Ari Hoffman is a contributing columnist for the Forward, where he writes about politics and culture. He is an adjunct assistant professor at New York University, and has a doctorate in English Literature from Harvard and a law degree from Stanford.
Ari Hoffman
By Ari Hoffman
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Opinion Cancel culture comes for all sins – except anti-Semitism
One of the great ironies of this moment is that the role of police is being debated while too many are becoming cancel culture cops, alert to infractions of tone or language, eagle-eyed and quick to punish. But this new regime has a curious blind spot, a category of infraction where enforcement is lax and…
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Opinion We need a Jewish American Hamilton
American Jews are showing signs of strain from our concurrent crises: anti-Semitism, the shut down of communal life, the shuttering of schools and the open antagonism over Israeli annexation. Meanwhile, institutional leadership has been caught in the crossfire of a community torn over its first principles and ultimate commitments on issues like racism and Zionism….
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Opinion Anti-Israel demonstrations are ruining Black Lives Matter
It is perhaps less than shocking that this season of our discontent gave way to a Day of Rage, a term used across the Arab world to denote a popular uprising. July 1 was devoted to an expression of Palestinian rage, with demonstrations erupting across the U.S. against “Israeli annexation, racism, and repression.” The date…
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Opinion American Jews’ hysteria about annexation has nothing to do with Israel
This is one of many pieces The Forward is running on annexation. Read another point of view here and here. There are plenty of things to argue about these days. The presidential election is a mere 125 days away, and the country is enmeshed in a series of overlapping crises, fueled by long-simmering resentments and…
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Opinion The idolatry of smashing idols
For millennia, Jews have been obsessed with the danger of idols. Monotheism was born in the Chaldean back room where Abraham smashed his father’s figurines, men and women of clay whose favor was courted by those of flesh and blood. The Bible warns endlessly of idolatry, and its anxious denunciations testify to both the danger…
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Opinion Jews stand for debate- which means backing the NYT
Jews believe in argument. Even Jews who have never looked at a page of Talmud know that debate is part of our DNA. Our greatest thinkers were our best arguers. Our most precious inheritance is that tradition of argument. This isn’t something to be hoarded. On the contrary, it is something that needs to be…
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Opinion ADL’s anti-Semitism numbers confirm what we know: Anti-Semitism is contagious
The battle between the algorithm and the gut is a well told tale, played out in baseball front offices and Davos panels. Do we trust our instinct or the numbers? The premise behind the question is that these two paths lead to different conclusions. The ADL’s just-released Audit of Antisemitic Incidents 2019 is an entirely…
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Opinion We’ve debated ourselves into irrelevance over liberalism and Zionism
There are two versions of the story we tell ourselves about the increasingly curdled romance between a sizeable chunk of American Jews and the Jewish State. If you’re on the left, you probably believe that somewhere along the way, Zionism lost its liberalism. If you’re on the right, you probably believe the opposite, that liberalism…
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