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
A Tale of Two Citizens
Now and then, there’s a moment when everything comes together, when all the sturm und drang that so often characterizes Israel’s saga recedes, the land is girdled by rainbows, it streets are filled with song and marshmallows. So it must have been when 29-year-old Hillary Rubin, who had made aliyah to Israel (from Detroit) in…
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Opinion Don’t Take Hamas’s Goals Out of the Equation
Why do the debates over the morality of Israel’s responses to Hamas never seem to produce a consensus? A debate broke out last year after Israel’s military campaign in Gaza, and another after the publication of the Goldstone Report. Recently we have found ourselves in the midst of yet another debate in the wake of…
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Opinion Seizing a Moment of Promise for Mideast Peace
Things are starting to look up on the Middle East peace front. From the very positive White House meeting in July, where Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu vowed to take to “concrete steps” to revive the peace process, to the Arab League’s recent green light for direct negotiations between Israelis and Palestinians, we’re finally seeing some…
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Opinion A Wounded People vs. Oliver Stone
Abba Eban once told me a story about a conversation he’d had years before with a British friend. It happened in 1970, shortly after the Six Day War. The friend complained that Israel was acting unnecessarily defensive and inflexible for a country that had just won a major victory. “You must understand, we’re a wounded…
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Opinion An Orthodox Pledge of Compassion
It has been nearly a decade since the film “Trembling Before G-d” introduced Jewish communities around the globe to the very existence of faithful and observant gay Orthodox Jews and their struggles. While many in the Orthodox world paid attention to the film at the time, since then there has been little or no change…
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Letters August 13, 2010
Wedding Erodes Intermarriage Taboo Like it or not, the media-hyped Clinton-Mezvinsky intermarriage, discussed in your August 6 editorial, “When Marc Weds Chelsea,” will make religiously based Jewish opposition to such matches in our society more difficult. (I’m the groom’s uncle, although I wasn’t present at the ceremony.) Chelsea did not and will not convert to…
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Opinion The Mosque and Us
Before it became a cause célèbre for Sarah Palin and Newt Gingrich and other rank opportunists, before the Anti-Defamation League sullied a once-noble reputation by siding against religious liberty, before the tweets and satellite trucks spun this all out of control, the plan to turn an eyesore of an empty building two blocks from Ground…
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Opinion Why Do Legendary Warriors Become Nincompoops When They Join Our Side?
I read this a few days ago, but for some reason its importance just hit me. It’s one of the smartest, most pointed questions I’ve heard in the escalating debate over the Afghanistan war. It was posed last week by a writer who’s not usually associated with pointed, incisive political analysis, Maureen Dowd of The…
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Opinion The Swastika on My Wall
Does the swastika represent animus against Jews alone, or should it be considered a symbol of universal hatred when it is directed against a Hispanic immigrant or an African-American family? The Anti-Defamation League has decided that the infamous, four-pronged symbol has become a broader expression of hatred and therefore won’t automatically consider its use anti-Semitism….
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Opinion Everybody’s Mad at Abe
Boy, people are really steamed at Abe Foxman right now. The left wants his head for coming out against Cordoba House, the proposed Muslim community center near Ground Zero. The right, on the other hand, is enraged over his acceptance of Oliver Stone’s apology for his London Times interview. There’s a lot to deconstruct here,…
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Opinion The Jewish Press Defends the Confederacy and Its Traditions. Again.
Inquiring readers have a treat waiting for them in the current issue of The Jewish Press, the Brooklyn-based weekly that’s hands-down the most widely read Jewish periodical in the Orthodox community. I’m speaking of a front-page article defending the cause of the Confederacy and attacking Abraham Lincoln as a bigot. No, I’m not kidding. Read…
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