Leonard Fein
By Leonard Fein
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Opinion Is Israel Losing Young Democrats?
Some people find numbers intimidating. If you are among them, skip the first four paragraphs. When it comes to Americans favoring Israel over the Palestinians, Israel wins by a wide margin — 54% to 8%. Alas, if that’s as far as you read, you will be woefully underinformed. For that number is only for Americans…
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Opinion Barack Obama’s Speech Appeals to Israelis’ Best Instincts — and Interests
President Obama’s speech in Jerusalem was not merely a home run; it was out of the park. Few people — truth to tell, I can think of none — combine eloquence and substance as well as Obama, and the shame of it is that there was no one on base when he delivered his major…
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Opinion Anthony Lewis, Teacher and Thinker, Cared More About Israel Than His Critics
In all the richly deserved encomiums that came in the wake of Tony Lewis’s death, there is scarce mention of Lewis’s frequent commentary on the Israel/Palestine conflict. It is as if all he wrote about – and this, all agree, he did brilliantly – was the law and the courts. But in fact his interest…
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Opinion A Useful Tension at the Heart of Judaism
A very senior professor from a very distinguished university sought me out recently, ostensibly to talk about international human rights. His specific interest, he said, was in the relative absence of Jews from the ongoing struggle to advance humanitarian concerns. But the issue that ended up taking most of our time was: Why Jewish? That…
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Opinion The Work of Passover
I have long believed that Judaism is a system of vocational education — that is, of education for a vocation, a calling (from the Latin vocare, to call). I needn’t elaborate here on the substance and texture of that calling. I note only that such questions as ayeka (“Where are you?”) and such injunctions as…
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Opinion Abandoning Education, the Great Equalizer
As we all know, America is the quintessential Land of Opportunity. It turns out, however, that what we know is wrong — very wrong. As Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz wrote in The New York Times in mid-February, the gap between the American promise and the American reality “could hardly be wider.” That is a sobering…
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Opinion Tzipi Livni Walks Into a Trap
It is not at all uncommon for appetite to displace sound judgment. Think about over-eating: Your diet will keep until tomorrow. Or think about the questions you might have asked if you hadn’t been quite so hungry — and flattered — by the job you were just offered. Last week’s case in point: Tzipi Livni,…
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Opinion Barack Obama Returns to Roots as Community Organizer
Back during the primary battles of 2008, my brother and I had an ongoing disagreement. He wondered how this upstart senator, his eloquence notwithstanding, could ride herd on the doyens of the House and Senate. My standard response was to invoke Obama’s experience as a community organizer. “No,” I’d say, “Obama will not go that…
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