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
The Labor Zionist Youth Leader Behind Israel’s Tent Protests
Calcalist, the Ynet-Yediot online business supplement, has an interesting interview with Pesach Hausfater, the Labor Zionist youth leader who’s described as the key organizational mind—some call him “the responsible adult in the room”—in the leadership of Israel’s current economic protest movement. His critique of Netanyahu’s economic policies is the most trenchant I’ve heard since the…
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Opinion David Grossman on the Tent Protests: ‘Window to a Different Future’
Israeli novelist David Grossman participated last week in the large demonstration in Tel Aviv that was a high point in the ongoing economic protests, and wrote a powerful, poignant and much-discussed account of the emotions it generated. It appeared August 5 on the front page of the Yediot Ahronot Friday supplement (here is the Hebrew…
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Opinion A Jewish Death at the End of the Soviet Union
On Friday, August 23, 1991, Rabbi Zinovy Kogan received a telephone call from Boris Yeltsin’s office. Yeltsin, president of the Russian Federation, the largest republic of the Soviet Union, had emerged as a leading political figure just a few days earlier, between August 19 and 21. During those momentous three days exactly 20 years ago,…
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Opinion Israel’s Inspiration
A current preoccupation of the American Jewish establishment is diagnosing why so many young Jews are alienated from the state of Israel. Theories abound, from Peter Beinart’s now famous essay on the disappearance of liberal Zionism, to the assertions that college campuses are rife with stealth anti-Israel manipulations. Millions of dollars are being spent for…
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Opinion BDS Movement’s Revealing Position on the September UN Vote
We recently ran a symposium on our op-ed pages gathering together various opinions on what will happen in September when the Palestinians ask the United Nations to recognize Palestine as a state. Even though there was quite a range of opinion — from condemnation to encouragement — I was surprised to find that the overall…
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Opinion Working Poet
There is a kind of poetic justice in the news that Philip Levine will be the next poet laureate of the United States. At a time when an economy driven by technological innovation rewards ever-younger thinkers and creators, Levine, at 83, is one of the oldest laureates. He hails from Detroit, that sunken city, and…
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Opinion Fight Over Jerusalem in the Pages of a Passport
Why is it, friends of Israel often ask, that the Jewish state is the only country in the world that’s not allowed to name its own capital city? King David chose Jerusalem as capital of the original Jewish state 3,000 years ago. And yet America refuses to place its embassy there, despite repeated acts by…
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Opinion Who Is Underneath the Tent?
The passing in the Israeli Knesset of the anti-boycott law on July 11 now seems like a long-lost memory, overshadowed by the tent city protests that started just a few days later and have led to hundreds of thousands taking to the streets. It is no coincidence, however, that just days after the law was…
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Letters Foundation Takes No Stand on Treatments
The Forward’s August 4 article, “Gaucher Disease Patients Get New Hope From Drug,” does not in any way represent the views or opinions of the National Gaucher Foundation. They are, in fact, only those of Cyndi Frank, a patient. Therefore the NGF should not have appeared in that article in any manner. The NGF does…
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Letters There Have Always Been Divisions
In David Hazony’s July 27 column, “The Death of Peoplehood,” his lament over Jewish ethnic diffusion and friction is understandable, but only to a point. The fact is that even apparent ethnic monoliths have internal tensions, and can go their own separate ways. One only has to look at America. America was founded by white…
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Letters Remembering Bookie
I would like to add to Michael Berenbaum’s wonderful July 26 obituary for Hyman Bookbinder by going back one administration earlier than Michael’s memories. For a year and a half, I served as the Jewish liaison for the Ford White House. During that time, Bookie, whose personal political proclivities were pretty much on the other…
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Opinion American Jews were played — now what?
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News Head of embattled Gaza aid program tells Jewish group starvation is ‘real’ — but blames the United Nations and Hamas
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Fast Forward There’s a Jewish judge at the center of Trump’s Harvard showdown. Her grandfather escaped pogroms.
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