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
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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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Opinion Learning to Undo ‘Ashkenormativity’
Maimonides, one of the most famous Sephardic Jews, as portrayed on an Israeli banknote Like most Jews with ties to South Africa, my heritage is extremely Ashkenazi. In fact, both sides of my family largely originate from the same region of what is now northeastern Lithuania and northern Belarus. Growing up in New York, most…
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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…
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Opinion Fear and (Jew) Loathing in Venezuela
A “Hello, Hitler” shirt for sale in Venezuela It started with the Hello, Hitler t-shirt. Just after arriving for a month in Caracas, I saw a teenage girl on the subway wearing a snug red tee whose logo warped the familiar “Hello, Kitty” character into a cute parody of… Der Fuhrer. A giant swastika dominated…
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Opinion Our ‘Car Talk’ Rebbe in God’s Auto Repair Shop
“Car Talk” hosts Tom and Ray Magliozzi It’s a stereotype, but Jewish men have an ancient and mostly well-earned reputation for not being able to fix things. (There have been many notable exceptions to this, including my father, who could fix anything). I have done my best to uphold this proud tradition of our people….
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