Opinion

• Opinion

  The New York Times and its Israel Bias

  The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is not confined to the battlefield. It is also waged in the media, nowhere more prominently than in The New York Times. In “The Conflict and the Coverage,” a November column she “never wanted to write,” Margaret Sullivan, Times Public Editor, addressed “hundreds of emails from readers on both sides of the…

  By Richard A. Block

  4 min read
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  Opinion

  Want To Stop Terror Attacks? Cover Up!

  Illustration by Lior Zaltzman “Short clothing = shortened life.” That’s a message currently winding its way through Jerusalem’s streets, thanks to a new ultra-Orthodox modesty campaign. The ad, plastered across 20 Egged buses, has been sparking social media protests among secular Israelis who resent being told how to dress. They’re saying that it’s hypocritical of…

  By Sigal Samuel Jan 22, 2015 | 3 min read
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  Opinion

  ‘I Suddenly Find Myself Feeling Powerless’

  ‘For once they are not targeting Jews.” This was the strange thought that came to my mind a few minutes after I started reading about the horrific attack at Charlie Hebdo, less than a mile from where I live. But I was wrong. I should have remembered that since the Toulouse attack in 2012 and…

  By Samuel Ghiles-Meilhac Jan 22, 2015 | 2 min read

Columnists View All

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

  

• Jay Michaelson Have we become the ‘ordinary Germans’ now?

  

• Rob Eshman Oh, great, Elon Musk’s antisemitic AI is about to ride shotgun in my Tesla

  

• 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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  Opinion

  Let’s Replace Blasphemy Laws With a Little Common Respect

  We in the liberal, pluralistic West are pretty smug about distancing ourselves from what appears to have motivated a couple of Muslim terrorists to massacre French cartoonists: responding to blasphemy. We don’t intuitively comprehend what is so terrible about poking fun at the Prophet Muhammad because ridiculing and challenging religious symbols is an accepted form…

  Jan 22, 2015 | 4 min read
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  Opinion

  #JeSuisCouteau Trending After Tel Aviv Attack

  This might just be the world’s worst hashtag — ever. Hours after a Palestinian terrorist stabbed 12 people on board a Tel Aviv bus, extremists took to social media to praise his actions with #JeSuisCouteau, which is French for “I am the knife.” The hashtag, a clear play on the #JeSuisCharlie hashtag used around the world…

  By Sigal Samuel Jan 21, 2015 | 2 min read
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  Opinion

  4 Ways SOTU Was Good for the Jews

  Getty Images Yesterday’s State of the Union address was a success for Obama. From ending the war in Afghanistan and helping to revive the economy, the president touted his accomplishments. The same accomplishments his fellow party members were reluctant to use to their advantage in the last elections. So many stood up and applauded as…

  By Lior Zaltzman Jan 21, 2015 | 2 min read
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  Opinion

  Orthodox Jews Aren’t Trying To Kidnap Your Kids

  Getty Images Reading the article was wrenching. It was a first-person offering, on the website Kveller, by the non-Orthodox mother of a young woman who had adopted Jewish observance and in the process (at least in her mother’s telling) had jettisoned all respect for — apparently, all feeling for — her parents. The mother described…

  Jan 21, 2015 | 4 min read
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  Opinion

  We Need a Mikveh Revolution

  Recent events have forced us as a community to take a hard look at the practice of having female converts immerse themselves in a mikveh before a rabbinical court of three men. In the wake of news that a Washington rabbi, Barry Freundel, allegedly spied on women as they were engaging in this ritual, others…

  By Dov Linzer Jan 21, 2015 | 4 min read
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  Opinion

  Bibi’s Challengers Spoof Cartoonish Election Ad

  (JTA) — Remember that Hillary Clinton ad from 2008, the one where it’s 3 a.m. and the White House phone is ringing? The spot, an attempt to highlight Clinton’s superior experience compared to then Sen. Obama’s ostensible naivete, didn’t do much to save the Clinton campaign, which lost the Democratic primary that year. But that hasn’t…

  By Ben Sales Jan 21, 2015 | < 1 min read
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  Opinion

  ‘Pope’s Rabbi’ Wants New Argentina Terror Probe

  Rabbi Abraham Skorka chats with Pope Francis during their visit to Holy Land last year. /Getty Images (JTA) — Rabbi Abraham Skorka traveled from Buenos Aires to Washington to wax lyrical about his passion – interfaith dialogue – and intimate about his well-known pal, Pope Francis. Also to plug his movement, the Masorti movement, and its…

  By Ron Kampeas Jan 21, 2015 | 3 min read
• Letters

  Endowing Day Schools

  In his op-ed, Rabbi Ari Segal portrays the quandary that most Jewish day schools, and especially Jewish high schools, find themselves in today in regard to their middle-income families (“The 1% Solution,” January 2). Tuition increases have well exceeded rises in wages, cost of living has increased greatly and middle-income families with multiple children in…

  Jan 20, 2015 | 2 min read