Opinion articles that represent the views of the Forward’s editors.
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Opinion The Limits of Religious Freedom
From 1985 to 1989, Priscilla M. Lippincott Adams refused to pay her federal taxes. She was a devout Quaker — she worked as a Peace Field secretary for the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends — and believed that participating in war was contrary to God’s will. Since her federal taxes would…
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Opinion Replacing @PresidentofIsrael
The journalist Gershom Gorenberg says that in Israel the office of president is much like the Queen of England. Only much cheaper. In many ways, he’s right. The Israeli presidency is not an inherited position, of course, and it has none of the aristocratic presumptions built into the House of Windsor; the official president’s house…
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Opinion A Man of His Time
Abraham Foxman is a man of his time. The man of his time. Foxman is so intertwined with our personification of American Jewish leadership that when he announced February 10 that he would retire as leader of the Anti-Defamation League — not until 2015, of course — the reaction seemed universal. Abe was the ADL….
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Opinion Birthright’s Second-Time Shift
Here’s the current mission statement: “The gift of a trip to Israel from Taglit-Birthright Israel is designed to offer a first-time educational peer experience.” Not any more. The international leadership group in charge of Birthright has decided that the free, 10-day program can be a second-time educational experience, too. This is a technical change with…
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Opinion Protect the Children, Mayor de Blasio
Regulating the ritual practice of a small number of New Yorkers is hardly the top priority of the city’s new mayor, nor should it be, not with the myriad of challenges facing Bill de Blasio, who is slowly remaking city government after 12 years of Michael Bloomberg’s highly successful, though occasionally problematic tenure. But neither…
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Opinion Bursting Bubbles of SodaStream’s Haters
Is it wrong for Scarlett Johansson to perform as the celebrity global ambassador for the Israeli company SodaStream? Is it wrong for the rest of us to drink the fizzy, made-at-home water in the environmentally-friendly reusable bottles that are manufactured in Palestinian land occupied by Israel since the 1967 war? Thanks to the high-wattage Super…
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Opinion What Defines Us as Jews? Actions — Not Ancestry.
One of my daughters recently suggested that I investigate whether I’m eligible for British citizenship. It’s not a far-fetched notion. My mother was born in England, and so were her mother, and her mother, and her mother, and probably her mother. There’s a cemetery in Leeds where many of these women are buried; my mother…
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Opinion Corporations Aren’t People — Especially When It Comes to Birth Control
Corporations are people, Mitt Romney famously said at the Iowa State Fair in 2011, and it’s easy now to dismiss the phrase as the awkward, revealing statement of a man so out of tune with the public that he lost an election he was supposed to win. But in March, the U.S. Supreme Court will…
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Culture The Kennedy Center canceled its ‘woke’ programming — so why is this Jewish musical OK?
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Culture Kinky Friedman has been gone a year, but his family’s summer camp lives on
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Fast Forward Historic synagogue vandalized in Chile with posters of Netanyahu with bullet hole on his head
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Fast Forward Spotted in a Nazi’s daughter’s real estate ad: a painting looted from a famed Jewish art dealer
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Fast Forward Transnistria’s Jews find themselves caught in a Soviet time warp as Ukraine war rages next door
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