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 40th anniversary of the Kent State killings of four unarmed students was commemorated earlier this month, a seminal moment for many of us who came of age during an unpopular war and mounting civic strife. But it’s worth noting that the violence of that bloody spring did not end in Ohio. It spread all…
The latest round of shuttle diplomacy on the vexing issue of conversion to Judaism in Israel has left us wondering whether there can ever be a compromise on an issue this fundamental and, therefore, this divisive. There certainly has been welcome movement. When Knesset member David Rotem made the rounds of meetings with American Jewish…
The consulting group Advancing Women Professionals and the Jewish Community, led by the indefatigable Shifra Bronznick, is persuading, training, cajoling and exhorting American Jewish organizations to adopt family-friendly policies. The goal: 100 sign-ups in 2010. Since only 35% of Jewish communal organizations have paid maternity-leave policies, even though three-quarters of their workforce is female, reaching…
Grumbling about a commencement speaker is almost a rite of passage on many a college campus, the choice so inevitably drawing complaints from one aggrieved group or another that it is best not to make too much of it. But the criticism directed at Brandeis University for selecting Michael Oren, the Israeli ambassador to the…
It is rare, indeed, to find ourselves nodding in agreement with a pronouncement from a politician named Bush. But when Jeb Bush, former governor of Florida, became the first prominent national Republican to speak out against Arizona’s new, draconian immigration law, he reminded us that there was a time not long ago when some of…
We are told that the carefully worded, hard-to-decipher resolution on the role of women in Orthodox Judaism was approved by the Rabbinical Council of America on April 27 without a single murmur of opposition. That’s what we are told, anyhow. You have to take it on faith, because the RCA decided to bar the public,…
Rabbi Louis Jacobs was well on his way to becoming chief rabbi of the United Kingdom in the 1960s, when his ascension was stopped cold because of a small, brilliant book he had published challenging the traditional view that the Torah was dictated by God from Mount Sinai. Banned from his own Orthodox synagogue, he…
Easy for us to say it doesn’t matter if there are no longer any Protestants on the U.S. Supreme Court, what with two Jews among the nine current justices, and several more co-religionists on the short list to replace the retiring (and Protestant) John Paul Stevens. So what if the majority of Americans are Protestant,…
100% of profits support our journalism