Opinion

• Opinion

  Man, Oh, Manischewitz

  “Holy Matzo!” a recent Forward headline read. The accompanying article announced the baking of the “world’s largest matzo” — 82 square feet — to mark the opening of the new Manischewitz matzo factory in Newark, N.J. The matzo proved ephemeral; it was soon broken up and distributed. What I found fascinating at the factory’s opening…

  By Jonathan D. Sarna

  3 min read
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  Opinion

  How the Flotilla Helps Hamas

  Chrisopher Hitchens, in a July 4 piece on Slate linked to on Tuesday by J.J. Goldberg, almost got it almost right. “It seems safe and fair to say that the flotilla and its leadership work in reasonably close harmony with Hamas, which constitutes the Palestinian wing of the Muslim Brotherhood,” he wrote. It’s unclear if…

  By Ezra Glinter Jul 7, 2011 | 2 min read
• Opinion

  Tammuz Tales: Taxes, Personal Income and Federal Debt (or: The Rich and the Rest)

  My current Forward column, “For Source of Debt Crisis, Look to the Tithes,” tries to make the simple point makes that we have a federal debt crisis because we have lowered taxes over the past 30 years and created a federal revenue base that’s simply not enough to pay our bills. My second point is…

  By J.J. Goldberg Jul 7, 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

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  Opinion

  My Commitment Ceremony With Obama

  I’m one of those Americans who pounded the pavement for candidate Barack Obama in 2008 but has since grown ambivalent about his presidency. He wasn’t pulling out enough troops from Afghanistan; he wasn’t working hard enough to push Israel to halt settlement building; the health care initiative turned into a disaster. And he wasn’t coming…

  By David Shneer Jul 6, 2011 | 4 min read
• Opinion

  A Way To Embrace Palestinian Statehood

  Few issues have so discombobulated the American Jewish community — to say nothing of the Israeli government — as the prospect of a United Nations vote on recognition of Palestine. Students of the matter debate whether such a vote would have any practical significance, but most Jews, as well as most Jewish organizations, have viewed…

  By Leonard Fein Jul 6, 2011 | 3 min read
• Opinion

  For Source of Debt Crisis, Look to the Tithes

  These are mournful days. It’s the month of Tammuz, when the ancient walls of Jerusalem were first breached and the commonwealth began to crumble. Or, to phrase it slightly differently: July, when the credit of the republic began to run out. The sages of the Talmud teach us that Jerusalem and its temple fell because…

  By J.J. Goldberg Jul 6, 2011 | 4 min read
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  Opinion

  Liberate the Letter!

  When Ron Chernow was travelling the country last year to talk about his new biography of George Washington, he was often asked about Washington’s 1790 letter to the Jews of Newport, R.I. — the one that famously promised that the United States government would give “to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance.” “There were…

  Jul 6, 2011 | 4 min read
• Opinion

  Hitchens Has a Few Questions for the Flotilla

  Christopher Hitchens, writing in Slate, has a few questions about the Free Gaza flotilla that he wishes the journalists on the scene would find time to ask. Most of the speculation so far has been to do with methods and intentions, allowing for many avowals about peaceful tactics and so forth, but this is soft-centered…

  By J.J. Goldberg Jul 5, 2011 | 2 min read
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  Opinion

  Funding Peoplehood

  What happens when an idea is really important and needs our full financial support, but just isn’t sexy? Many philanthropies face this funding question every day. It’s a lot easier to get someone to pay for an ambulance than to pay for salary raises for medics. It’s a lot easier to get people to pay…

  By Misha Galperin Jul 5, 2011 | 3 min read
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  Opinion

  Who Said Jews Are Leaving Obama?

  A new Gallup Poll out today confirms that President Obama’s strong Jewish support has not evaporated following his May 19 speech on the Middle East. In fact, it hasn’t moved a bit. Sixty percent of Jews approved of Obama’s job in June, while 32 percent disapproved. In a poll of the general public, Obama gets…

  By Gal Beckerman Jul 5, 2011 | 3 min read
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  Opinion

  Will the One-State Solution Become the Only Solution?

  Tony Judt’s deliberately provocative 2003 New York Review of Books essay, “Israel: the Alternative,” is a lesson in the limits of American Jewry’s allowable discourse when it comes to Israel. Writing explicitly in the tradition of thought experiment, rather than policy proposal, about what he called an “alternative future,” Judt suggests that Jews and Arabs…

  By Eric Alterman Jul 5, 2011 | 4 min read