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
How To Remember Gettysburg
The sesquicentennial of the Battle of Gettysburg is still two years away, but the drumbeat is already sounding. On our visit just days before the 148th anniversary, the parking lot outside the new visitors center was throbbing with cars and buses, as if the commemoration had already begun. But what are we remembering? The bloodiest,…
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Opinion Anti-Semitism and the American College Campus
The recent controversy over the axing of Yale University’s Interdisciplinary Initiative for Studying Antisemitism (to be replaced by a new faculty-based research program) has generated much heat, but little light. Some of the commentary has been venomous, unnecessarily personalized, and self-serving, while invoking unproven allegations of political bias. The highly polemical tone of the debate…
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Opinion Measuring the American Jewish Population Today
Oy, the perils of random telephone dialing, one of the tried and true methods of accurately measuring population trends. Sometimes, you hear the most unexpected replies. “We have 50 women all married to the same Jew,” said the respondent who answered the phone in St. Petersburg, Fla., during a demographic survey. What?! “We had called…
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Opinion The Freedom Flotilla’s Real Agenda
As a new international flotilla sets sail for Gaza, three recent headlines put the operation into context. In mid-June, Israel approved the delivery of $100 million of materials needed to build 1,200 new homes and 18 new schools in Gaza. Israel now transports some 50,000 tons of goods to Gaza biweekly. In addition to accelerating…
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Opinion The Futility of Barring Flotilla Coverage
Never thought I would say this, but Benjamin Netanyahu just saved me from banging my head against the wall in desperate frustration. This morning brought news that Israel’s Government Press Office had warned media outlets that any foreign correspondent found aboard the flotilla about to set sail for Gaza would be “denied entry into the…
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Opinion IDF Probe: Troops’ Hands Tied Controlling Rightist Jewish Extremism
An internal Israeli army probe finds that Israeli security forces in the West Bank are hobbled in trying to control far-right Jewish lawbreakers by lack of cooperation among various branches of government working at cross-purposes. The probe is reported in Haaretz. The probe was ordered by the army’s Samaria Brigade following May 30 disturbances by…
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Opinion Israel’s Soviet Political Party
Yisrael Beiteinu is widely understood to be the party of Russian Jewry, that population of nearly one million Jews who arrived in Israel after the disintegration of the Soviet Union. Twelve years since its founding, it has become the third largest party in the Knesset, on a radical anti-clerical and staunchly nationalist platform. Yisrael Beiteinu’s…
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Opinion Five Years Later, Everyone Is Behind Gilad Shalit
At a time when it’s painfully difficult to find any sort of unanimity in the Jewish community with regard to Israel, the outpouring of concern from across the political spectrum for one sad-eyed serviceman provides a poignant place for common ground. On the fifth anniversary of his capture by Hamas everyone, it seems, is publicly…
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Opinion Ouch: Israel Probes Matisyahu and Sarah Silverman for Signs of Jewish Life
Shimon Peres apparently thought when he convened his Israeli Presidential Conference this week in Jerusalem that he could bring together several hundred cutting-edge thinkers and doers in the fields of technology, economics, international relations and Jewish thought to interact, share, clash and perhaps create something new, with a few thousand bright people sitting on the…
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Opinion Will the Real Daniel Gordis Please Stand Up?
Rabbi Daniel Gordis, I’m told, is perhaps the single most popular speaker on Israel to American Jewish audiences. He moved to Israel in 1998, after serving as founding dean of the Ziegler School of Rabbinic Studies at the University of Judaism in Los Angeles, and in Jerusalem he serves as senior vice president of the…
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Opinion The Conversion Debate Gets Fiery in Jerusalem
The Israeli Presidential Conference, Shimon Peres’s vanity international blabfest, continues today with a series of panel discussions on the woes of the global economy and the future of the Jewish people. I don’t think we’ve solved the world’s economic problems, but there have been a few bombshells dropped into the field of Jewish identity. The…
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Opinion Progressive Jews are trying out post-Zionism. There’s one big flaw in their approach
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