Opinion

• Opinion

  Hath Not a Jew Tensions?

  And here, yet again, a new production of “The Merchant of Venice,” this time at the Delacorte Theater in New York’s Central Park. And, to decidedly mixed reviews, starring Al Pacino. (The Times loved him; The New Yorker not.) “The Merchant” is, of course, an exceedingly difficult play to pull off in our time. No…

  By Leonard Fein

  4 min read
• Opinion

  On Conversion, Alienating Israel’s Friends

  Considering all the threats Israelis face right now — what with Hezbollah missiles to the north, Iran’s nuclear program to the east, war crimes lawsuits in Europe and Gaza blockade-busters on the high seas — you might think the last thing they’d be looking for would be a fight with their closest ally, the American…

  By J.J. Goldberg Jul 14, 2010 | 4 min read
• Letters

  July 23, 2010

  Outreach Is More Than Hugs and Smiles It is absurd to characterize the basis of the Jewish Outreach Institute’s work — or any Jewish outreach — as an “assumption that all that’s needed is open arms,” as your article put it (“New Study Finds That It’s Not a Lack of Welcome That’s Keeping the Intermarrieds…

  Jul 14, 2010 | 2 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 There’s a shocking new report on civilian deaths in Gaza. If only it were accurate.

  

• Nora Berman Is Netflix’s new show the most Jewish cartoon ever?

  

• Dan Perry Israel’s new gift to the far right could help end the Gaza war

  

• Emily Tamkin Entering motherhood — and an obsession with the works of an Italian Jewish literary hero

  

The Latest

• Opinion

  The Climate Clock

  There are many reasons why the United States Senate needs urgently to debate and vote on a climate and energy bill before the fall election campaign begins in earnest. Persistent dependency on carbon-based fuels is driving the planet toward disaster. This nation’s inability to focus on developing alternative energy sources is driving us toward ever-more…

  Jul 14, 2010 | 2 min read
• Opinion

  Lessons of Tisha B’Av

  The fast of Tisha B’Av, which falls on July 20 this year, is one of those odd calendar events that has no name of its own. The Hebrew words simply mean the ninth day of the month of Av. It marks the destruction of the Second Temple in Jerusalem by the legions of imperial Rome…

  Jul 14, 2010 | 2 min read
• Opinion

  The Unknown, Early Hollywood Roots of the ‘Who is a Jew?’ (Mi Hu Yehudi?) Debate

  The contentious question “Who is a Jew?” (Mi Hu Yehudi? in Hebrew) has bedeviled the Israeli legal system continuously since 1959, when the Jewish-born Polish priest Oswald Rufeisen, known as Brother Daniel, was rejected in his application for Israeli citizenship under the Law of Return. Israel’s Supreme Court upheld the rejection in 1962. Since then…

  By J.J. Goldberg Jul 11, 2010 | 2 min read
• Opinion

  Bibi Bombshell: ‘Many Jewish Neighborhoods in J’lem Will Remain in Israel’

  Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu dropped a bombshell today in a speech at the Plaza Hotel to about 500 people gathered by the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations: Israel might accept a peace agreement in which parts of Jerusalem are handed over to a Palestinian state. He said it backwards, but the…

  By J.J. Goldberg Jul 7, 2010 | < 1 min read
• 
  Opinion

  The Israeli-Palestinian Confluence

  Is the two-state solution passé? Serious people, with democratic instincts, are asking this now, but it is hard to think of a more frivolous question. The alternative to a two-state solution is not a one-state solution. It is war, Bosnia-style. It is one thing to become exasperated by the occupation and to start throwing around…

  By Bernard Avishai Jul 7, 2010 | 5 min read
• Opinion

  For Reform Judaism, Change Is the Constant

  Two hundred years ago, in the small Westphalian town of Seesen, the latter-day court Jew Israel Jacobson built a small synagogue intended mainly for the impoverished boys in the vocational school he had founded there. What made the “Jacobstempel,” as it became known, unusual was that it contained an organ; the bimah was at the…

  By Michael A. Meyer Jul 7, 2010 | 4 min read
• Opinion

  Bringing Judaism Out of the Home, and Into the Public Square

  ‘Be a Jew in the home and a man [sic] in the street.” These words by the 19th-century Lithuanian Jewish poet Judah Leib Gordon became a rallying cry for the Haskalah, the Jewish enlightenment. With this slogan, Gordon urged Jews to keep their religious rituals in their homes and synagogues, while wearing modern clothes, pursuing…

  By Jill Jacobs Jul 7, 2010 | 3 min read
• Opinion

  Bibi and the Briar Patch

  You have to feel sorry for Benjamin Netanyahu. The Israeli prime minister is in about as tight a spot as a politician can be, backed up to the edge of a cliff, with an avalanche racing toward him. Does he stand still — or jump? Not literally, of course. That abyss is a leap into…

  By J.J. Goldberg Jul 7, 2010 | 4 min read