Batya Ungar-Sargon is the former Opinion Editor at the Forward.
Batya Ungar-Sargon
By Batya Ungar-Sargon
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Culture Coronavirus exposed a huge gap between the media and the American people
If you’re not part of the political or chattering classes, you might have missed two recent tempests that erupted in tiny teacups on the devil’s banquet of the coronavirus pandemic. Last week, the President insisted on calling the virus that causes COVID-19 the “Chinese virus.” And this week, he’s insulted a number of reporters at…
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Opinion My Bernie Sanders problem
In some ways, the Democratic presidential primary campaign has felt like a cruel joke, a perfect amalgamation of positive and negative forces that almost cancel each other out. We got the most diverse field in the history of the United States — and ended up with two old white men. We started with the most…
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Opinion How AIPAC proved Bernie right
I had never been in the same room as a person who has defended genocide until Sunday afternoon at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee policy conference. Words like apartheid and genocide and ethnic cleansing are often thrown around in the context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, much to the chagrin of Israeli Jews and their…
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Opinion Why No One Can Talk About The Attacks Against Orthodox Jews
There’s a poem Jews sing every evening after lighting Hanukkah candles. It’s called “Maoz Tzur” — Rock of the Ages — and was written during the Crusades, one of the many times when Jewish blood ran through the streets; its lines are laced with the tragedy and longing that typifies Jewish liturgy. One chokes me…
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Opinion Meet The Forward’s New Columnists
As we come to the end of an intense news year in the Jewish world and the dawn of a whole new decade, we are rededicating ourselves to one of the Forward’s core missions: being a platform for civil discourse on the issues that divide our communities. In service of that mission, we are adding…
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Opinion I Was Protested At Bard College For Being A Jew
When I was asked to speak at last week’s conference on racism and anti-Semitism at Bard College’s Hannah Arendt Center, I think my heart actually skipped a beat. Arendt, the German-born political philosopher who fled the Nazis in the 1930s and eventually settled in New York, is the thinker who has most deeply influenced me,…
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Opinion What Bernie Sanders Is Saying When He Won’t Talk About Being Jewish
You might think that as American Jews are suffering the worst anti-Semitic violence in the history of the United States, they would be taking comfort in the fact that, for the first time, there is a Jewish candidate for president with a non-negligible chance of success. They’re not. It turns out that Jews don’t like…
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Opinion This Week Proves It: Politicians Won’t Call Out Anti-Semitism On Their Own Side
President Trump, long a trafficker in anti-Semitic stereotypes, treated American Jews to a classic anti-Semitic canard Tuesday afternoon. When asked about two Congresswomen, Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar, who had been barred from Israel at Trump’s own behest, he broke out an oldie but a goodie from the closet of anti-Semitic tropes. “Any Jewish people…
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