Opinion

• Opinion

  On Airport Security, America Should Take a Lesson from Israel

  Airport security is back in the news this year, with passengers and the Transportation Security Administration alike anticipating longer lines than ever as the summer travel season begins. Yet for all the handwringing and occasional proposing of solutions, few are addressing the central issue: that the system itself is ineffective, inefficient and just plain dumb….

  By Jay Michaelson

  4 min read
• 
  Opinion

  How I Crowdsourced My Way To Testifying as an Expert on Jewish Abortion Ethics

  When I got a call from the Rev. Laura J. Young, head of the Ohio Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice, asking me if I could testify before an Ohio state Senate committee about Jewish views on abortion, I did what rabbis have done for hundreds of years: I crowdsourced. With only a short time to…

  By Eric Woodward May 20, 2016 | 4 min read
• 
  Opinion

  What Avigdor Lieberman Can Learn From the Last Non-General To Be Israel’s Defense Chief

  (JTA) – He was an outspoken politician with little military experience, appointed by a rival and promising to bring a new approach. Current and former officials at the Defense Ministry called his appointment an “enigma,” fretting that “it will take some time until he understands how things work” and that “he’ll have to undergo basic…

  By Ben Sales May 19, 2016 | 2 min read

Columnists View All

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

  

• Jay Michaelson American Jews were played — now what?

  

• Rob Eshman Americans keep getting killed in the West Bank. Here’s how the US could fight that awful trend

  

• Nora Berman First Camp Auschwitz, now Alligator Alcatraz — why the right is obsessed with commodifying brutality

  

• Dan Perry What exactly is going on between Israel and Syria — and is the prospect of peace dead?

  

• Emily Tamkin Zohran Mamdani’s victory proves it: The ‘gotcha’ mode of fighting antisemitism has to go

  

The Latest

• 
  Opinion

  Adelson’s Money Puts Us All in Bed with Trump

  Now that Sheldon Adelson, one of the richest Jews on the planet, has endorsed Donald Trump and pledged to spend lots of his considerable fortune to elect the presumed Republican nominee for president, how should the Jewish community react? What a silly question, you might say. Why should the Jewish community have a response one…

  By Jane Eisner May 19, 2016 | 4 min read
• 
  Opinion

  Jewish Anti-Zionism Does Not Deserve a Home in Hillel — at Brown or Anywhere Else

  A lot has happened at Brown RISD Hillel over the past few days after a group of Jewish students planned an event that they framed as a dialogue on competing Jewish and Palestinian narratives around the 1948 War of Independence. As members of Brown Students for Israel (BSI), we don’t shrink from discussions that challenge…

  By Benjamin Gladstone and Jared Samilow May 18, 2016 | 4 min read
• 
  Letters

  Meet the Jews of Color Organizing in Partnership With JVP

  To the Editor: We are three members of the Jews of Color (JOC) in solidarity with Palestine caucus organizing in partnership with Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) responding to Sigal Samuel’s recent article about the JOC Convening (“Jews of Color Get Personal and Political at First-Ever National Gathering”)”). We agree with Samuel’s summary of the…

  By Lina Morales and Tallie Ben Daniel May 18, 2016 | 2 min read
• 
  Opinion

  Why We Flouted Hillel Rules To Hold Nakba Event at Brown University

  On May 11, more than 70 students crowded into the Hillel meeting room at Brown University/Rhode Island School of Design for a screening of three short films produced by the Israeli NGO Zochrot, and for a discussion about the Nakba (“catastrophe” in Arabic, referring to the 1948 Palestinian expulsion), the politicization of memory, and the…

  By Will Tavlin May 17, 2016 | 3 min read
• 
  Opinion

  The White House Campaign of Lies That Wrecked the Middle East — No, It Wasn’t Ben Rhodes

  America’s political polarization affects us all in such strange and profound ways that sometimes we don’t even know it’s there. We’re all familiar with those debates that never go anywhere because the two sides are arguing from different sets of facts. Climate change, for example. Sometimes, though, we’re living in solitudes so utterly separate that…

  By J.J. Goldberg May 16, 2016 | 6 min read
• 
  Opinion

  Let Israelis and Palestinians Be Enemies

  Despite what many people may believe, humanization between individuals does not resolve conflict between groups. And yet against all the hard evidence, most conflict management or simulation exercises still put this forward as their primary objective. The Forward recently ran two articles about conflict negotiation simulations dealing with the Israel/Palestine dispute. Both mention the challenges…

  By Natasha Gill May 16, 2016 | 4 min read
• 
  Opinion

  Why Jews Need To Recognize the Armenian Genocide Once and for All

  Imagine that you’re walking in Manhattan a few days before Holocaust Memorial Day and see five airplanes skywriting in massive letters that the Holocaust was a hoax. How would you feel? Imagine that you later find out that a full-page advertisement had run the same day in the Washington Post explaining that although some Jews…

  By Jordan Kutzik May 16, 2016 | 5 min read
• 
  Opinion

  Donald Trump’s Rise Shows How Much Pro-Israel Politics Has Changed in 5 Years

  Five years ago this Friday, President Obama threw Israel “under the bus.” At least, that’s how Mitt Romney, who formally announced his presidential run just a few weeks later, described Obama’s call for a two-state solution based on the 1967 lines. Romney’s indignation was shared by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and virtually every member…

  By Matthew Finkelstein May 16, 2016 | 3 min read