A professor at the University of Houston, Robert Zaretsky is also a culture columnist at the Forward.
Robert Zaretsky
By Robert Zaretsky
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Culture How to feel the staggering awesomeness of the Days of Awe (a little German philosophy can help)
A few years ago, a colleague asked me what makes the High Holidays so high. “Well,” I replied, “they are awesome days.” “Sounds like a slacker’s line in a Linklater film,” she laughed. “You know, D-A-Z-E of Awe.” I smiled, but uneasily. During the one Jewish holiday that, above all others, demands reverence, the joke…
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Culture What would Louis Brandeis do about Texas?
Nearly a century ago, the Supreme Court ruled that warrantless wiretapping, because a physical trespass did not occur, was not an unwarranted violation of an individual’s rights. The majority opinion, however, proved less influential than one of the dissenting ones. The framers of the Fourth and Fifth Amendments, this associate justice affirmed, “sought to protect…
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Culture With its abortion bill and new gun laws, Texas is a blacklisted Jewish screenwriter’s Hollywood nightmare
A marshal learns that a group of murderous gunslingers, led by a killer he had sent to jail, is heading to his town. After waiting in vain for volunteers at his office, he strides to the saloon and even the church to ask for deputies. Met with scornful jibes at the first and mournful gazes…
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Culture The French Tucker Carlson is Jewish, xenophobic — and maybe a presidential candidate
France has lurched into its annual exodus known as la rentrée. It is the moment when the French, after a long summer at the shore or in the mountains, return to their offices and schools. Accompanying this vast population shift is la rentrée politique, when the nation’s politicians return to partisan sniping and intraparty squabbles,…
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Culture Can a visionary Jewish philosopher help us make sense of the chaos in Afghanistan?
As scenes of turmoil and terror in Kabul unfold on our screens, our politicians and pundits are in hot pursuit of those responsible for this nightmare. There is, remarkably enough, something of a consensus when it comes to an answer: President Joseph Biden. These critics may be right, but as the work of a Jewish…
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Culture In maskless Texas, a famed Jewish math whiz’s theories are playing out in real time — and it’s frightening to behold
Future historians of Texas might well puzzle over events now unfolding in our state. The fourth wave of the pandemic, whipped into a frenzy by the Delta variant, has crashed over Texans, filling emergency room beds and overwhelming medical personnel. Some hospitals, out of space, are transporting patients to others. Breakthrough cases among already vaccinated…
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Culture How Anti-Vax protesters use Nazi symbols — and pervert the ideals of ‘Liberté’
Last week, the Public Religion Research Institute released its study on the degree of vaccine hesitancy of American faith groups. The findings were, perhaps, not surprising: American Jews register, by far, the lowest degree of hesitancy towards vaccination. A study on the attitude of American faith groups toward the current political tensions in France over…
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Culture Adolf Eichmann is alive and well and living in America
In a recent column in the Washington Post, the conservative commentator Michael Gerson reflected on Republican opposition to the government’s efforts to vaccinate Americans against COVID-19. Perplexed by the lies parroted by GOP politicians and pundits, he observed that neither opportunism nor fanaticism fully explained their behavior. “This is hard,” Gerson confessed, “to get my…
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Yiddish די הגדה ווי אַ לעבעדיקער דענקמאָל פֿון אַשכּנזישער פּאָעזיעThe Haggadah as a living monument to Ashkenazi poetry
אַמאָל זענען די פּייטנים, מיסטישע דיכטער־וויזיאָנערן, געווען אויבן־אָן בײַ די פֿראַנצויזישע און דײַטשישע ייִדן.
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