
A professor at the University of Houston, Robert Zaretsky is also a culture columnist at the Forward.
A professor at the University of Houston, Robert Zaretsky is also a culture columnist at the Forward.
On February 26, just two days after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the Ukrainian Embassy in Israel issued an invitation to its “dear compatriots, brothers and all caring citizens of Israel.” This was an unusual invitation: it was directed to all of those “who wish to participate in combat actions against the Russian aggressor. The response…
“The Tears of History: From Kishinev to Pittsburgh,” by the renowned French historian Pierre Birnbaum, takes its title from the work of the influential Jewish-American historian Salo Baron. In rejecting what he called the “lachrymose” account of Jewish history, Baron instead insisted that, both in medieval Europe and modern America, our history was more fortunate…
In his classic work “The Captive Mind,” the Polish poet and Nobel laureate Czeslaw Milosz remarks on our tendency to see the world we have always lived in as natural. The buildings on our street “seem more like rocks rising out of the earth” and the clothes we wear as we do our jobs in…
One of Karl Marx’s best-known lines appears in “The Eighteenth Brumaire,” his merciless vivisection of the revolution of 1848 in France. Torn between crying and laughing at the words and actions of the French revolutionaries, who seemed to see themselves as characters in a remake of the earlier revolution of 1789, Marx panned their performance….
The past two years have made amateur epidemiologists of us all. We have learned that “aerosol” applies to more than hairsprays, that “crushing the curve” means more than slamming a pitch into the bleachers, and that ingesting bleaches will not crush the coronavirus. We have also learned the distinction between pandemic — the exponential explosion…
This week marked the start of spring semester at my place of work, the University of Houston. In one of my classes, devoted to the French Enlightenment, I launched into my rather tired explanation why it was important to understand this era. I told my students that so much that our world has since witnessed…
The most recent episode of “Saturday Night Live” revealed that Paul Rudd is not just the sexiest man alive in America in 2021, but also the savviest. Rudd was to be inducted into the “5-Timers Club” — those happy few who have hosted “SNL” five times. But with the Omicron variant sweeping across New York…
“When the artist finds himself,” Max Ernst famously remarked, “he is lost.” That he had never found himself, Ernst added, was “his only lasting achievement.” And yet, Ernst had indeed once found himself in, well, surreal circumstances. In 1939, the 50-year old German painter who had lived in Paris since the early 1920s was caught…
אַן עקספּערט פֿון פֿאַרצײַטיקע קמיעות האָט באַשטעטיקט אַז די קמיע איז געלעגן אויפֿן אָרט פֿונעם אַמאָליקן לאַנד כּנען.
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