Opinion

• Opinion

  Why All Jews Should Listen to ‘Serial’

  Illustration by Lior Zaltzman Hello, my name is Lior and I’m a podcast addict. I’ve been streaming “This American Life” for years. I’ve turned podcasts into verbs. No, I can’t answer the phone right now, I’m “Savage Love”-ing. Whenever my husband says “Ok. Alright?” I want to scream “This is Radiolab!” Once I even used…

  By Lior Zaltzman

  3 min read
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  Opinion

  A Most Inspiring Hanukkah at the White House

  By just before 8 o’clock last night, my feet really began to hurt. I was standing at attention, waiting for the President and his wife, wedged between four bearded Haredi men, a woman with very bare shoulders, and several people way taller than me who had their iPhone cameras at the ready and looked as…

  By Jane Eisner Dec 18, 2014 | 2 min read
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  Opinion

  News Quiz: Why are Fran Drescher and Marlon Brando in the Same Quiz?

  Getty Images Fran Drescher, Marlon Brando and Meyer Lansky — together at last! And also — at first!

  By Lenore Skenazy Dec 18, 2014 | < 1 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

  

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  Opinion

  VIDEO: Barack Obama Welcomes Alan Gross Home

  President Barack Obama trumpeted the release of Alan Gross at the annual White House Hanukkah party. The president said Gross had his strong family and the entire Jewish community to thank for his release after five hears in captivity in Cuba. “He never gave up and we never gave up,” Obama told guests at the…

  By Forward Staff Dec 18, 2014 | < 1 min read
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  Opinion

  What We Learn From the Salary Survey

  So why do we do this, anyhow? Why, for six years in a row now, does the Forward go through the immense trouble of sifting through reams of public documents and then making hundreds of calls to verify basic public information about Jewish charities? And what have we learned? When we started the salary survey…

  Dec 17, 2014 | 3 min read
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  Opinion

  One More Thing About the Salary Survey

  Thinkstock Sagi Balasha wants you to know that he makes more than you may think. In fact, twice as much. The CEO of the Israeli-American Council is listed in the latest Forward salary survey as earning only $93,900 a year, making him the second most underpaid on our annual list of executives of national Jewish…

  By Jane Eisner Dec 16, 2014 | 2 min read
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  Opinion

  Abraham’s Lesson: Quality Over Quantity in Push for Jewish Continuity

  Anxiety about the Jewish future — and the number of people we will have in that future — is totally reasonable. It is a long-standing hobby of Jews going back to Abraham, and an especially popular pastime of late 20th and early 21st century Jews. It is born of the historical reality of the Shoah…

  By Yehuda Kurtzer Dec 16, 2014 | 3 min read
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  Opinion

  Family Is at the Center of Everything

  T.M. Luhrmann, a Stanford University anthropologist, recently published a fascinating piece in the New York Times positing that over thousands of years, wheat people and rice people have developed distinct cultures. The cultivation of wheat depends on rainfall and individual work, while “a community of rice farmers needs to work together in tightly integrated ways,”…

  By Jane Eisner Dec 16, 2014 | 3 min read
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  Opinion

  Why Jews Should Ride With Muslims in Sydney

  People run with hands up from the Lindt Cafe during a hostage standoff in Sydney, Australia / Getty Images My ears perked up when I heard the news about a potential terror attack at the Lindt Chocolat Cafe in Sydney. “Potential” terror attack, because for a while the nature of the situation was unclear. And…

  By Leah Bieler Dec 15, 2014 | 3 min read
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  Opinion

  Why Tunisian Jews Can’t Wait To Vote in an Arab Election

  Illustration by Lior Zaltzman Jaco Halfon spent the last week of November glued to his computer at home in L.A. Presidential election results were coming in from his homeland of Tunisia. Halfon, a Tunisian citizen, wanted to make sure that he was up-to-date and that readers of his popular Jewish website Harissa got the relevant…

  By Yael Even Or Dec 15, 2014 | 5 min read
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  Opinion

  5 Most Overpaid (and Underpaid) Jewish Charity Chiefs

  Matt Brooks topped the Forward’s list of most-overpaid non-profit leaders/Courtesy of Republican Jewish Coalition The Forward’s annual salary survey allows readers to see how much of the money they donate to Jewish charities winds up in the pockets of those group’s top executives. So whose pockets got the fattest? Matthew Brooks, head of the Republican…

  By Forward Staff Dec 15, 2014 | 2 min read