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
To the editor: I spent the first eight years of my life in Odessa, but lived most of my life in neighborhoods in South Brooklyn, with large populations of Jewish immigrants from the former Soviet Union. Ukraine suffered greatly during World War II, and the identity of the region has been heavily shaped by the…
I’m sorry for crying. Today is the hardest day. I don’t remember what it feels like not having the war. I remember that I used to have feelings and ambitions, but since the war began, it’s been very hard to make myself do anything or concentrate. I hate that I can’t feel anything when I…
This is an adaptation of Looking Forward, a weekly email from our editor-in-chief sent on Friday afternoons. Sign up here to get the Forward’s free newsletters delivered to your inbox. Download and print our free magazine of stories to savor over Shabbat and Sunday. Perhaps you’ve seen the Twitter posts: paired photographs of a Ukrainian…
“If anyone asks, you’re not Russian. You’re Moldovan.” That’s what my mother-in-law advised me a few days ago, as the world reacted with justified horror to the Russian military invading Ukraine. She wants to protect me. Originally from Moldova herself (as is my husband), she’s relieved to be able to tell people truthfully that she’s…
Over 2 million Ukrainians have fled their country in the 14 days since the aggressive Russian invasion began, creating the fastest refugee crisis in modern history. Ukraine’s neighbors — such as Poland, Hungary, Moldova and Belarus — have been the first destination for most of these refugees, as the rest of the world watches in…
Sometimes it feels like history is doing its best to prove to my family that there’s no safe place on earth. As an Israeli national born to Jewish Ukrainian parents, I often joke that I feel comfortable in Quebec, where I have lived for the past seven years, because here, too, there is a generations-old…
When Stephanie Gold, a Los Angeles lawyer, read that Volodymyr Zelenskyy told European Union leaders, “this might be the last time you see me alive,” she broke down and cried. “I’m terrified for him,” she said. There’s something unique about the way that Zelenskyy has entered the hearts of American Jews. In a week, Ukraine’s…
Before last week, my greatest concerns were avoiding Omicron and looking for a new job. Now I’m waiting for news on when the war in Ukraine, the country my parents and grandparents were born in, will stop. Over the past few days, my grandmother has made several calls to distant friends and relatives overseas, checking…
I am sickened by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton’s recently announced nonbinding opinion regarding gender-affirming care, which states that medical treatments used in the transition process for transgender minors (ie: those whose gender identity does not correspond with the sex they were assigned at birth) ought to be defined as acts of child abuse. I…
“My sister, brothers, mother and father are all buried in Babi Yar,” Fania Khasidovich told me when I visited her in 2008 in Fastiv, a city of 40,000 people about 50 miles southwest of Kyiv. It was only a few days before her 92nd birthday. “I was with them,” she continued, “I lived through it,…
This is an adaptation of Looking Forward, a weekly email from our editor-in-chief sent on Friday afternoons. Sign up here to get the Forward’s free newsletters delivered to your inbox. Download and print our free magazine of our most memorable Ukraine stories so far. One of Natan Sharansky’s vivid early childhood memories is the 300th…
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