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Opinion Tax Season
Sometimes the biggest ideas spring full-blown from a great mind — think of Freud, say, or Keynes — and the truth, once stated, suddenly alters our understanding of reality. Other ideas, like racial equality, bubble up from below, building strength until leaders emerge who can force the issue onto the public agenda. And then there…
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Opinion Joy of Texts
There is a moment, for those who indulge, of explosive, triumphant joy, at times approaching ecstasy, during the festival of Simchat Torah, which fell October 7. It’s the moment when the reader chants the last few lines of Deuteronomy, completing the annual cycle of public Torah reading, and then begins again with “In the beginning.”…
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Opinion The Poor Among Us
The numbers have finally started to come in, and it turns out that much of what we thought we knew about Jewish wealth and poverty is wrong. Several new demographic studies, reported on Page 1 by Nathaniel Popper, indicate that Jews are not the affluent subset within the American population that they are commonly thought…
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Opinion Israel’s Window
There was an air of tedious familiarity in the latest United Nations debate on Israel. Like so many times before, Palestinian provocation led to Israeli military action, prompting the Palestinians to convene the Security Council, which obligingly took up a condemnation of Israel, which was vetoed by the United States. After the charade was done,…
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Opinion A Failure of Moral Vision
The movement toward divestment from Israel by mainline Protestant churches — first the Presbyterians and now, perhaps, the Anglicans — is an alarming measure of how badly Israel’s reputation in the West has been damaged in the last four years. The uneven warfare of the intifada, the spreading global specter of Muslim rage and the…
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Opinion The Miracle of Return
More than any other holiday, the Day of Atonement is a marker of American Jews’ devotion to their heritage and traditions in the face of the assimilatory pull of the broader culture. Other holidays with a mass following, such as Passover and Hanukkah, are joyous occasions that combine family celebration with readily accessible messages of…
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Opinion Shelter From the Storms
The festival of Sukkot, which begins Wednesday night, September 29, is known for the custom among observant Jews of building sukkahs, or booths, in their backyards and on their rooftops. The booths, open to the sky and the elements, are meant to symbolize the fragile, transient quality of the Hebrews’ journey through the wilderness on…
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Opinion Mortgaging Our Future
While the eyes of the nation were riveted last week on the news that American combat deaths in Iraq had passed the 1,000 mark, a far more frightening statistic was released with far less fanfare. The federal budget deficit hit a record $422 billion for the first nine months of 2004, according to the nonpartisan…
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Opinion Passover liberation and US liberty both summon us to remember and renew
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Culture Gene Shalit, a mensch with a personality as big as his mustache, turns 100
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