Opinion articles that represent the views of the Forward’s editors.
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Opinion The Vaccination Nation
It’s only a pinprick, a momentary burst of pain for a tiny human being who doesn’t know what is happening and therefore cries with such abandon that even a veteran parent cringes at the sight. Vaccinating an infant can be frightening, and not just for the baby. It is essentially an act of faith, based…
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Opinion Bibi’s Bad Choice
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s planned speech to Congress next month has already accomplished a rare feat: It has united ideologues as different as Jeremy Ben Ami of J Street and Chris Wallace at Fox News — in opposition. When the left-wing J Street organizes a petition calling on Congress to delay the speech, and…
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Opinion Let’s Replace Blasphemy Laws With a Little Common Respect
We in the liberal, pluralistic West are pretty smug about distancing ourselves from what appears to have motivated a couple of Muslim terrorists to massacre French cartoonists: responding to blasphemy. We don’t intuitively comprehend what is so terrible about poking fun at the Prophet Muhammad because ridiculing and challenging religious symbols is an accepted form…
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Opinion Should French Jews Stay — or Should They Go?
No sooner had the deadly siege of the kosher supermarket in Paris come to an awful end than Israel’s political leaders issued their emphatic pleas for French Jews to emigrate. “To all the Jews of France, all the Jews of Europe, I would like to say that Israel is not just the place in whose…
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Opinion After Paris Attacks, Let’s Not Repeat Past Mistakes
The last few days have brought us from terror to despair to tentative hope to… what? The cascading terror visited first on Charlie Hebdo and then on the kosher supermarket in Paris drove home a despairing reality: the ease with which hatred of Jews is ignited in a Europe that was supposed to have confronted…
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Opinion Why Charlie Hebdo Must Be Free to Offend All — Even Us
It is not easy to be at the receiving end of Charlie Hebdo’s especially biting, brutal form of satire. Jews should know. Since the massacre of the French magazine’s top editors and journalists January 7, much has been made of their eagerness to criticize and lampoon people of all faiths, from the pope to presidents…
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Opinion The High Cost of American Inequality
In the closing days of 2013, President Obama gave a speech in which he declared that the growing gap in income and opportunity in America is presenting “the defining challenge of our time.” So intent was he to make the point that he repeated the word “inequality” 26 times in one 50-minute speech. Obama’s declaration…
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Opinion 2-0-1-4 No More
As we say farewell to twenty fourteen To the joys, sorrows and all in-between, Let’s remember that when it comes to the Jews There is no such thing as too much good news! Could this be the year of women, we asked. The Forward 50 had more than years past. Leadership, alas, remains a man’s…
Most Popular
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News DNA test kits spark a surge of online conversions to Judaism in the U.S.
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Culture RFK Jr.’s poems to Olivia Nuzzi are peak cringe — so were King Solomon’s
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Culture She was a dancer who leapt to the top of her field — then the Trump administration fired her
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Fast Forward Cory Booker has long embraced Jewish tradition. Now he has married a Jewish woman.
In Case You Missed It
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Fast Forward NYC synagogue protest leads to a new bill, and a rally by Jewish groups outside Park East shul
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Fast Forward LA synagogue protest leads to two arrests as mayor deploys extra police outside event that featured Israeli defense firm
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Film & TV In ‘The Secret Agent,’ a peek into Brazilian Jewish history — and a warning against propaganda
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Fast Forward NYC principal turns down Holocaust survivor’s talk over his ‘messages around Israel and Palestine’
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