A professor at the University of Houston and the Women’s Institute of Houston, Robert Zaretsky is also a culture columnist at the Forward.
Robert Zaretsky
By Robert Zaretsky
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Culture In America, as in Ukraine, the unthinkable has become thinkable
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…
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Culture How a career in performance prepared Volodymyr Zelenskyy for this moment in Ukraine
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….
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Culture Is this particular strain of antisemitism and bigotry becoming endemic?
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…
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Culture For Jews, Texas is beginning to look more like France (that’s not a good thing)
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…
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Culture In Paul Rudd’s extreme disappointment, a universal philosophy for 2022
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…
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Culture In a notorious French internment camp, harrowing reminders of the consequences of extremism
“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…
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Culture How a right-wing Jewish presidential candidate is channeling de Gaulle, X-Men and ‘The King’s Speech’
After months of hedging, Éric Zemmour finally crossed the Rubicon yesterday. In a video released on YouTube, the racist and reactionary pundit declared his candidacy in next year’s French presidential election. Upon parsing the video’s words and images, a chorus of commentators have noted the many cues Zemmour took from Charles de Gaulle’s historic appeal…
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Culture What Hannah Arendt is telling us about Kyle Rittenhouse and Kenosha
In her account of the trial of Adolf Eichmann, the SS officer who oversaw the transportation of European Jews to Nazi death camps during World War II, Hannah Arendt noted a divergence between the goals of the prosecution and judges. The former, conceived by Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion and carried out by the chief prosecutor…
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