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Opinion Seven Weeks
The holiday of Shavuot, the Feast of Weeks, traditionally commemorates the giving of the Torah at Mount Sinai, seven weeks after the Jews left Egypt. In traditional rabbinic teaching, it brings the Passover season to a climax. The Exodus, celebrated on Passover, marks the liberation of the Jews from bondage into freedom, so the rabbis…
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Opinion Meltdown
The very public meltdown of the World Jewish Congress is a tragedy of historic proportions, masquerading as low farce. An organization that once embodied the Jewish people’s epic struggle against the greatest of world evils, the WJC has now been reduced to a mockery, an ugly sideshow of nasty personal feuds, name-calling and bookkeeping scandals….
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Opinion Israel’s Tough Medicine
Watching the uproar in Jerusalem this week, following the release of the Winograd report on the conduct of last year’s Lebanon War, friends of Israel must be gripped with profound feelings of sadness and alarm — sadness at the degraded state of public leadership in the Jewish state, and alarm at the report’s gloomy depiction…
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Opinion May Day
Springtime, the season of renewal, is a time of expectation and remembrance, a time for looking forward to nature’s rebirth, while thinking back on the winter just endured. We fill the season with holidays of hope and memory, mimicking the earth in its drama of reawakening: Passover, with its memories of exodus and promise of…
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Opinion Mysteries of Moscow
On the morning of August 19, 1991, Americans woke to the televised sight of an empire in meltdown. Tanks were converging on the Kremlin, seeking to reclaim Russia for communism. One man, Boris Yeltsin, climbed atop a tank and stopped the coup, and entered history. Yeltsin, who died this week at 76, was a complicated…
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Opinion Celebrating Israel at 59
As Israel approaches its 59th anniversary of independence, marked this coming Monday according to the traditional calendar, there’s a distinct mood of solemnity — bordering on gloom — that’s taken root among those who hold Jewish statehood most dear. There’s a fear afoot, rising almost monthly, that Israel faces threats of ever-growing deadliness, that the…
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Opinion Fear of Facts
Earlier this month, just in time for Holocaust Remembrance Day, the British government’s education department released a study reporting that classroom teachers were quietly ignoring the mandatory Holocaust education curriculum, fearful of offending their students’ cultural norms. According to the BBC, “some schools avoid teaching the Holocaust and other controversial” — yes, “controversial” — “history…
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Opinion Gunfire
This week’s horrific carnage on the campus of Virginia Tech has rekindled the perennial American debate on gun laws. The apparent shooter, a troubled youth, was able to walk into a store in Virginia and purchase a handgun over the counter, no questions asked. The same thing is possible in dozens of other states around…
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Opinion The Gaza hostage crisis could forever change how American Jews relate to Israel — but it’s not too late to fix that
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Yiddish ווידעאָ: היסטאָריקערין וויווי לאַקס באַשרײַבט געשיכטע פֿון לאָנדאָנער ייִדישער פּרעסעVIDEO: Historian Vivi Laks tells history of the London Yiddish Press
שבֿע צוקער פֿירט דעם שמועס מיט וויווי לאַקס און ביידע לייענען פֿאָר עטלעכע פֿעליעטאָנען פֿון יענע צײַטן.
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Yiddish World Puppet Monty Pickle is guest on the Forward’s ‘Yiddish Word of the Day’
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News Who is Bruce Blakeman, the ‘Almost Orthodox’ Jew running for New York governor?
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