Editorial


2010 in Verse

What a year this was, this twenty-ten!/Wikileaks, iPads, a Beck named Glenn, Tea Parties and miners in Chile,/A campaign that was strange and silly./For Jews in the news it was a year/Of achievement and reason to cheer.Read More

Oh, Henry

Apologists for Henry Kissinger — and there are many in the upper echelons of the organized Jewish community — argue that his egregious comments ought to be weighed against the good he did for Israel and the Jewish people. Curiously, these are the same people who pounce on any hint of anti-Semitism in others, and too often conflate valid criticism of current Israeli policies with crude anti-Zionism.Read More

Making Service Matter

Volunteerism comes in all shapes, sizes and outcomes. There are the one-day service projects that can galvanize those who participate, but may not always have the kind of oomph that leads to lasting change. There are long-term commitments like Teach for America and the Peace Corps that are out of reach for most workaday people.Read More

Our Money, Their Salaries

The Forward created its annual survey of executive compensation in Jewish nonprofits to enable our readers to make informed choices about their own philanthropic giving and to hold leaders accountable for their pay and performance. What’s disheartening is to encounter the reluctance and avoidance on the part of some nonprofits to do more than they absolutely, positively must under the law. So, for example, 15 months after assuming the position of president of the Jewish Federations of North America, we still don’t know how much Jerry Silverman earns.Read More

Leaking for Leaking’s Sake

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.Read More

Hiring Rights and Wrongs

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.Read More

Denial at the Western Wall

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 of distorted, insulting lesson. History says otherwise.Read More

A Dangerous Link

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 on both the left and the right among Americans who care about Israel’s security. It’s not beneficial to either nation.Read More

Looking at Haiti

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.Read More

Hanukkah Time

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.Read More

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