In the Forward’s opinion section, you’ll find analysis and essays from diverse corners of the Jewish world.
To pitch an opinion piece, email our Opinion Editor, Talya Zax.
Opinion
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Opinion
N.Y. Justice System Blocks My Column for 2 Weeks
My weekly column, “Good Fences,” will not appear for the next two weeks. Readers who are pleased that the world will be spared my flawed judgment should not leap to celebrate, however; I am participating even more directly in the flow of events by serving on Grand Jury duty. Unlike jury duty, I don’t sit…
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Opinion Int’l Scientific Parley Mulls Slowing Warming by Blocking Sun: Giant Mirrors, Very Long Hose
The Associated Press has a fascinating, must-read report today about an international gathering of scholars convened last month by Britain’s Royal Society to consider the last-ditch prospect of preventing global warming by developing ways of blocking out the sun. The meeting brought together 80 earth and atmospheric scientists, legal and political scholars and philosophers to…
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Opinion From the Civil War to Our Seders, a Song of Redemption
At every Seder I can remember, our family has sung “Go Down Moses” (“Go down, Moses/Way down in Egypt’s land/Tell ol’ Pharaoh/Let my people go”). As a child I loved it because it was a song in English, and I did not yet know Hebrew. (Most of the fun tunes were in Hebrew.) As an…
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Opinion How Big a Tent?
Drawing boundaries, whether for congressional districts after the decennial census, for nations (Israel/Palestine, for example) or to determine who belongs “within the tent” of Jewish life, is a complicated and often nasty business. At the moment, considerable Jewish energy is being invested on all sides of this last, the tent question. So, for example, a…
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Opinion The Pragmatic President
“Speaker John Boehner complained that Obama ordered the U.S. military into combat in Libya without clearly defining the mission to the American people and Congress,” joked Jay Leno. “See, apparently you’re only allowed to do that when invading Iraq.” Well, inconsistency does seem to be the hallmark of governance, especially in complicated times. A waffler…
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Opinion This ‘Arab Spring,’ Only Uncertainty Blooms
Observers are increasingly using the term “Arab spring” to describe the tsunami of revolution, revolt, state collapse and armed intervention that is sweeping the Arab world. The term implies that a better reality, a rebirth, is about to burst forth from the Arab world. Yet it is not obvious or certain that we are actually…
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Opinion The Bum Rap Against Independent Minyanim
Recent months have seen a wave of opinion pieces and statements — in these pages and elsewhere — that have been critical of independent minyanim. Minyanim are portrayed as too independent and not independent enough, and their participants are painted as both selfish ingrates who take from the community without giving anything back and energetic…
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Opinion LGBT Activists Should Know Friends From Foes
Lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender communities in the Muslim world face lethal homophobia. Yet too many LGBT progressives in the West — Jews and non-Jews alike — focus their ire on Israel, branding it a pariah state and placing themselves on the wrong side of history. Israel is the only — with a capital “O”…
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Opinion We Have a Problem, but Rick Jacobs Isn’t It
Thirty-four years ago, when Menachem Begin first led the Likud to power in Israel, it was Rabbi Alexander Schindler, the leader of Reform Judaism, who reached out to embrace him. In doing so, Schindler averted a crisis in relations between America’s liberal-leaning Jewish community and an Israel where the right was newly ascendant. This would…
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Letters A Welcome Silence
In contrast to many other Jewish publications, the Forward highlighted the struggle for public workers’ rights and dignity in Wisconsin. Your front-page article noted that 16 rabbis have publicly supported the unions (“In Madison, Only Some Jewish Voices Are Heard,” March 18). The Shabbat service conducted for 150 participants by four rabbis in the State…
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Letters The Holocaust’s Untold Chapter
The revelations about sexual violence against women during the Holocaust presented by scholars Sonja Hedgepeth and Rochelle Saidel are most important (“Struggling To Be Heard,” March 25). It is understandable that stories like this are often never broached. How can a person overcome such personal shame to disclose such things to one’s own children? For…
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