Opinion

• Opinion

  Israel, Egypt and the Chill in the Arab Spring Air

  With political and social upheaval sweeping the Middle East, Israel is threatened by a tsunami of hand-wringing, angst-ridden warnings of impending doom. New York Times Jerusalem bureau chief Ethan Bronner summed up the situation in this news analysis over the weekend. Here is Reuters’ Crispian Balmer on the issues a week earlier, and here’s Haaretz’s…

  By J.J. Goldberg

  3 min read
• 
  Opinion

  Israel’s Image Won’t Improve Without Policy Changes

  The thousands of scantily clothed bikers, skateboarders, walkers, hawkers, gawkers and performers were simply taking advantage of another breezy, crystal clear Southern California day. They had fought their way valiantly through relentless freeway traffic to participate in the year-round weekend ritual of parading down Los Angeles’ bohemian thoroughfare, the Venice Beach boardwalk. This was not…

  By Gary Wexler Aug 29, 2011 | 4 min read
• 
  Opinion

  The Ingatherers

  The United States and Israel were born to ingather — the U.S. as the proverbial nation of immigrants, though not all its early settlers came here voluntarily; the modern state of Israel, as the haven and magnet for dispersed Jews everywhere. That is the ideal, anyhow. The reality of who is allowed to enter and…

  Aug 26, 2011 | 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 Americans keep getting killed in the West Bank. Here’s how the US could fight that awful trend

  

• Nora Berman First Camp Auschwitz, now Alligator Alcatraz — why the right is obsessed with commodifying brutality

  

• Dan Perry What exactly is going on between Israel and Syria — and is the prospect of peace dead?

  

• Emily Tamkin Zohran Mamdani’s victory proves it: The ‘gotcha’ mode of fighting antisemitism has to go

  

The Latest

• Opinion

  Makovsky on Egypt and Restarting the Peace Process

  The website of Foreign Affairs magazine has a very useful interview with David Makovsky, fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, former Jerusalem Post editor, former Haaretz diplomatic correspondent and one of the smartest Middle East watchers in Washington, on the various uncertainties Israel faces right now. He notes that Israel and Egypt…

  By J.J. Goldberg Aug 26, 2011 | 2 min read
• Opinion

  Is It So Strange That Obama Has Yet To Visit Israel?

  This question has been haunting President Obama ever since he took office: When will he visit Israel? Israelis wanted to see Obama come over right after his June 2009 visit to Egypt in which he gave his famous Cairo speech to the Muslim world. But Obama passed on the opportunity. Since then, the issue has…

  By Nathan Guttman Aug 25, 2011 | 2 min read
• Letters

  Women in the Lead

  As an American living in Israel for the past 33 years, I want to thank you for your August 19 editorial, “Israel’s Inspiration.” And as the director of the Israel office for the National Council of Jewish Women, I want to point out the inspirational leadership of Israel’s young women in this protest for social…

  Aug 25, 2011 | < 1 min read
• Letters

  Not the First Case

  Your article (“Line Between Anti-Israel and Anti-Semitic Protests Splits AJC,” Aug. 16) inaccurately stated that the 2009 complaint alleging a hostile environment at UC Santa Cruz was the first case of anti-Semitism that the U.S. Department of Education ever agreed to investigate under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act. In fact, the first case…

  Aug 25, 2011 | < 1 min read
• Letters

  Protecting Our Children

  One wouldn’t know it by reading your news story about employee fingerprinting and background checks in yeshivos (“Leiby Kletzky Killing Renews Call for Oversight of Yeshivas,” August 5), but it is a fact that the two main national organizations representing the yeshiva movement – Torah Umesorah and Agudath Israel of America — have strongly urged…

  Aug 25, 2011 | < 1 min read
• 
  Opinion

  After Eilat

  What with Libya, and Dominique Strauss-Kahn, and the East Coast earthquake, and the gyrations on Wall Street that sometimes feel like an earthquake, it’s been easy to forget what happened on August 18 in southern Israel. Flora Gez and Shulamit Karlinsky, two sisters from Kfar Saba, were travelling in a silvery painted car to a…

  Aug 25, 2011 | 2 min read
• Opinion

  Hard To Shut Out World’s Woes, Even for a Week

  For some time now, I’ve been wanting to write an amusing column, one offering us all a much-needed diversion from the insistent grim news — violence, famine, unemployment, nastiness and all that — with which we are daily inundated. The trouble is, even the light-hearted stuff seems to be rooted in the downside. So, for…

  By Leonard Fein Aug 25, 2011 | 3 min read
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  Opinion

  AJC Gets It Right on Campus Anti-Semitism, At Last

  In early August, the American Jewish Committee’s executive director, David Harris, finally renounced his organization’s highly controversial joint statement on campus anti-Semitism. The initial statement, which AJC anti-Semitism expert Kenneth Stern had published four months before, with Cary Nelson, president of the American Association of University Professors, had generated considerable criticism within the Jewish community….

  By Kenneth L. Marcus Aug 23, 2011 | 3 min read