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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Opinion When Munich Became a Synonym for Appeasement
“A quarrel in a far away country between people of whom we know nothing.” When he pronounced these words, British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain was referring, of course, to Czechoslovakia. That “quarrel” eventually led to the Munich Agreement: an event which opened the path to WWII and whose 75th anniversary we are now marking. Rarely…
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Opinion The French Intellectual Who Is Both in the Shadows and in the Spotlight
Have you heard about the sinister role the French intellectual Bernard-Henri Lévy, in cahoots with the Israeli government, played in bringing down the government of Egypt’s president, Mohamed Morsi? And that BHL — aka He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named-but-Wears-White-Shirts-Opened-to-the-Navel — used telekinesis to achieve his nefarious goal? These, at least, are the questions that recent news dispatches from Turkey…
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Culture France Has Problems With All Religions — Not Just Islam
A couple of months ago, the French media reported on yet another clash between religious extremists and state authorities. Fifty boys from a private religious school near Paris arrived at a public lycée to take their final examination; however, when two women serving as their proctors met them, there was a standoff. The students, citing…
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Opinion Primo Levi Was No Saint — But We Already Knew That
Prisoner 174517 had a recurrent nightmare at Auschwitz. He dreamed that he had survived, returned home and told his family about his experience —yet nobody listened. That same prisoner, Primo Levi, who died a little more than 25 years ago, probably by his own hand, has now been subjected to a different nightmare: someone who…
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Opinion The Specter of Xenophobia Stalks Europe
Poetry, Robert Frost famously said, is what gets lost in translation. But as “L’Allemagne Disparaît,” the newly issued French translation of Thilo Sarrazin’s “Deutschland Schafft Sich Ab,” reminds us, demagoguery survives translation all too well. While the translation of the French title, “Germany Is Disappearing,” transforms that of the German title, “Germany Does Itself In,”…
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Culture Who Was Afraid of Viviane Forrester?
After a long battle with cancer, the French Jewish novelist and essayist Viviane Forrester died in April at the age of 87. Not everyone mourned her death: Neither the Representative Council of Jewish Institutions of France, more commonly known under the acronym CRIF, or the Tribune Juive marked her passing. But most everyone, including her…
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Culture Francesco Lotoro’s Mission To Save the Music of European Jews
‘We lament the loss of the treasures of the library at Alexandria, and the great step back in knowledge it entailed. The same thing will happen if we lose the music of the concentration camps. It’s an imaginary library that may never materialize.” Walking the narrow streets of the decaying industrial city of Barletta in…
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Opinion French Chief Rabbi’s Fall From Grace in Plagiarism Scandal
Forty years ago, “The Mad Adventures of Rabbi Jacob” had French audiences doubled over in laughter. Gerard Oury’s frantic comedy of an anti-Semitic businessman who finds himself mistaken for a famous rabbi — don’t ask — smashed box office records. The timing was important: Oury’s anarchic comedy reflected the end of a 30-year run of…
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