Opinion

• Opinion

  The Title VI Crusade Gains an Address

  A new, Washington DC-based organization will advocate for the rights of Jewish students under federal civil rights law. Led by Kenneth Marcus, the former staff director at the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, the Louis D. Brandeis Center, Inc. will focus on research, advocacy, and education on anti-Semitism and the law, and will also litigate…

  By Naomi Zeveloff

  2 min read
• Opinion

  ‘Criticize Away’: Hartman Institute Debates Debating

  Havruta, a journal of the Shalom Hartman Institute, features a symposium on whether and how to criticize Israel in its February 2012 issue. It makes for interesting reading, with special shout-outs to Yossi Klein-Halevi’s thought-provoking letter to a right-wing friend and editor Stuart Schoffman’s delightful introduction. My own contribution is below. I would link directly…

  By J.J. Goldberg Feb 17, 2012 | 5 min read
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  Opinion

  Tweets of Times’s New Jerusalem Bureau Chief

  Stop tweeting! That was the loud-and-clear message from Tablet’s Marc Tracy, the Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg, the Jewish Journal’s Shmuel Rosner, and others to the New York Time’s Jodi Rudoren this week. They were all admonishing the newly appointed NYT Jerusalem bureau chief for over-sharing on Twitter. We are all, on occasion, guilty of this behavior,…

  By Renee Ghert-Zand Feb 17, 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 Recognizing a Palestinian state is a great way to doom Palestinians

  

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

  

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  Opinion

  The Pension Promise

  Quick question: When is a Jewish federation like a church? Answer: When it doesn’t have to fully protect its employees’ pensions. In this flip exchange lies a serious issue. As our Nathan Guttman has reported, Jewish social service groups, along with other nonprofits seeking to cut pension costs, are using a controversial tax loophole to…

  Feb 17, 2012 | 2 min read
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  Opinion

  Does Education Fuel Anti-Semitism?

  A new study on anti-Semitism, commissioned by the German Parliament, came to the distressing, widely publicized conclusion that 20% of Germans are “latent” anti-Semites. But buried deep in the report is an assertion that might be even more troubling: Holocaust education is inadvertently fueling German anti-Semitism, making it worse. The study concluded that “anti-Semitic stereotypes…

  By Dan Fleshler Feb 17, 2012 | 4 min read
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  Opinion

  France: The Dumbest Right-Wing in the World

  Charles de Gaulle famously observed that France had “la droite la plus bête au monde” [“the dumbest right-wing in the world”]. Events over the last couple of days reveal that the French Right continues to work hard for bragging rights to that dubious moniker. At the start of the week Christian Vanneste, a deputy of…

  By Robert Zaretsky Feb 16, 2012 | 2 min read
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  Opinion

  Rewarding Storytelling

  The extraordinary success of Opinion Editor Gal Beckerman’s book, “When They Come for Us, We’ll Be Gone: The Epic Struggle to Save Soviet Jewry,” isn’t simply a matter of wonderful things happening to a really nice guy. (And he is a really nice guy. He edits my editorials. I know.) Gal’s achievement — winner of…

  By Jane Eisner Feb 16, 2012 | 2 min read
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  Opinion

  The Other Denied Genocides

  Like the Holocaust itself, Holocaust denial is a well-known if often misunderstood phenomenon. In its most naked form, it denies the historical fact that during the Nazi period, Germans, helped by many other Europeans such as Ukrainians, sought to kill the Jews of Europe and managed to slaughter roughly 6 million of them. In somewhat…

  By Daniel Jonah Goldhagen Feb 15, 2012 | 4 min read
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  Opinion

  Judea Pearl: Anti-Zionism is Racism

  Those who came to hear Judea Pearl speak last night at an event sponsored by the Simon Wiesenthal Center‘s Museum of Tolerance might have expected to be offered an array of numbers, shown detailed charts or even be given a sense of whether anti-Semitism was getting better or worse. Instead, he handed them something else…

  By Lillian Swanson Feb 14, 2012 | 3 min read
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  Opinion

  Our Stance on Homosexuality

  The chief rabbi of Amsterdam, Aryeh Ralbag, was suspended in January for signing a document stating that one can be “healed” from homosexuality. Though he was eventually reinstated after apologizing to the community for having signed using his official title, the episode does provide an opportunity to consider exactly what the traditional Orthodox view on…

  Feb 14, 2012 | 4 min read
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  Opinion

  Cultural Divide on Display at CPAC

  Never before have I felt more keenly the cultural divide, a divide that goes well beyond its most obvious current expression in the realm of politics (although that realm is, here, my principal focus). During the speeches at the recent Conservative Political Action Conference, the signal annual meeting of American conservatives, I was especially interested…

  By Leonard Fein Feb 14, 2012 | 3 min read