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
Oscars Host Seth MacFarlane Crossed Line To Bigotry and Anti-Semitism
It seems as though the Oscars writers think that Hollywood is so liberal that they can get away with making offensive comments because everyone knows they’re “just joking.” I don’t agree. Sunday night’s Academy Awards ceremony featured a not very subtle onslaught of sexist, racist, homophobic and anti-Semitic “jokes.” At a time when America is…
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Opinion Beauty and The Pig
Where is Roland Barthes now that we truly need him? Barthes was the French intellectual who founded the discipline of cultural criticism, insisting everything, from the epic to pedestrian, signifies something. Flags and photos, cars and commercials, pop stars and plastic: Barthes trawled the sea of signification for the flotsam of mass culture. He would…
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Opinion Farming the Jewish Way
I recently joined more than 150 people at the Pearlstone Center near Baltimore for the 5th annual Beit Midrash to learn about the Jewish calendar and how it connects to sustainability and farming. The Beit Midrash has become an annual ritual for my family and we have watched it grow from an informal gathering of…
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Opinion Our Preschool Challenge
When President Obama extolled the virtues of early childhood education in his recent State of the Union address, he voiced sentiments that any parent with a child in preschool would echo: how important it is to expose children to active learning, positive reinforcement and socialization at a young age. “But today,” the president said, “fewer…
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Opinion A Possible Pope Goes to Shul
Timothy Cardinal Dolan, Archbishop of New York, went to shul Shabbat yesterday. Not for the usual davening. Cardinal Dolan, who is considered papabile (a candidate, albeit a very dark-horse candidate, for the papal throne recently vacated by Pope Benedict XVI), immediately captured the standing-room-only crowd in the Manhattan’s Lincoln Square Synagogue by greeting the congregation…
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Opinion Confessions of a Synagogue Membership Hoarder
My family belongs to two synagogues. In two years, when our two smallest children start going to synagogue nursery school, we’re probably going to join the nursery school’s synagogue, too. Have I mentioned that we are also being actively recruited as members of a fourth synagogue? Up front, let me be clear: Not everyone should…
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Opinion Oscars Message to Israel
“The Gatekeepers” and “5 Broken Cameras” have already succeeded in breaking one of Israel’s biggest taboos: airing out its dirty laundry on the big screen, for the whole world to see. Now the two films are both heading to the biggest stage of all: the Academy Awards. If either one of the films from Israel/Palestine…
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Opinion Barack Obama Returns to Roots as Community Organizer
Back during the primary battles of 2008, my brother and I had an ongoing disagreement. He wondered how this upstart senator, his eloquence notwithstanding, could ride herd on the doyens of the House and Senate. My standard response was to invoke Obama’s experience as a community organizer. “No,” I’d say, “Obama will not go that…
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Opinion Haredi Power on the Brink
On a cool winter evening in 2012, a senior delegation of ultra-Orthodox rabbis and politicians — members of Israel’s Ashkenazi religious party, United Torah Judaism, and the Sephardic religious party, Shas — convened in Bnei Brak, a predominantly Haredi city near Tel Aviv. The host was a 98-year-old rabbi, Aharon Shtainman, spiritual leader of the…
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Opinion Poll: New Vote Would Net Lapid 30 Seats, Bibi 22
A new opinion poll shows that if Israel were to hold new elections today, Yair Lapid’s Yesh Atid party would win with 30 seats in the 120-member Knesset, up from its current 19, putting the former television personality in line to be prime minister, while Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud-Beiteinu would drop from 31 seats to 22….
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Opinion Battling Climate Change, the Jewish Way
The rally in Washington D.C. last Sunday on climate change, organized by the Sierra Club, 350.org, and hundreds of other groups, was the largest of its kind in U.S. history, attended by up to 50,000 people, from all over the country. Buses came from all over, some traveling for several days to bring people to…
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