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
Why Pope Francis Must Move This Church From Auschwitz
(JTA) — This week, Pope Francis will be making a pilgrimage to Poland, visiting Auschwitz – the notorious death camp in Poland where 1.1 million Jews were murdered during the Holocaust. Auschwitz is comprised of two camps: Auschwitz I and Auschwitz II, also called Birkenau. Birkenau is the actual “theater of death,” where the vast…
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Opinion Will Bill Clinton’s Spiritual Masterpiece Humanize Hillary for America?
Love him or hate him, former President Bill Clinton delivered a masterpiece of oration last night, a “Checkers” speech for the 21st century. He also reminded us why the spiritual is political and the political is spiritual. Clinton’s job was clear: humanize his wife, Hillary Clinton. Other people could talk about policy, or the threat…
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Opinion Tim Kaine’s Very Talmudic Approach to Politics
Senator Tim Kaine, Hillary Clinton’s pick for vice president, is a devout Catholic who sings tenor in the choir of the church he has attended regularly for 30 years. As he reminded his fellow Democrats last night, he went to a Jesuit high school and worked with Jesuit missionaries in Honduras. He quotes freely from…
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Opinion The Tim Kaine I’ve Known for Decades Is a True Friend of the Jews
Tim Kaine is one of the best people I know. I am already on record with a somewhat lighthearted appreciation of how he brought hummus to Virginia and ran for governor just so my daughter could meet her husband on the campaign. But the man I have come to know and admire is not just…
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Opinion Both Republicans and Democrats Went Backward on Israeli-Palestinian Conflict. Now What?
For Americans, Israelis and Palestinians who still seek a two-state resolution to the long and exhaustive conflict between Israel and the Palestinians, the platforms of the major American political parties are profoundly disappointing. Neither platform addresses the issue seriously. The failure to do so serves no one’s interests, especially not those of the United States….
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Opinion The Inconvenient Truths Stalking Hillary Clinton’s Democratic Convention
It’s hard to be a cheerleader when the world’s about to end. That’s how the Democratic National Convention feels right now. Everyone knows that Donald Trump’s post-convention boost is temporary. But still, to see a perfectly qualified, mainstream candidate — too mainstream for many — losing to a white supremacist demagogue with no knowledge of…
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Opinion 4 Ways Michelle Obama’s Speech Spoke to Jewish Values
Michelle Obama absolutely blew the nation away with her front-and-center speech at the Democratic National Convention on Monday night. In a convention fraught with stressors like the Debbie Wasserman Schultz fiasco and lingering Bernie supporters in the throes of their histrionics, FLOTUS’s speech offered some much-needed unifying sentiments that the vast majority of people tuning…
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Opinion I Put (((Echoes))) on My Name To Teach WikiLeaks a Lesson About Anti-Semitism
When news broke about the anti-Semitic marker being used to identify Jews on Twitter — a sequence of three parentheses called “echoes” — the symbol was added to the Anti-Defamation League’s hate speech database within days. Many Jews, and even some non-Jews, immediately began putting the echoes around their names as an act of defiance….
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Opinion I Won’t Cry Over Debbie Wasserman Schultz’s Fall From Power
I don’t know Debbie Wasserman Schultz, who was just forced to resign as the head of the Democratic National Committee, but I always secretly identified with her. We are both ambitious New York-born Jewish women of modest height and outsized energy, with three children — and very curly hair. But I’d like to believe, especially…
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Opinion As We Approach Tisha b’Av, the Jewish Future Again Hangs in the Balance
Calendar alert: Saturday, July 23, coincided this year with the 17th of Tammuz on the Hebrew calendar. That means we’ve now entered the traditional mourning period known as The Three Weeks. The 17th of Tammuz is a minor fast day, dawn to dusk, commemorating the Roman legions’ breaching of the walls of Jerusalem in the…
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Opinion How Debbie Wasserman Schultz’s DNC Tried To Weaponize Bernie Sanders’s Jewishness
It was around this time last year that I first waded into coverage of the 2016 presidential race for this newspaper, asking whether Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, a democratic socialist, was being subjected to anti-Semitic treatment from his critics. The short answer was that in some cases yes, in some cases no, so we better…
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Culture Louis Theroux’s Netflix documentary on the manosphere takes a detour into antisemitism
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Fast Forward Expelled Oberlin Chabad rabbi says he ‘made a mistake’ with explicit social media chats
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Fast Forward Illinois primary pits Jewish candidate with deep Israel ties against AIPAC spending
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Opinion Trump has forced an impossible choice on American synagogues amid antisemitic attacks
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Fast Forward Can James Talarico’s faith-forward politics invigorate the Jewish religious left?
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Fast Forward JB Pritzker once sat on AIPAC’s national board. Now he says he wants nothing to do with it.
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Culture The Nazis didn’t care that Paul Klee wasn’t Jewish
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News Ben Gurion airport shutdowns leave already disrupted passengers desperate
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