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
No, AIPAC Isn’t Anti-Israel
Getty Images Jay Michaelson has it wrong. AIPAC is not, as he argues, anti-Israel. Most of what the lobby does is focused on strengthening the bond between the United States and Israel — various aspects of this relationship, including the U.S.-Israel security cooperation — which is undisputedly pro-Israel. But not only AIPAC. All American Jewish…
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Opinion Israeli Soldiers Create Least Sexy Pin-Up Ever
Just a couple of months after the Gaza war, Israel has found a new way “to show the world the beauty of Israel and its people” — via the power of a pin-up calendar featuring real IDF soldiers. Or, as the creators of the MTKL Israeli Army Women Calendar like to call them, “the chosen amongst…
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Opinion Take Sex Assault Probes Off Campus
What happens when institutions or communities don’t want to properly investigate allegations of sexual abuse for fear that it will harm their reputations or expose their powerful? We cry for reform, and in this case, reform means going outside. So U.S. Senator Kirsten Gillibrand of New York introduced the Military Justice Improvement Act earlier this…
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Opinion Settlements, Snub Cause Latest U.S.-Israel Strain
Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is planning a massive new wave of construction in the West Bank, according to a report Sunday night on Israel’s Channel 2 News. It’s part of a deal to calm his restive allies in the settler-backed Jewish Home party. The Channel 2 report has since been confirmed independently by Haaretz,…
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Opinion When Palestinians Bury an American Teen
Palestinian mourners carry Orwa Hammad to a prayer session at a Silwad school / Naomi Zeveloff On Sunday afternoon, the main street in Silwad, a village north of Ramallah in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, was lined with parked cars for as far as the eye could see. Palestinians from all over the area had come…
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Opinion Why AIPAC Is Anti-Israel
American Jews who support Israel have been fighting one another in an asymmetrical way: Hawks routinely accuse doves of being anti-Israel, but doves do not accuse the hawks. I’m not sure how this pattern has come about — maybe it just feels ironic for pro-peace people to pick a fight — but it needs to…
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Opinion Why Jews Will Vote Democrat Again
Milton Himmelfarb, essayist and thinker, once famously quipped that “Jews earn like Episcopalians, and vote like Puerto Ricans.” There is some truth to this, and that’s why it prompts a laugh even from liberals. But what is this about? As the midterm elections approach, it’s worth contemplating why a resounding majority of us vote Democrat,…
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Opinion The Raw Honesty of Klinghoffer
“You’re enabling terrorism!” a woman said as I made my way through a maze of police barricades and a crowd of angry protestors chanting in front of Lincoln Center. A man standing next to her ostentatiously photographed ticket holders, as though documenting them in the act of committing a crime. Neither of them understood a…
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Opinion Using Ebola To Scare Israelis Off African Migrants
Getty Images Nine workers at Israel’s Ben Gurion Airport lost their jobs yesterday because they refused to interact with passengers who arrived from Ethiopia. The workers, contractor employees of the Israel Airports Authority, were asked to hand out Ebola information pamphlets to the Ethiopian Airlines passengers and to direct them to an area where they…
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Opinion Kiss Those Nobels Goodbye
The Nobel Prize committee has now announced the last of its science selections for 2014, and for the first time in this new century, there are no Jews among the laureates. This fact would hardly be worth noting if not for another fact: that three laureates a year have been Jews since 2000. And if…
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Opinion How Not To Respond to the Ottawa Shootings
Shootings in Canadian Parliament captured on film / YouTube As I write this while at home in central Ottawa, my husband is in lockdown at work and my kids are being kept indoors all day in their secured school. Ottawa residents joined by onlookers the world over are still trying to piece together today’s events,…
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Opinion It’s time for Jews who love Israel to give up on Zionism
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Opinion Progressive Jews are trying out post-Zionism. There’s one big flaw in their approach
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Opinion Aristotle, Jewish ethics and the vexing case of Graham Platner
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Culture What does it say that Gwyneth Paltrow is advertising luxury Israeli real estate?