it’s mostly to my own community. The Russian Jewish community has long voted Republican, so it wasn’t completely strange that they lined up behind Donald Trump against Hillary Clinton. What was surprising to me, and frankly upsetting, was how much they liked Trump…
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Opinion Will President Donald Trump Unleash a Civil War Among Democrats — and Can They Recover?
Waking up in America on November 9 felt a bit like stumbling into the middle of a science fiction movie. Everything was askew, out of place, upside down. All the familiar signposts of normality were wrong. Every conventional indicator said Hillary Clinton was about to win a historic victory. Democrats would begin gearing up for…
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Opinion I Bought a Gun Because of Donald Trump’s Anti-Semites — But I See Reason for Hope
This has been the most surreal election of my lifetime. The feeling of confidence slowly replaced by dread and despair as we watched Donald Trump slog toward the Republican nomination on primary nights repeated itself on election night, but on a much greater scale. Now the rest of the country understands the error in underestimating…
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Opinion 4 Unknowns for Jews in Bitterly Divided America Under President Trump
(JTA) — Donald Trump defeated Hillary Clinton and Republicans kept control of the Senate. The U.S. House of Representatives will remain Republican. What are the takeaways for the Jewish community? Chief among them: Trump, and the class he represents — anxious, resentful and ready to make radical changes — was once largely invisible to Jews….
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Opinion Stop Panicking and Start Inviting Donald Trump Supporters to Your Next Shabbat Dinner
Donald Trump has won the 2016 election, so by all means, take the next 24 hours to cry, mourn, scream, panic, and beg your Canadian friends to marry you and run away together. And then, if you can, please get back to work. Now that America has elected a racist, misogynist emboldener of white supremacists…
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Opinion What Does It Mean To Be Jewish in Donald Trump’s America?
The question before liberal American Jews — and that is most of America’s Jews — is whether we have a place in Donald Trump’s America. Let’s put aside for the moment, if that’s possible, all the racist, anti-Semitic, Islamophobic, anti-immigrant hate unleashed during this campaign and deal with the issues that underlined Trump’s improbable win. On…
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Opinion 5 Creepy Anti-Semitic Memes On Reddit, Or How the ‘Alt-Right’ Spent Election Day
On Election Day, Hillary Clinton supporters and Donald Trump supporters alike are making the urgency in their votes known across every social media platform, with both camps gunning hard for their candidate. Of course, in Trump’s camp, there’s one subset of supporters that has made itself quite loudly, consistently and troublingly known throughout the 2016…
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Opinion Trump has forced an impossible choice on American synagogues amid antisemitic attacks
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Opinion Antisemitism is exploding on the right but the Jewish establishment is focused on the left
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Opinion The one crucial domain in which Iran outwitted Israel
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Culture Louis Theroux’s Netflix documentary on the manosphere takes a detour into antisemitism
In Case You Missed It
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Opinion Israelis and Americans deserve to know why they are still at war
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News A government takeover could save a struggling Brooklyn hospital — while unsettling the Orthodox Jewish community it serves
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News Joe Kent, Trump official with white supremacist ties, resigns over Iran war and blames Israel
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Fast Forward Dueling letters from Jewish groups dispute prevalence of antisemitism at UCLA
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