Opinion articles that represent the views of the Forward’s editors.
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Opinion Who Can Be a Jew?
The shocking revelations last fall that a respected Orthodox rabbi spied on and exploited women studying for conversion led to two concrete outcomes: The rabbi, Barry Freundel, is serving more than six years in prison, and the Orthodox rabbinical group that should have stopped his shameful behavior is trying to reform itself. In a report…
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Opinion Let’s Unite To Make Marriage Stronger for All — Gay and Straight
In the stirring words of his groundbreaking decision in Obergefell v. Hodges, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy not only affirmed the value of marriage between those of the same sex. He also wrote into the law journals and history books a rigorous, passionate argument for marriage, period. “No union is more profound than marriage,…
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Opinion Michael Oren, You Hardly Know Us at All
The new memoir by Michael Oren, recounting his four years as the Israeli ambassador to Washington and his “journey across the American-Israeli divide,” ignited debate before the 400-page book was even published yesterday. Much of that was due to Oren himself, who in a few strategically-placed opinion pieces, siphoned off the most provocative parts of…
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Opinion After Charleston, Let’s All Look in Mirror
The grim-faced look of President Obama as he addressed the nation after the attack on a Charleston church seemed not only to reflect his personal pain. It encapsulated the resignation of a man who thought he would not have to minister again on these occasions, would not have to continually remind us that the toxic…
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Opinion 3 Jewish Lessons on Rachel Dolezal and Caitlyn Jenner
I’ll start with an old joke. Mr. Rosenbaum enjoys cooking a steak on his outdoor barbecue grill every Friday afternoon, for his family’s Sabbath meal. But because he is the only Jew in a very Catholic neighborhood, the smell of the cooking meat drives his neighbors — who are forgoing meat on Fridays during Lent…
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Opinion The Wrong and Right Way to Beat BDS
The movement to boycott, sanction and divest from Israel takes as its inspiration a statement issued in July 2005 by scores of Palestinian civil society groups, calling on their international supporters to adopt tactics similar to those used to mobilize worldwide action against South Africa’s apartheid regime. Who could have predicted that only a decade…
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Opinion Why the Forward Sent a Brave Reporter to Gaza
When the Forward sent Naomi Zeveloff to Israel last August to be our first full-time reporter there, the title she went with — Middle East correspondent — was chosen consciously and deliberately. Israel’s policies and actions in the region have simply grown too intertwined with those of its neighbors for her to cover only Israel,…
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Opinion Israel’s Precarious Gender Balance
Women harassed when they refuse to go to the back of a public bus. Women forced to sit in segregated areas at public health clinics and at burials in cemeteries. Women berated for wearing clothes deemed to be immodest. Women’s voices banned from a radio station. Women excluded from participating in municipal programs and state…
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Opinion What if Donald Trump puts his name on the US Holocaust Memorial Museum?
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