Opinion

• Opinion

  Who Took Over Bill Kristol’s Body?

  Emergency Committee for Israel board member Bill Kristol told an Upper West Side audience last night that President Obama has “moved back to the center” on Israel. The statement, one of a number of kind words Kristol had for Obama, came just two months after ECI released a video calling the president’s Israel policy “dangerous.”…

  By Josh Nathan-Kazis

  2 min read
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  Opinion

  Failure of Leadership on Child Sex Abuse

  On a recent Sunday morning, I glanced at my newspaper and had another “cringe” moment. The story on the front page of The New York Times, like the Sholom Rubashkin, Bernie Madoff and Baruch Goldstein stories before it, exposed an underworld of evil with Jews at the center. This time, the papers focused on child…

  By Misha Galperin May 16, 2012 | 3 min read
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  Opinion

  Should Gaza Become Part of Egypt?

  Is Egypt Palestine? It is a tired (and discredited) claim that Jordan is Palestine. But now there is a new one: that Egypt is. I inadvertently pushed a button I didn’t mean to push earlier this week in a conversation in Gaza City with a group of Islamists, mostly Hamas officials and their supporters. I…

  By Kathleen Peratis May 15, 2012 | 3 min read

Columnists View All

• Jodi Rudoren This is my last column as editor of the Forward

  

• Jay Michaelson American Jews were played — now what?

  

• Rob Eshman I have the answer to Jon Stewart’s toughest question about Israel

  

• Nora Berman ‘Eddington’ is full of conspiracy theories but it’s not about Jews. Or is it?

  

• Dan Perry A US official just made history in the West Bank — did he imperil prospects for peace?

  

• Emily Tamkin Is starvation in Gaza really Israel’s fault? The facts are clear

  

The Latest

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  Opinion

  Presidential Questions on Peace Process

  The battle for the philo-Israel vote is taking familiar shape as both major candidates and major parties do their best to pledge fealty to Israel at this hour of maximum peril. President Barack Obama and Governor Mitt Romney are outdoing each other when it comes to their rhetoric. Obama says he’s got Israel’s back. Romney…

  By Noam Neusner May 15, 2012 | 4 min read
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  Opinion

  Hatikvah Redux and Carlebach Responds

  When Neshama Carlebach recently recorded for us a slightly different, more inclusive version of Hatikvah (one first suggested by our language columnist, Philologos), the reaction from some was predictably pretty negative. As one commenter succinctly put it, “Israel is not a binational state. It is the national homeland of the Jewish people. I’d rather Israel…

  By Gal Beckerman May 14, 2012 | 3 min read
• Opinion

  Fifty Years Since the ’60s

  In 1960, Jews numbered roughly 3% of Americans. Of the six presidents that Students for a Democratic Society elected in its brief life of electing personages so designated, only two were Jewish. No precise figures exist for the whole membership, or, for that matter, other radical groups of the ensuing years, or, more particularly, the…

  By Todd Gitlin May 14, 2012 | 4 min read
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  Opinion

  If It’s Okay for Mofaz…

  The dramatic announcement that Israel was going to have a new unity government instead of national elections scrambled the political calculus in the Knesset, left a shrunken opposition rudderless, and proved once again that Benjamin Netanyahu is one heck of a politician. It has also opened up opportunities for American Jewish dialogue on Israel. How…

  May 14, 2012 | 2 min read
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  Opinion

  Vigilante Justice and the Jews

  In early May, a circuit court judge in Baltimore found Eliyahu Werdesheim, a 24-year-old member of a local Shomrim anti-crime patrol, guilty of assaulting a teenager named Corey Ausby. According to prosecutors, in 2010 Werdesheim and his brother, Avi, set upon Ausby on a residential street in Northwest Baltimore and beat him with the butt…

  By Matthew Shaer May 13, 2012 | 4 min read
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  Opinion

  The Two-Minute Zionism Elevator Pitch

  In their May 2 debate in New York, Daniel Gordis and Peter Beinhart enthusiastically agreed on one matter that has been omitted from all the coverage of the event I’ve seen. And yet I am exceedingly uncomfortable with their argument. Here, reluctantly but necessarily foreshortened, is the heart of their exchange: The question put to…

  By Leonard Fein May 13, 2012 | 3 min read
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  Opinion

  Katzenberg’s $12 Million Party for Obama

  President Obama raised a reported $12 million for his reelection campaign at a Hollywood fundraiser at George Clooney’s home co-hosted by top Obama donor Jeffrey Katzenbeg. The May 10 fundraiser came days after Obama announced his personal support of legal recognition for gay marriage. Though the president stopped well short of calling for federal legislation,…

  By Josh Nathan-Kazis May 11, 2012 | 2 min read
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  Opinion

  Victory!

  The letter has been liberated. We’ve been waiting to write that for a long time, ever since our Paul Berger went on a national search for George Washington’s original, iconic 1790 letter to the Jews of Newport, Rhode Island, the one famously promising a new United States government that would give “to bigotry no sanction,…

  May 11, 2012 | 3 min read