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
Shavuot Is Holiday That Speaks of Love And Freedom
The contemporary notion of freedom is twisted, at least in Judaism’s eyes. Many moderns feel fettered by — depending on the particulars of their lives — their jobs, finances, parents, children or spouses, and they imagine that cutting whatever bonds they find bothersome will make them free. But freedom isn’t shaking oneself loose of human…
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Opinion Why Is It So Hard To Convert to Judaism?
In February 2013, Rabbi Elliot Cosgrove of Park Avenue Synagogue, as fancy and important a place as its name suggests, floated an intriguing idea. In a sermon to his congregation on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, Cosgrove urged the Conservative movement, his movement, to become much, much more welcoming to anyone interested in converting to Judaism….
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Opinion The Shaming of Rabbi Barry Starr
Getty Images I don’t know Rabbi Barry Starr personally, but I don’t like how he is being vilified in the media, most recently in an article in The Forward with the lurid headline “When a Good Rabbi Goes Bad.” We still don’t know all the facts in this case, and we’ve already found this man…
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Opinion How Wily Donald Sterling Beat These 5 Investments
Getty Images (Reuters) — Donald Sterling bought the Los Angeles Clippers for 16 million and is set to sell the team for $2 billion. That’s a 16,000% return or a lofty 16% a year. Here’s a look at other investments he could have made at the time, and how much less he would have made….
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Opinion Right Wing Gadfly Group Has Day in Knesset
Im Tirtzu, the right-wing Israeli truth squad best known for bashing the New Israel Fund, allowed itself a victory lap this week after taking credit for an “emergency” gathering in the Knesset on “delegitimization of Israel.” Unfortunately, as with so much else the organization touches, the facts of the case are a bit murky. Im…
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Opinion Agudath Israel Is Wrong About Yeshivat Chovevei Torah
Courtesy of Agudath Israel As I concluded a yearlong course that I have been teaching at a local day school, a student approached me with a concerned look on his face. “What if I don’t know what my Jewish identity is?” I pushed him to say more. “Well, my parents had the Holocaust, but —…
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Opinion Why Is Avigdor Mad at Bibi?
Getty Images Since Israel’s last general election a year and a half ago, the country’s two most powerful party leaders have exhibited surprisingly good relations. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Foreign Minister Avigdor Liberman united their parties, Likud and Yisrael Beytenu, before the election and have surprised observers by keeping them together and getting along…
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Opinion Have the Jews Lost Europe?
‘At what point,” columnist Jeffrey Goldberg tweeted recently “do the Jews of America and the Jews of Israel tell the Jews of Europe that it might be time to get out?” While Goldberg did not elucidate the reasons for his stark view of the future of European Jewry, it is likely that he had in…
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Opinion Don’t Ban Us From the Celebrate Israel Parade
Conservative Israeli journalist Ben-Dror Yemini, a frequent critic of the New Israel Fund and progressives in general, recently wrote about the manufactured controversy regarding NIF’s participation in the Celebrate Israel parade on Sunday. Acknowledging that we do not in fact support global BDS, the lie that’s been told to justify our exclusion, he wrote that…
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Opinion I’m No One’s ‘Heretic’
Rabbi Yaakov Perlow speaks at the Agudath Isael annual gala / YouTube On Wednesday we learned that, while speaking at a fundraising gala for the ultra-Orthodox Agudath Israel of America, Rabbi Yaakov Perlow, head of that organization, slandered virtually every Jew on the planet, down to and including a bunch of plain-old-Orthodox folks. We were…
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Opinion The Deceptive Style of Settlement Leader Dani Dayan
“My religion is Zionism,” Dani Dayan says. It is hard to know quite what to make of him. Is he, as Yariv Oppenheimer, director of Peace Now suggests, the enemy? “His agenda is the same as the most fanatic right-wing settlers. But he has this ability to hide it and to speak with the public…
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