Opinion

• 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…

  2 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

Columnists View All

• Alyssa Katz What I learned at a Holocaust survivors’ Purim party

  

• Rob Eshman Trump is backed into a corner on Iran. Get ready for him to start blaming Jews

  

• Dan Perry Israelis have no idea where the Iran war is going. But they know it’s part of Netanyahu’s campaign

  

• Emily Tamkin Hungary is poised to topple an authoritarian leader. American Jews have something to learn

  

• Jay Michaelson Epstein and Iran are an antisemitism mega-crisis. Here’s what Jewish organizations should do about it. 

  

The Latest

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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
• Opinion

  Newsweek Gets Inside Obama’s Iran Calculations

  The current issue of Newsweek has a must-read inside look at what drives President Obama’s Iran policy, including the ups and downs of his relations with Israel on the matter. The article, by Newsweek writers Daniel Klaidman, Dan Ephron and Eli Lake (Lake is a former Forward correspondent), reports that Iran was the main topic…

  By J.J. Goldberg Feb 14, 2012 | 3 min read
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  Opinion

  Seeing Alan Gross in a New Light

  I’ve been following the Alan Gross saga for the past two years now and have often felt alone. The story of the seemingly hapless technology expert who found himself jailed in Cuba for trying to help the miniscule Jewish community connect to the internet has never gotten much pickup among American Jews and has elicited…

  By Gal Beckerman Feb 14, 2012 | 3 min read
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  Opinion

  The Loss of Our Very Own ‘Agony Uncle’

  Jeffrey Zaslow wasn’t a therapist, and he didn’t have a wealth of life experience, when he was plucked from among 12,000 applicants to succeed Ann Landers as an advice columnist for the Chicago Sun-Times in 1987. But the 28-year-old features reporter was as empathetic as he was astute, and he had the ability to communicate…

  By Gabrielle Birkner Feb 13, 2012 | 2 min read
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  Opinion

  Listening to Women

  Too many of the images of women in Israel these days are disturbing — a girl spat on because of her dress, an esteemed scientist denied the stage, a commuter forced to the back of the bus. But that’s an incomplete narrative in a nation where women hold leading roles in politics, business, the judiciary,…

  Feb 13, 2012 | 3 min read