Opinion articles that represent the views of the Forward’s editors.
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Opinion Old Friends, Shattered Dreams
One day back in the late 1980s, during another interminable cocktail party in another New York Jewish office suite, I had the good fortune to find myself in a quiet corner with Malcolm Hoenlein, then recently installed as executive director of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations. It turned into one of…
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Opinion Peace, Sharon and, Yes, Shas
Ariel Sharon’s self-imposed coalition crisis has already forced Middle East-watchers around the world, both Jewish and non-Jewish, to re-evaluate their long-held views of Israel’s aging enfant terrible. After a 55-year career of brutal military adventurism and relentless territorial expansionism, Sharon appears to have transformed himself magically in the space of 12 months into the world’s…
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Opinion Hanukkah, Forever New
In trying, as we do every year on this page, to understand Hanukkah’s magical hold on the American Jewish imagination, it’s worth examining the holiday’s marvelous malleability, its Zelig-like capacity for embodying the very values that each generation needs it to uphold. Yes, drowning out Bing Crosby is part of the holiday’s appeal, but only…
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Opinion Two Viktors and Ukraine’s Soil
the Black Sea through Belarus and Lithuania to the North Sea. Places with names like Chernowitz, Kamenetz, Lutsk and Dubno are imprinted in our genes and on our driver’s licenses. We were there far longer than we have been in America. It was there that the greatest flowering of modern Jewish culture took place, from…
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Opinion Reforming the U.N.
Kofi Annan delivered a surprise Hanukkah gift to friends of Israel and democracy this week, in the form of a United Nations reform plan that includes, at long last, a clear and usable definition of terrorism. Ruling out “mitigating” circumstances like occupation, the report is said to declare that terrorism against civilians “is never an…
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Opinion Engaging Iran
President Bush was right to demand this week that Iran allow clear-cut, third-party verification of its claims that it has suspended its enrichment of weapons-grade uranium before the rest of the world begins to breathe easy. There’s been a lot of slippery talk and outright falsehood about nuclear weaponry in the Middle East of late,…
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Opinion Old Europe, New Jihad
We Americans have tended to be of two minds as we have watched events unfold in the Netherlands in the three weeks since the murder of filmmaker and anti-immigrant provocateur Theo Van Gogh. Half of us look at the mounting tensions surrounding Europe’s growing Muslim minority, the incidents of jihadist and anti-Jewish violence, and the…
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Opinion Rice’s Mission
If there were any doubts about President Bush’s inclination to learn from the foreign-policy mistakes of his first term, he seemed to lay them to rest this week with his nomination of Condoleezza Rice as secretary of state. True to form, the president is not looking back but steaming forward, and critics be damned. Coming…
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