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
When Israel Takes a Good, Hard Look at Itself
Two new and quite spectacular websites have become available in the last several weeks. Both offer a mine of information on Israel’s social and economic condition, and anyone who wants to be an informed lover of Zion (rather than merely a starry-eyed cheerleader) would do well to spend some time with both. The first, and…
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Opinion Joining the Tribe Late in Life: The Ever-Widening Circle of Celebrity Jews
Every time another celebrity is surprised with the news that they’re Jewish — Madeleine Albright, Senator George Allen, playwright Tom Stoppard, John Kerry (on his father’s side) — the same series of perplexed shrugs ripple through the media. Did they really never know? What made the Jewish parent turn away? Anyway, what’s the difference? Are…
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Letters Guarding the Collection
Thanks to the Forward’s August 12 article, “How B’nai B’rith’s Museum Went From Must-See Site to Oblivion,” readers were reminded about B’nai B’rith’s extraordinary collection of Judaica, which formed the core of the B’nai B’rith Klutznick National Jewish Museum in Washington, D.C. It is true that the majority of the magnificent collection is currently in…
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Opinion Leadership Helped Bring Crown Heights Back From Brink
August marks the 20th anniversary of the worst anti-Semitic attack in American history: a three-day nightmare that historians and journalists call the “Crown Heights riots” and that many members of the Jewish community have called a “pogrom.” The truth is, we’ve learned a lot from bitter experience. The incident began with a tragic car accident….
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Opinion Jews Have Little to Fear From Black Anti-Semitism
Early in the 1990s — so many years ago that it’s nowhere to be found online — I was on a panel about black anti-Semitism at New York’s 92nd Street Y, where the historian of slavery Eugene Genovese observed that if a black demagogue called Italian Americans “racists,” they’d come after him with baseball bats,…
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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 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 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 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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Music In Elie Wiesel’s latter years, he and I discussed the effects of the Holocaust. Those conversations are now an opera.
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