Opinion

• Opinion

  More Dire Signs of Liberal Jewry’s Demise

  There’s a pair of new studies just out that sheds important light on the future of Judaism in America. One paints an alarming picture of a population headed for precipitous decline, but offers hope that certain measures can turn things around. The other suggests that the most hopeful measure actually might not offer much hope…

  By J.J. Goldberg

  4 min read
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  Opinion

  Adelson and Saban Try To Out-Hawk Each Other

  Haim Saban and Sheldon Adelson / Getty Images What do you get when you put two of the largest pro-Israel donors — Sheldon Adelson and Haim Saban — on one stage? For participants at the Israeli American Council’s inaugural conference, this meeting of Jewish finance titans produced several historical insights about the roots of the…

  By Nathan Guttman Nov 9, 2014 | 4 min read
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  Opinion

  A New Kristallnacht for Today’s European Jews?

  Protesters took to the streets of Paris this summer to demonstrate against Israel / Getty Images (JTA) — Each year on the anniversary of Kristallnacht, we recall the opening salvo of the violent assault on Jews that foreshadowed the Holocaust and ask ourselves what should have been done at that moment. In thinking about Kristallnacht,…

  By Abraham Foxman Nov 9, 2014 | 3 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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  Opinion

  Why the Nazis Are Still Winning Kristallnacht

  Wikimedia Commons Broken and Burning: The main synagogue in Frankfurt-am-Main burns in the November pogrom, 1938. The word Kristallnacht is poetic, alluring: A night of crystal — perhaps in today’s context we might think of Cristal champagne. The name the Nazis gave the violence of November 9 and 10, 1938, is redolent of European sophistication…

  By Dan Friedman Nov 9, 2014 | 6 min read
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  Opinion

  Two Jewish Berlins, Divided by the Wall

  In the fall of 1972 I moved to Berlin from Frankfurt, Germany, to begin my studies at the Free University, which was founded in 1948 in the American zone. The upper-middle-class villas of this section of town had not been bombed during World War II; they had once been owned by well-to-do Jews who had…

  By Liliane Weissberg Nov 8, 2014 | 4 min read
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  Opinion

  Building Jewish Life on the Rubble of the Berlin Wall

  The French writer François Mauriac is quoted with the sentence, “I love Germany so much that I am glad that there are two of them.” This was pretty much the attitude among the Jewish community in Germany, in which I grew up in the 1970s and ’80s. The Jews of postwar Germany felt protected by…

  By Michael Brenner Nov 7, 2014 | 3 min read
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  Opinion

  Settler Yeshiva Battles IDF Over…Treadmills?

  Thinkstock Score one for the settlers. In the ongoing battle between the most extreme West Bank settlement and the Israeli Defense Forces, the settlers of Yizhar have now announced a modest, if bizarre win. Following the threat of legal action, the IDF has agreed to move treadmills it had set up in Yizhar’s religious study…

  By Naomi Zeveloff Nov 6, 2014 | 2 min read
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  Opinion

  Using Ex-Nazis as Spies? I Saw It Happen.

  Hubertus Strughold worked for Hitler’s Luftwaffe throughout World War II — and was later recruited by the U.S. / U.S. Air Force I got an email the other day from a Jewish man who saw something in Germany 60 years ago that he can’t forget. The man reached out to me after reading my story…

  By Josh Nathan-Kazis Nov 6, 2014 | 3 min read
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  Opinion

  Divesting From Immorality

  Could it get any more catastrophic? The latest report on global warming from the United Nations, released on November 3, describes a vision of the future that should make us snap to attention: massive food shortages leading to widespread hunger, refugee crises, the flooding of major cities and entire island nations, mass extinction of plants…

  Nov 6, 2014 | 4 min read
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  Opinion

  Jewish Defense League Meets Pastrami

  The register at Ben and Izzy’s Deli in Toronto / Courtesy of Menachem Freedman When the news hit my Facebook feed that Ben and Izzy’s, a restaurant in Toronto, had been named “North America’s Top Kosher Deli,” I immediately packed my bags. Under the guise of visiting family, I began a pilgrimage to what shalomlife.org…

  By Menachem Freedman Nov 5, 2014 | 3 min read
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  Opinion

  Switzerland Begins To Confront Its Own Holocaust Past

  What will it take for Switzerland to emerge, at long last, from the shadows of the Holocaust? The question comes up, yet again, with two recent news items. First, a Holocaust survivor family has filed suit in both Switzerland and the United States, alleging that restitution payments for family art stolen by the Nazis went…

  By David E. Gumpert Nov 5, 2014 | 4 min read