Opinion articles that represent the views of the Forward’s editors.
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Opinion Leaking for Leaking’s Sake
The cascade of diplomatic cables unleashed by WikiLeaks and published by some of the world’s most respected news organizations has left us ambivalent and uncomfortable — as Jews, as journalists, as citizens. It’s impossible to say whether the predictions of the most dire consequences of this enormous dump of scattered information will come true, whether…
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Opinion Hiring Rights and Wrongs
Back in 2008, then-candidate Barack Obama warmly endorsed his predecessor’s faith-based initiative, allowing churches and other religious groups to compete for federal grants to deliver social services, but with one major caveat. President Bush allowed those faith groups to discriminate in hiring. Candidate Obama pledged to end the practice. “If you get a federal grant,…
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Opinion Denial at the Western Wall
Really? What did Al-Mutawakel Taha, the Palestinian Authority’s deputy minister of information, think he would accomplish by issuing a “scientific” report claiming that the Western Wall wasn’t actually a Jewish historic site? Taha told the Forward’s Nathan Jeffay that the report was intended to educate the Jewish people. Thanks, but we don’t need this sort…
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Opinion A Dangerous Link
The Obama administration’s offer of a package of advanced weaponry and military assistance worth billions of dollars in return for an Israeli commitment to freeze settlement construction for just three months marks a troubling development in the relationship between the two allies. There’s a reason that this deal has drawn criticism from an unusual chorus…
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Opinion Looking at Haiti
The images beamed from Haiti seem to go from very bad to unbearably worse. The nation was already the poorest in the hemisphere before the January 12 earthquake crushed the landscape and killed hundreds of thousands. Then came the sight of more than a million displaced people living in over-crowded, squalid refugee camps. Then the…
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Opinion Hanukkah Time
Hanukkah comes early this year, in the way that Jewish holidays seem always to be early, or late, but never on time because it’s not at all clear what that means. In America, we live by two calendars. They rarely match, but they do instruct. When Hanukkah is late — that is, close to Christmas…
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Opinion Deficits ’R’ Us
The joint recommendations of a bipartisan commission led by Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson and charged with balancing the federal budget included such incendiary ideas as raising the retirement age for Social Security and making its benefits more progressive. That these ideas are politically difficult doesn’t mean they should be dismissed. On the contrary. The…
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Opinion Still Necessary: Journalists and Rabbis in the 21st Century
This is an excerpt of the keynote speech given November 11 at the annual meeting of the Jewish Reconstructionist Federation in Newport Beach, Calif. I understand that your movement is struggling with major challenges, some of them institutional, some existential. So is journalism today. I have no magical prescription to offer, but I do think…
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Opinion The Iran war ended terribly for the US, and even worse for Israel
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Film & TV In ‘Disclosure Day,’ Steven Spielberg finds himself at odds with Jewish thought about aliens
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Opinion Cultural boycotts of Israel just reached peak absurdity
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Culture ‘My mayor Muslim, my bagel Jewish’ — the Knicks chant capturing New York’s soul
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Culture The manosphere says women owe their husbands sex — Judaism says the opposite
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Fast Forward Georgia’s Jewish senator called his newly minted GOP opponent an antisemite. Why?
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Fast Forward Alex Bores’ supporters disagree on Israel. They agree on him.
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Fast Forward Organizers of London Israeli real estate fair apologize after West Bank properties surface despite denials