Leonard Fein
By Leonard Fein
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Opinion With the Elections, a New Reckoning
At last, this bizarre election season draws to a close. How it will end, no one can reliably say. We read of widespread anger, we know something of the widespread dislocation that is the continuing consequence of the Great Recession, we watch with concern the widespread emergence of a cohort of candidates who seem peculiarly…
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Opinion Rights of Return and Recognition Cannot Be Swapped
In a recent New York Times essay, published Oct. 14, Israel’s ambassador to the United States, Michael B. Oren, argues forcefully on behalf of the call by Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu for the Palestinians to recognize Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people. “Affirmation of Israel’s Jewishness,” he writes, “is the very foundation of…
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Opinion Seeking the Power Of a Community Organizer
Back during Barack Obama’s campaign for the presidency, I frequently found myself arguing with friends who were supporting Hillary Clinton’s bid. “How,” they would ask, “do you expect this young and relatively inexperienced man to stand up to the walruses of the Congress? They will ride roughshod over him!” My answer, which seemed to me…
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Opinion The Guatemala Revelations Are Not An Aberration
Now and then, I write here about matters that have no obvious connection to the world of the Jews. And now and then, such columns provoke responses from readers who question why a newspaper devoted to matters Jewish would publish such writing. So this time I am going to try to make the connection explicit….
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Opinion David Grossman, a Man Who Owns Israel
In his remarkable recent New Yorker profile of the Israeli writer David Grossman, George Packer observes that the heroine of Grossman’s new novel “embraces the breadth of Israel’s tragedy, a country that can take nothing for granted, not even its own existence.” (The novel, “To the End of the Land,” is newly available in English.)…
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Opinion Times for Rhetoric, Times for Action
Now and then, one gets carried away by rhetorical devices. The words are seductive, even if they distort their author’s intent. That, I fear, is what happened to me just last week in the course of writing a column about the artists’ boycott of the new cultural center in Ariel. My arguments in favor of…
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Opinion How History Will Judge Boycotters of the Theater in Ariel
What shall we make of the recent refusal by dozens of Israeli actors and artists to perform in the newly built cultural center in Ariel, a city of 17,000 deep in the West Bank? By now, their voices have been augmented by those of some 150 American peers, including Broadway producer Harold Prince, performers Eve…
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Opinion Israel Needs a Separation Wall
We have long since become accustomed to the Israeli Haredi community’s version of roadside bombs. They come, they go, damaging Judaism’s dignity with their excesses, but inflicting no human casualties. Last week’s over-the-top outburst by Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, head of the Shas party’s Council of Torah Sages, was the sort of derangement we have come…
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