Opinion articles that represent the views of the Forward’s editors.
Opinion articles that represent the views of the Forward’s editors.
Opinion articles that represent the views of the Forward’s editors.
Opinion articles that represent the views of the Forward’s editors.
The cascade of diplomatic cables unleashed by WikiLeaks and published by some of the world’s most respected news organizations has left us ambivalent and uncomfortable — as Jews, as journalists, as citizens. It’s impossible to say whether the predictions of the most dire consequences of this enormous dump of scattered information will come true, whether…
Back in 2008, then-candidate Barack Obama warmly endorsed his predecessor’s faith-based initiative, allowing churches and other religious groups to compete for federal grants to deliver social services, but with one major caveat. President Bush allowed those faith groups to discriminate in hiring. Candidate Obama pledged to end the practice. “If you get a federal grant,…
Really? What did Al-Mutawakel Taha, the Palestinian Authority’s deputy minister of information, think he would accomplish by issuing a “scientific” report claiming that the Western Wall wasn’t actually a Jewish historic site? Taha told the Forward’s Nathan Jeffay that the report was intended to educate the Jewish people. Thanks, but we don’t need this sort…
The Obama administration’s offer of a package of advanced weaponry and military assistance worth billions of dollars in return for an Israeli commitment to freeze settlement construction for just three months marks a troubling development in the relationship between the two allies. There’s a reason that this deal has drawn criticism from an unusual chorus…
The images beamed from Haiti seem to go from very bad to unbearably worse. The nation was already the poorest in the hemisphere before the January 12 earthquake crushed the landscape and killed hundreds of thousands. Then came the sight of more than a million displaced people living in over-crowded, squalid refugee camps. Then the…
Hanukkah comes early this year, in the way that Jewish holidays seem always to be early, or late, but never on time because it’s not at all clear what that means. In America, we live by two calendars. They rarely match, but they do instruct. When Hanukkah is late — that is, close to Christmas…
The joint recommendations of a bipartisan commission led by Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson and charged with balancing the federal budget included such incendiary ideas as raising the retirement age for Social Security and making its benefits more progressive. That these ideas are politically difficult doesn’t mean they should be dismissed. On the contrary. The…
This is an excerpt of the keynote speech given November 11 at the annual meeting of the Jewish Reconstructionist Federation in Newport Beach, Calif. I understand that your movement is struggling with major challenges, some of them institutional, some existential. So is journalism today. I have no magical prescription to offer, but I do think…
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