Opinion

• Opinion

  No, Vassar Isn’t a Hotbed of Anti-Semitism. Trust Me, I Should Know!

  My mom isn’t sleeping. Either she spends the night reading articles about anti-Semitism at Vassar, or she reads them during the day and then stays up at night worrying. I was admitted to Vassar three years ago this spring, and it was my parents who encouraged me to choose this liberal arts school out of…

  By Abigail Johnson

  4 min read
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  Opinion

  Can Supreme Court Take a Lesson from Jewish Law on Scalia Replacement?

  Within minutes of the announcement of Justice Antonin Scalia’s death, the wrangling started. Should President Obama nominate a successor in an election year? Should the Senate give the president’s choice a respectful hearing? I don’t have much to add to these debates. But I do worry about our current distorted sense of the relation between…

  By Perry Dane Feb 22, 2016 | 3 min read
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  Opinion

  Stop Trying To Steal Bernie Sanders’s Red Flag — and Mine

  In the spring of 1968 I had a transformative experience that changed my self-awareness as a Jew and an American. I’ve been thinking about that moment a lot since Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaign turned serious — and especially since the story of his kibbutz connection has gotten him slammed as a communist. I was spending…

  By J.J. Goldberg Feb 22, 2016 | 4 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

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  Letters

  Synagogues and Independent Congregations Are Allies, Not Enemies

  I’m grateful to the Forward for reprinting the JTA story about the , a new partnership of communities that is attracting the young and unaffiliated. It is a great story, and there is one nuance I would like to lift up. While the tempting story to tell is one that links the declining synagogue affiliation…

  By Lizzi Heydemann Feb 21, 2016 | 2 min read
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  Opinion

  Would Talmudic Rabbis Approve of Hillary Clinton’s Wall Street Money?

  During the Democratic presidential debate on the night of February 4, Hillary Clinton said to Bernie Sanders: “If you have something to say, say it.” She was referring to Sanders’s repeated indication that Clinton has compromised herself by taking money from Wall Street. Sanders did not answer directly, but he wasn’t dodging. He understood that…

  By Michael Bennett Cohn Feb 21, 2016 | 3 min read
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  Opinion

  We Need To Out Bernie Sanders as a Jew — for His Own Good

  Bernie Sanders is marching through his presidential campaign with a giant target on his back: his Jewishness. Unless the Democratic candidate begins to more publicly admit his Jewish identity (even though he doesn’t practice Judaism as a religion), it will become a huge vulnerability. If nominated, he will leave the Democratic Party susceptible to ugly…

  By Valerie Lieber Feb 20, 2016 | 3 min read
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  Opinion

  Israeli Opposition’s Plan for Jerusalem Makes No Sense. Here’s a Better Idea.

  Israeli opposition leader Isaac Herzog has announced that, since a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is not currently viable, Israel should take unilateral steps to manage the conflict. These steps include cutting off a number of Palestinian neighborhoods from East Jerusalem. “Then we’ll reunite the true Jerusalem, without hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, who…

  By Eetta Prince-Gibson Feb 19, 2016 | 4 min read
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  Opinion

  How Jewish Would a Bernie Sanders Presidency Be?

  Bernie Sanders is the first Jew to win a presidential primary in New Hampshire, or in any other state. If he should go on to secure the Democratic nomination, and if he should then win the general election, he will have upended conventional wisdom by bringing a long-shot, socialist campaign all the way from Brooklyn…

  By Jane Eisner Feb 18, 2016 | 4 min read
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  Opinion

  Why Does Israel’s Liberal Opposition Leader Say There’s No Prospect of a Peace Deal?

  Israel’s Knesset gave preliminary approval February 9 to a controversial bill aimed at shaming human rights organizations that get funding from foreign governments. The bill, a top priority of Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition, requires not-for-profits getting more than half their budgets from foreign governments — mostly European — to post a warning of their foreign links…

  By J.J. Goldberg Feb 16, 2016 | 4 min read
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  Opinion

  My Memories of Nino Scalia, the Most Jewish Gentile on the Supreme Court

  (JTA) — “When there was no Jewish justice on the Supreme Court,” Antonin “Nino” Scalia told me, “I considered myself the Jewish justice.” After Abe Fortas resigned in May 1969, there would be no Jewish justice on the court for nearly a quarter of a century, until President Bill Clinton named Ruth Bader Ginsburg to…

  By Nathan Lewin Feb 15, 2016 | 5 min read
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  Opinion

  We Need Mahmoud Abbas — But Let’s Not Give Him Carte Blanche

  Israel and its supporters are being held hostage by the notion that Mahmoud Abbas, president of the Palestinian Authority, is all that we have on the Palestinian side and that any successor would be far worse. The right’s response to this is either that there isn’t a hair’s breadth of difference between Abbas and Fatah…

  By Ken Jacobson Feb 15, 2016 | 3 min read