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
5 Ways To Know If Your Anti-Zionist Comment Is Anti-Semitic
Last week I wrote about Malia Bouattia’s derogatory comments about her university Jewish society and Husam El-Coolaq calling Tzipi Livni smelly. Given Bouattia’s position as the new head of the National Union of Students in Britain and given El-Coolaq’s comment at a public event at Harvard where he is a law student, it seemed as…
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Opinion Should He Stay or Should He Go? Neither — Bernie Sanders Has a Third Path
Bernie Sanders stands at a historic crossroads in his presidential campaign. One path is a continued fight against Hillary Clinton until every last delegate is chosen. The other path is to quit the race and start rallying his troops behind the winner. Each is a legitimate option with its own pluses and minuses. You can…
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Opinion We’re Celebrating Passover. Where Is Hope for Peace in Israel, Freedom and Progress?
Passover had a certain bittersweet cast to it this year. I don’t think I’m the only one who felt it. It’s always been a joyous time: a family reunion, a festive meal, a chance to catch up with loved ones, to sing together, swap stories and talk about big ideas. Someone at our Seder table…
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Opinion Why Israel’s $2.9M Rainbow Plane Is a Joke — and You Don’t Have Be a BDS Fan To Say So
I confess when I first saw the simulated image of an airplane bedecked in the colors of the rainbow flag, ostensibly on its way to Tel Aviv Pride, I thought it was some sort of joke. Yet it really was the Israeli government’s intent, as part of an 11 million shekel ($2.9 million) advertising blitz,…
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Opinion Why Did Bernie Sanders Pick ‘Palestine’ as Poverty Benchmark?
(JTA) — Bernie Sanders, campaigning this weekend in Baltimore ahead of Tuesday’s primary in Maryland, sounded familiar and poignant notes about American poverty, arguing that the United States, the world’s mightiest power, lags behind developing countries on a number of scales. One marker, though, was odd: Two neighborhoods in Baltimore, he said, have worse infant…
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Opinion What the Other Bernie Teaches Us About the Budding Sanders Personality Cult
In mid-February of 1983, a week before Chicago chose its Democratic nominee for mayor, People magazine published a bemused profile of a political curiosity named Bernard Epton. An insurance lawyer who had put in a dozen years as a state legislator, Epton was the Republican candidate for City Hall. In a city that overwhelmingly voted…
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Opinion Why Are Israelis Lashing Out at Reform Jews? Because We’ve Reached the Tipping Point!
Malcolm Gladwell had it right: “There comes a time when an idea, trend or social behavior crosses a threshold, tips, and spreads like wildfire.” Thomas Kuhn, a historian of science who wrote of similar tendencies in his classic “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions,” would have called this the moment of “paradigm change.” Whichever author’s construction…
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Opinion Want To Keep Students from Turning to BDS? Try Mock Peace Negotiations With a Twist
As the two of us headed to the University of California, Santa Barbara to give a talk about Palestinian-Israeli peace back in 2009, we didn’t think much about it. We’re both veterans of this conflict, accustomed to the regular interactions between Palestinians and Israelis in the Middle East, and to the civil, collegial and interactive…
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Opinion Two Campus Tales and What They Say About American Vs. British Anti-Semitism
The past week has seen two disturbing pieces of campus anti-Semitism that illustrate their contexts. At Harvard on April 14, Husam El-Coolaq, a law student and member of the university’s Justice for Palestine group asked Tzipi Livni, “How is it that you are so smelly?” And in Brighton, England, at the National Union of Students…
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Opinion How Poland Is Targeting Holocaust Scholar Jan T. Gross for the Sin of Remembering
The anti-Semitic bloodbath that consumed the small Polish town of Jedwabne on July 10, 1941 might have been forgotten to history were it not for the scholarship of the Polish-American historian Jan T. Gross. Now, it would seem, Poland’s new government wishes Gross himself could be forgotten. In his short study, “Neighbors,” published in 2001,…
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Opinion I Was the ‘Child Who Does Not Know How To Ask’ — About My Father’s Suicide
Passover is here. It is usually one of my favorite holidays. I love the ritual of preparing the house, the smell of the food and the joyous atmosphere at the Seder table. But this year is different. Passover begins only three days after the one year anniversary of my father’s suicide. My father was trapped…
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