Leonard Fein
By Leonard Fein
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Opinion The Dangerous Man Who Dreams of Leading Israel
He may one day be Prime Minister of Israel. He has multiple qualifications. He’s a multi-millionaire (software), smart, young (42), charming — and ambitious. In the meantime, as a member of the Netanyahu cabinet, he is the Minister of Economy, Minister for Jerusalem and Diaspora Affairs and Minister of Religious Services of the State of…
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Opinion Praying Alone
Be careful what you wish for. My friend Sharon Cohen has introduced me to a rapidly growing phenomenon — to wit, streaming services. For those of you who may be technological laggards, a streaming service is a live broadcast of a worship service. Sit back, relax, and you can watch the Friday night service from…
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Opinion Making Ritual for Ourselves
Take the ritual of sitting shiva, for example. It is a cluster of touching and cryptic customs. Try parsing those customs and you will find yourself at a loss for words — or, if you’ve bothered to read the “explanatory” literature, inundated by a surfeit of words, this interpretation being run over by that, one…
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Opinion Israel Continues To Erase the Green Line
Regular readers of my columns in this newspaper will perhaps have noticed that I’ve written very little about Israel in recent weeks. There’s a reason for that — to wit, my conviction that Israel’s occupation of the West Bank is so harmful to the country, to say nothing of its manifest harm to the Palestinian…
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Opinion Moving Toward a ‘Living Wage’
There’s an active debate in America regarding the minimum wage. By and large, with President Obama’s endorsement and substantial public agreement, there’s widespread support for a bump upward, from the current national minimum of $7.25 and hour to $10.10 an hour. That sounds like a hefty hike, but it is actually about as stingy as…
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Opinion Pete Seeger Gave Folk Music Life — and So Much More
If Pete Seeger had written or re-discovered or adapted just “If I Had A Hammer” and “This Land Is Your Land,” even without so very many more, his passing would be a sad day. But he did way more than that. Essentially, he gave birth to a new life for folk music in this country….
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Opinion How Israel Went From Beacon of Hope to ‘Normal’ Outpost of Reaction
The literature on Jewish self-hate is vast; not so the literature on Jewish self-love. Max Weber once proposed that oppressed peoples develop a “theodicy of disprivilege,” a way of explaining to themselves (and compensating for) their persecution, and that the most common such theodicies rely on the assertion by the oppressed of their superior moral…
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Opinion Three Different Deaths
Three noteworthy deaths, though only two of the three are notable. There was a time I knew Edgar Bronfman, who died recently at age 84, quite well. He was helpful to my progeny, Moment Magazine. We’d have lunch, once a month or so, in his private dining room in the Seagram building in New York,…
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Music For Bob Dylan’s biographer, ‘A Complete Unknown’ is a dream come true — even if it’s mostly fiction
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Culture They were a kosher bakery success story — 80 years later, people are still trying to make a buck off their babka
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Culture ‘A Complete Unknown’ proves that one thing about Bob Dylan will certainly endure
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Film & TV Why ‘The Brutalist’ resonated so deeply with me
In Case You Missed It
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News 18 notable Jews who died in 2024
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Fast Forward Department of Ed resolves Title VI antisemitism complaints against 5 U of California campuses, U of Cincinnati
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Theater While Yiddish lives, Isaac Bashevis Singer’s ghost stories may flourish
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Yiddish World Frankie’s Menorah (a Yiddish Hanukkah story)
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