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
Guest Editor: Judith Shulevitz
*This fall, guest editors have helped to shape Forward Forum by commissioning opinion pieces. The eighth and final of the group is Judith Shulevitz, a cultural critic and magazine editor who helped to start both Slate and Lingua Franca, which won a National Magazine Award for General Excellence under her co-editorship. She has been a…
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Opinion Fuhgeddaboudit
Israelis are an impatient people. They speak dugri (“directly,” an import from Arabic). They get to the point. Haval (guttural, as in Hanukkah) means “too bad.” Al hazman means “about the time.” Haval al hazman: It’s a waste of time. Don’t even look at her, haval al hazman, she has a tall, dark paratrooper boyfriend….
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Opinion In the Situation Room
Hamatzav means “the situation,” and can refer to any situation — the economic situation, the weather situation, your medical situation. However, within certain groups, at certain times, the expression came to refer to the Israeli political situation, and specifically to the Israeli-Arab situation.* I first heard the expression when I became active in the early…
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Opinion Talmud of Traffic
‘Sa l’shalom,” said the policeman who had been about to give me a ticket for a traffic violation. (In the end he didn’t, because he discovered that he and my eldest daughter had been in the same class in elementary school, but that’s another story.) Translated freely, this meant, “You can go.” It’s at such…
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Opinion One Born Every Minute
Nobody likes to be a sucker, but call an Israeli man a freier and you insult him to the core. Not only should he have gotten a better deal, you imply, but he has betrayed the cardinal rules of Israeli masculinity: don’t play by the rules and never let someone outsmart you. Being a freier…
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Opinion State of Being
When used with the definite article ha, medina, meaning state, may express anger (“The state threw us to the dogs,” say the newly unemployed); disappointment (“this is not the state we dreamed of!”); wonder (“what a state! An extraordinary state!” sings the popular entertainer Eli Luzon); even love. This range of strong emotions is a…
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Opinion Land of the Surreal
In 1911, when the 11th edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica was published, the entry titled “The Hebrew Language” stated: “The dream of some Zionists that Hebrew — a would-be Hebrew, that is to say — will again become a living, popular language in Palestine, has still less prospect of realization than their vision of a…
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Opinion So Glenn Beck Calls George Soros a Nazi Collaborator? Marty Peretz Said It First
The Glenn Beck-George Soros story gets stranger by the day. If you haven’t been following it: Glenn Beck devoted three evenings on his Fox News program last week, November 9, 10 and 11, to a three-part, three-hour documentary about George Soros. It’s titled “The Puppetmaster.” It purports to prove that Soros is the mastermind of…
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Opinion Guest Editor: Letty Cottin Pogrebin
Letty Cottin Pogrebin is a leading figure in American Jewish feminism and a founding editor of Ms. magazine. The author of numerous articles and 10 books, including “Deborah, Golda and Me: Being Female and Jewish in America,” Pogrebin was a founder of Jews for Racial and Economic Justice and is a past president of Americans…
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Opinion The Deeper We Go, the Clearer Our Understanding
My connection to the Jewish experience didn’t begin in our Dialogue. It started at birth. As a Washington, D.C. native, born blond and “Barbra”-esque to Palestinian parents who fled West Jerusalem in 1948, I was strangely more mishpucha than habibi. My brother spent his afternoons spouting Mel Brooks-isms while I ran around the house belting…
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Opinion We Believe We Can Make A Difference
I have devoted most of my adult life to working as a diplomat on behalf of Palestinian rights, foremost their right to live as a free and dignified people in their homeland in peace and security, side by side with all their neighbors, including Israelis. Despite many setbacks on the long road to freedom, I…
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Opinion It’s time for Jews who love Israel to give up on Zionism
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