In the Forward’s opinion section, you’ll find analysis and essays from diverse corners of the Jewish world.
To pitch an opinion piece, email our Opinion Editor, Talya Zax.
In the Forward’s opinion section, you’ll find analysis and essays from diverse corners of the Jewish world.
To pitch an opinion piece, email our Opinion Editor, Talya Zax.
Israel has become a defining fact of Jewish life for Zionist and anti-Zionist Jews alike
Kissinger was a skilled statesman whose diplomatic strategy helped Israel in fundamental ways
From the moment the statement dropped on Twitter, it was entirely predictable what would happen next. After Sunrise DC announced they were withdrawing from a voting rights coalition because of the participation of three major Jewish organizations on Tuesday, Oct. 19, many leaders in the Jewish community labeled Sunrise DC’s behavior as antisemitic, which major…
On Oct. 27, 2018, a white supremacist opened fire in the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh during Shabbat services, killing eleven people and injuring two. Three years later, in the beginning of October, Pittsburgh hosted the three-day Eradicate Hate Global Summit, presented in honor of the members of our community murdered and wounded in…
If 174,000 American Jews had been physically attacked in the past year, you’d think we’d all have heard about it. That’s roughly five times the number of Jews who were assaulted, had their businesses vandalized or were sent to concentration camps during Kristallnacht, the worst pogrom of the 20th century. Yet that’s the tsunami of…
This essay originally appeared in Hey Alma. Growing up with one foot in Mexico and one foot in the United States, I am no stranger to the idea of straddling two cultures. In religious studies, we call this idea liminality. Vampires, centaurs, even Jesus Christ (as both divine and human) are all liminal beings. To…
My grandfather Alexander Brill was murdered in Belgrade, Yugoslavia 80 years ago this November. My family only learned the date — Nov. 13, 1941 — in 2017 when we received documents from the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. When you think of the Holocaust, you likely think of massive death camps, gas chambers, cattle cars, prisoner…
Breast cancer can strike any woman at any time, yet few young women are fully aware of the potential deadly threat they face. For Ashkenazi Jews like myself, this disease looms as an even larger threat compared to most women. A mutation in the BRCA gene is the most common cause of hereditary breast cancer….
Have you ever heard the woods sing “B’tzelem Elohim”? The whistle between trees carries the melody. The acoustics of boulders amplify the reach of the lyrics: “When I reach out to you and you to me/We become B’tzelem Elohim.” It is in the divine image — B’tzelem Elohim — when an intergenerational and multiracial group…
I have engaged in civil disobedience against the actions of Sudanese crimes against humanity in Darfur, South African apartheid, and a U.S. administration whose Vietnam policy I morally deplored. But never have I done so at the gates of the White House of a President I so staunchly admire, whose policies resonate so deeply with…
Muhammad Shehada’s Op-Ed “Palestinian Textbooks aren’t the problem,” published in The Forward on Oct. 14, laments the fact that the Palestinian Authority’s educational materials and their incitement toward Jews and Israelis has recently gained traction in Europe. European policymakers have researched the violence and antisemitism within Palestinian textbooks for years, passing legislation in 2018, 2020…
When my dad was growing up in Leningrad in the former Soviet Union, he’d beat up the neighborhood kids for calling him a “zhyd”—a pejorative term for Jew that’s akin to “kike.” His flair for fighting was prophetic, as he grew up to be a professional boxer. When he and my mom started dating, she…
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