Leonard Fein
By Leonard Fein
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Opinion The ‘Availability’ Of Aptitude
In 1873, Edward Clark, a Harvard physician, suggested that young women who engaged in “heavy mental activity” would wreck their reproductive system. “The results are monstrous brains and puny bodies… . The brain cannot take more than its share without injury to other organs.” What calls this to mind just now, obviously, is the flap…
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Opinion Trembling Before Saying ‘God”
God. There, I’ve said it. And I didn’t flinch. That’s the big divide, according to Frank Luntz, a Republican strategist who first came to prominence when he helped draft Newt Gingrich’s late and unlamented “Contract With America” back in 1994. Now Luntz is freely dispensing advice to Democrats in search of “values.” Or, more properly,…
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Opinion Back to School On Education
The big news in Jewish education these days is, of course, the dramatic expansion in day school enrollment. We are indebted to Marvin Schick and the Avi Chai Foundation for providing us the count as of the 2003-2004 school year: There were 759 schools and 205,035 students. For those of us in the non-Orthodox community,…
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Opinion Give Them Liberty or…
In the peroration of his inaugural speech, President Bush made explicit the scope of his ambition: “When the Declaration of Independence was first read in public and the Liberty Bell was sounded in celebration, a witness said, ‘It rang as if it meant something.’ In our time it means something still. America, in this young…
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Opinion Ariel Sharon: Man of Mystery
Prime Minister Sharon and his colleagues in Israel’s newly patched-together government now repeat, mantra-like, that the road map must be followed to its letter. Let us not look this gift horse too closely in the mouth; let us not dwell on that fact that when the road map was first put forward, in April of…
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Opinion Privatizing Hope
Let’s start with the president’s Christmas message: In his radio address on Christmas Day, George W. Bush observed, correctly, that “Many of our fellow Americans still suffer from the effects of illness or poverty,” and then went on to say that “Christmastime reminds each of us that we have a duty to our fellow citizens.”…
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Opinion Searching for the Next Herzl
The funeral took place in Vienna on July 7, 1904. The stunning announcement had come three days earlier: Theodor Herzl, dead at age 44. Here is Stefan Zweig’s description of the day, as quoted by Ernst Pawel in “The Labyrinth of Exile, A Life of Theodor Herzl”: “A strange day it was, a day in…
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Opinion The Way We War
Soon after World War II, when I was in my teens, I saw the film version of Erich Maria Remarque’s novel, “All Quiet on the Western Front.” The film, produced in 1930, is set during World War I. It was the first “anti-war” film of the sound era, and much as the war it depicted…
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Opinion A daring attack on Hezbollah may reveal Israel’s strengths — and its most terrifying weakness
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