Opinion articles that represent the views of the Forward’s editors.
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Opinion Sukkah in the Storm
The sukkah, the fragile hut that gives the Sukkot holiday its name, could be the most ambivalent symbol in all of Jewish tradition. Custom dictates that we spend a week each fall dwelling — or at least taking meals — in a roofless shack, open to the heavens. It is, we are taught, a time…
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Opinion In Our Time
Whatever else might be said about it, the Roman Catholic Church must be deemed one of the wonders of human civilization. In continuous operation for two millennia, it remains among the world’s most powerful institutions, claiming 1 billion followers, one-sixth of all humanity, in a tightly organized community of belief and influence that reaches into…
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Opinion The Book of the People
This coming Tuesday, Jewish congregations around the world will complete their annual cycle of public Bible readings and start the reading anew, and they will mark the moment with the raucous festival known as Simchat Torah, the “Joy of the Torah.” The holiday is noteworthy for a number of reasons, but none more poignant or…
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Opinion In the Beginning …
In addition to its specific, text-related theme, Simchat Torah has an added significance: It marks the end of the month-long cycle of holidays that begins with Rosh Hashanah. It is an emotional roller-coaster of a month for observant Jews, running from the trumpeting grandeur of the New Year proclamation to the anguished soul-searching of Yom…
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Opinion The Miers Test
It’s a sure sign of how low President Bush’s fortunes have sunk that the Supreme Court nomination of Harriet Miers, clearly intended as a deft feint to circumvent Senate mud-wrestling, is instead turning into a first-class political debacle. In its desperation to find some traction, however, the administration appears to have crossed a constitutional line…
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Opinion Storming the Gates
The baroque scenes that unfolded on the Mediterranean coast of North Africa over the last two weeks, described by Marc Perelman in his Page 1 report, seem as though they were lifted from some futuristic end-of-the-world movie epic rather than from today’s headlines. But they are real. In two separate assaults a week apart, hundreds…
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Opinion A Great Civil War
Last week, almost exactly 80 years after John Scopes went on trial in Tennessee for teaching Charles Darwin’s Theory of Evolution in a schoolroom, a federal court in central Pennsylvania convened to revisit the same question: whether America wants its schoolchildren to learn modern science. The terms of the dispute have changed remarkably little in…
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Opinion Begging Pardon
Amid the grand pronouncements that newspapers regularly put forth on the issues of the day, it’s easy to lose sight of the things we leave unsaid, the people we overlook and the stories we leave untold — stories whose telling ultimately might have made the difference between the truth and the whole truth. The Forward…
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