Opinion articles that represent the views of the Forward’s editors.
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Opinion Staring Into the Void, for Both Israelis and Palestinians
I visited Israel at the end of June, after the three yeshiva students were kidnapped but before their bodies were found, before the Palestinian teen was murdered in a revenge attack, before the air strikes and the ground war and the horrific death toll in Gaza. Before it all fell apart. It seems like a…
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Opinion Don’t Turn Them Away
When thousands of children appear on your doorstep after a long and desperate journey from a hostile environment, do you turn them away? Great Britain didn’t. From 1938 to 1940, the British accepted thousands of Jewish children who were rescued by the Kindertransport from Nazi Germany in the middle of a war. But when thousands…
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Opinion With Israel Feuds Raging, Can’t Jews All Get Along?
Yesterday, Jews and Muslims in Israel, New York and other communities decided to take advantage of a calendric symmetry to assert their connection to one another, if only by breaking bread after a daylong fast. For Jews, it was the 17th of Tammuz, when the walls around the ancient city of Jerusalem were breached, marking…
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Opinion Why Jews in Israel and Diaspora Share Fate
This is one of those times when the gulf between we American Jews and our Israeli kin seems wider than the ocean. As sirens blare and rockets whoosh through the sky there, we here can only empathize, support and, for those so inclined, pray. We can hope for a speedy end to the attacks and…
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Opinion Three Jews and a Palestinian — All Just Boys
One reason that the fate of the three kidnapped Israeli boys gripped our attention and stirred our concern is that they were immediately identifiable. Gilad, Naftali, Eyal. Names and faces, goofy grins, youthful exuberance, captured in grainy photos that quickly became ubiquitious on buttons, t-shirts, posters, billboards, Facebook posts, Twitter feeds. We didn’t know them…
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Opinion Who Will Speak Out for American Families?
This summer has already given us its fair share of sensational news — from the attempted takeover of Iraq by jihadi militants to Eric Cantor’s downfall to the thrill of victory and agony of defeat at the World Cup in Brazil. And July has only just started. With all this drama, the smaller stories get…
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Opinion Why Presbyterian Divestment Feels Like Anti-Semitism
In a hotel ballroom in Jerusalem jammed with journalists from all over the Jewish world, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu delivered a rambling speech that covered everything from Iran’s nuclear ambitions to an Israeli cow that he claims produces more milk than any other cow in the world. Really. But I want to focus on his…
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Opinion Why Supporting Israel Isn’t All in the Family Anymore
‘There’s been a kidnapping in the family,” wrote Haaretz columnist Bradley Burston, of Israel’s reaction to the ongoing agony over three missing teenagers, still gone as of this writing. It feels that way in America, too. Whatever angst exists in the relationship between American Jews and Israel disappears in times of crisis, evidence of a…
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