Matthew Gindin is a journalist, educator and freelance writer located in Vancouver, BC. He is the Pacific Correspondent for the Canadian Jewish News, writes regularly for the Forward and the Jewish Independent and has been published in Tricycle: The Buddhist Review, Religion Dispatches, Kveller, Situate Magazine, and elsewhere. He also writes on Medium from time to time.
Yesterday, a right-wing Zionist Twitter personality directed the following question at me and some others: 1000s of Palestinians killed, tortured, jailed in Assad’s Syria. Why the silence of many pro-Palestinian voices? Could it be that #Israel isn’t involved? Do these folks truly care about Palestinian welfare? Or are they just cynically using Palestinians as a…
16 year old Ahed Tamimi has now been indicted on five charges of assault for slapping and kicking an Israeli soldier. In the pages of outlets like Ha’aretz, +972, Mondoweiss and Al Jazeera she has been hailed as a brave rebel, courageously saying “No!” to the occupying Israeli military. In the meantime, “pro-Israel” organizations and…
On the last day of 2017, Rabbi Shmuley Boteach took out a full-page ad in the Washington Post attacking Lorde, a massively popular 21-year-old pop singer from New Zealand, with the leading headlines “Lorde And New Zealand Ignore Syria To Attack Israel!” and “21 Is Young To Become A Bigot!” Boteach was seemingly incensed because…
Today’s Hanukkah is a breezy holiday of lights, dreidels, latkes, Maccabeats videos and gifts for the little ones. Yet its origins are, without question, rooted in a story of bloody violence, which we often gloss over: The story of the victory of the Hasmonean Jewish militants against the Seleucid Greeks. Later on, after the Hasmonean…
On November 27, the Forward published an opinion piece by Palestinian activist and journalist Mariam Barghouti, who asserted that one cannot be both a feminist and a Zionist. Despite the fact that the Forward’s opinion section published, on the same day, an essay promoting the point of view of “Zioness,” a feminist Zionist organization, The…
On September 26, I published a piece in the Forward detailing a petition before the Israeli High Court to end the sale of Israeli arms and training to the military of Myanmar, who are widely regarded as guilty of a campaign of ethnic cleansing against the Rohingya which some would call genocide. The Israeli government…
On October 16, the Forward published a letter from Abraham Wyner, a Professor of Statistics who argued that criticism of Israel’s sales to the Burmese military is exaggerated. He was writing in response to Peter Beinart’s article in the Forward calling out mainstream Jewish organizations for failing to criticize Israel’s provision of weapons and training…
I hate Halloween, though I’m unlikely to mention it to you in person. Let me explain why. My Dad is a Holocaust survivor. He was born just as the war was ending, and he spent the first several years of his life in a rat infested refugee camp in Austria. His parents had spent the…
100% of profits support our journalism
