In the Forward’s opinion section, you’ll find analysis and essays from diverse corners of the Jewish world.
To pitch an opinion piece, email our Opinion Editor, Talya Zax.
Opinion
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Opinion
Bibi’s $40M Settlement Giveaway Blocked
Hours before Israel’s Knesset voted Monday evening to disperse and head to elections, Prime Minister Netanyahu asked the finance committee to approve an “emergency” grant to settlements in the West Bank of some 160 million shekels ($40 million). Netanyahu was acting in his capacity as acting finance minister, following his firing last week of incumbent…
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Opinion 7 Israeli Laws America Should Pass Right Now
Life’s good when you’re floating in the Dead Sea / Thinkstock Avital Burg’s recent post “If America Had Laws Like Israel” imagines an American parallel to Israel’s nation-state bill, and invites the reader to deplore what would happen if this bill became law here in the U.S. Though this probably wasn’t the writer’s intention, the…
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Opinion Is It Kosher To Fake a Photo for Peace?
Photographer Kitra Cahana on the hills overlooking Ramallah / Ed Ou Editor’s Note: The Forward’s story “Iconic Mideast Photo Is a Fake — and Heartbreaking One at That” generated a lot of debate about the ethics of staging photographs. For added insight, we put a few questions to Kitra Cahana, a documentary photojournalist whose work…
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Opinion The Iconic Mideast Photo That Isn’t Fake
Debbi Cooper’s 1988 photo of an Israeli and a Palestinian actually features an Israeli and a Palestinian. When I interviewed Ricki Rosen about her iconic — and completely staged — 1993 photo depicting a Palestinian boy and an Israeli boy, she reminded me of a similar picture taken by another Jerusalem photojournalist. Debbi Cooper’s 1988…
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Opinion ‘The Nu Republic’ No More
How do you say kaddish for a magazine that lived to be 100 years old? Because that is precisely what many fans of The New Republic are doing, as well as engaging in the more of-this-world-ly act of cancelling their subscriptions. By now, everyone in the literary world and blogosphere is aware of what has…
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Opinion How Israel Treats African ‘Infiltrators’
The new Anti-Infiltration Law presented by the Israeli government, after two previous iterations of the law have been voided by the High Court, is the culmination of the development of a completely unreasonable government policy toward the foreigners from Africa. Government officials and members of Knesset keep referring to Sudanese and Eritreans as “work infiltrators”…
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Opinion Eric Garner and Moshe Twersky Bound by History
Getty Images As I sit at my desk in a modern office building in lower Manhattan, the chants of angry protestors below grow louder. “I — can’t — breathe,” they shout, echoing the haunting final words of Eric Garner, whose death by asphyxiation I saw on video the day it occurred. It was in that…
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Opinion Farewell Philologos
Week in and week out, for 24 years, the person known as Philologos has graced our pages with an erudite, engaging and often surprising column about language. About Yiddish, English and Hebrew, French, Polish, Latin and Greek, Aramaic and Circassian and just about any other tongue humans have spoken. Ostensibly, Philologos answered readers questions about…
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Opinion Netanyahu Might Lose Election. Here’s How.
If the pre-election polls out of Israel teach us anything, it’s about the strength and weakness of pre-election polls. The strength is that they’re a pretty accurate reflection of what people are thinking. The proof of this is that the flood of polls coming every day from just about every media outlet, right, left and…
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Opinion How Elections Allow Leaders To Ignore Real Issues — in Israel and America
Election season: It’s just ended in America, just beginning in Israel. This seems the right moment to examine the striking parallels between the two countries’ political systems, and see if we can’t draw some useful lessons. Conventional wisdom says they’re poles apart. Most obviously, Israel has a dozen parties touting every possible mix of positions…
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Opinion Huge Israeli Arms Buy Nobody’s Talking About
The F-35 fighter jet is Israel’s latest big purchase / Wikipedia The Israeli parliament has become a turbulent place in the past few weeks — even more so than usual. What with key politicians getting fired, there’s been lots of chatter about what this shake-up will mean for the Israel-U.S. relationship. But it may not…
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Fast Forward CA Gov. Newsom says he regrets apartheid comment, ‘reveres’ Israel in new interview
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Opinion We must rewrite the rulebook for fighting antisemitism — or conspiracists like Joe Kent will win the narrative wars
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Looking Forward We need to talk about New Jersey’s Jewish master of literature. No, not that one
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Fast Forward Mamdani voices concerns about synagogue buffer zone bill poised to pass NYC Council
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News Analysis: NYC synagogue protest protection vote gives Mamdani cover
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Opinion Israel’s best-case scenario in Iran may also be its worst
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Fast Forward Hundreds of Diaspora leaders call for action against ‘Jewish-extremist terror in the West Bank’
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Fast Forward NYC Council approves ‘buffer zone’ legislation insulating houses of worship from protests
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