Opinion articles that represent the views of the Forward’s editors.
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Opinion Deli Down
The closing of the Second Avenue Deli, the landmark Lower East Side kosher eatery, has all the classic elements of a modern-day Jewish cultural crisis: The struggle for historical memory. The quest for generational continuity. The never-ending battle for control of the land on which we stand. And, of course, the search for a truly…
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Opinion Dover, Darwin and The Assault on Science
There was more at stake than legal or constitutional quibbles over church-state separation in that federal court ruling handed down last week in Pennsylvania, barring the pseudo-science known as Intelligent Design from public-school biology classes. Read carefully, the judge’s decision was a ringing defense of science itself, and of the empirical method of reasoning that…
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Opinion Intelligent Decision
This week’s ruling by U.S. District Judge John E. Jones III in the so-called Intelligent Design case in Pennsylvania is a courageous, historic step toward replacing the hysteria of our culture wars with some good sense and reason. Reason, in fact, is at the heart of the judge’s decision. In ruling that the Dover school…
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Opinion A Joyous Holiday Noise
Hanukkah seems almost anticlimactic this year. There’s been so much talk in recent weeks about the blurring of holiday messages and the proper place of religion in the public square that making a joyous holiday noise right now seems, well, a bit rude. Now isn’t the time to make trouble. In a way, though, that’s…
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Opinion Poverty, Charity and Justice
We Americans have widely divergent attitudes toward the meaning of the holiday season, but there’s one thing that brings just about all of us together right now. This is the time of year when we turn our hearts and thoughts to the less fortunate and dig deep to help out. The streets are clogged with…
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Opinion The Fruits of Good Will
Israel and its friends had good reason to celebrate this week, as the international community prepared to remove the legal barrier that keeps the Jewish state from joining the Red Cross. To the shame of the world humanitarian movement, Israel has been effectively barred from membership for decades by a technicality in the 1929 Geneva…
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Opinion The Big Spill
That massive chemical slick that was spilled into China’s Songhua River on November 13 completed its havoc-strewn journey through Harbin this week, allowing China’s fourth largest city to sound the all-clear and turn its water back on (though the lasting impact on groundwater and soil quality won’t be known for months or longer). Meanwhile, the…
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Opinion Sharon’s Earthquake
Fresh from his taboo-shattering withdrawal from Gaza last summer, Israel’s Prime Minister Sharon touched off yet another earthquake this week. The first earthquake, disengagement, began a redrawing of Israel’s geopolitical borders by removing troops and settlers unilaterally from territory first captured in 1967. The second earthquake will redraw the contours of Israeli politics, allowing him…
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Film & TV The new ‘Superman’ is being called anti-Israel, but does that make it pro-Palestine?
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Music ‘No matter what, I will always be a Jew.’ Billy Joel opens up about his family’s Holocaust history
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Culture She was my Hebrew school bully — and I finally learned what happened to her
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Music Remembering Ozzy Osbourne’s Jewish vow renewal
In Case You Missed It
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Fast Forward The largest Reconstructionist synagogue is set to cut ties with the movement over Israel tensions
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Culture The Melania Trump Opera House won’t change hearts and minds — not even the president’s
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Fast Forward Columbia suspends, expels and revokes diplomas of students involved in Butler Library takeover
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Fast Forward Youth wing of the Democratic Party passes amendment opposing Israel’s ‘ongoing genocide in Gaza’
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