Samuel G. Freedman
By Samuel G. Freedman
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Opinion Will Electing This Little-Known Jewish Democrat Stop Trump?
On the day before the first anniversary of Barack Obama’s first inauguration as president, voters in Massachusetts went to the polls in a special election to fill the Senate seat vacated by the death of Ted Kennedy. By all logic, the Democratic candidate, state attorney general Martha Coakley, should have coasted to victory over her…
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Opinion If Trump Really Knew the Somalis of Minnesota, He Would Rethink His Cruel Ban on Refugees
On the last Sunday before the presidential election, Donald Trump swooped into the Minneapolis airport for a typically inflammatory rally. At a transit hub with hundreds of Somali employees, in a city with about 25,000 Somali residents, the Republican candidate fed his audience fear, rage and resentment. “Everybody’s reading about the disaster taking place in…
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Opinion Why We Need Hanukkah’s Message of Righteous Rebellion in Age of Trump
We Jews, as an outnumbered and persecuted people, have literally hallowed the principle of communal unity. We espouse it not only as a practical value, but also as a religious injunction. The agents of destruction of the Second Temple were the Roman legions. Yet the Talmud tells us that the truer, underlying cause was Jewish…
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Opinion A Letter to My Evangelical Friend, Who Betrayed Me (and All Jews) by Voting for Trump
Dear C., Over the years as we’ve gradually become friends, we’ve come to realize how unlikely and how important our bond is. I’m an observant Jew and a political liberal, and you’re an evangelical Christian and a political conservative, and our peoples have been historical enemies for a long time. We thought we were helping…
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Opinion Bernie Sanders’s Rosh Hashanah Sermon — and Its Radical Lesson for All Liberals
When a hacker leaked a trove of internal emails from the Democratic National Committee several months ago, one of them considered the condition of Bernie Sanders’s soul — and its potential as a wedge issue during the primary campaign against Hillary Clinton. “Does he believe in a God,” asked Brad Marshall, the DNC’s chief financial…
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Opinion How Republicans Tried To Flip the Jewish Vote — and Created Donald Trump
On the Shabbat morning of June 19, 1943, in a tiny upstairs shtibl in the East Bronx, my Uncle Seymour became a bar mitzvah. My grandmother had given the rabbi very specific instructions for the occasion. As Seymour walked through the congregation, bearing the Torah scrolls, the rabbi followed right behind him, holding aloft a…
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Opinion What the Other Bernie Teaches Us About the Budding Sanders Personality Cult
In mid-February of 1983, a week before Chicago chose its Democratic nominee for mayor, People magazine published a bemused profile of a political curiosity named Bernard Epton. An insurance lawyer who had put in a dozen years as a state legislator, Epton was the Republican candidate for City Hall. In a city that overwhelmingly voted…
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Opinion AIPAC Now Creepily Resembles the NRA
As the members of the National Rifle Association gathered in Cincinnati for their annual convention in May 1977, the group superficially resembled the same bunch of hobbyists it had been for most of its century-long history. Two Civil War veterans had founded the NRA in 1871 out of a concern about how few Union soldiers…
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