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
-
Opinion The Paradox Of Jared Kushner, A ‘Man Without Qualities’
Seventy-five years ago, Robert Musil died in Switzerland. The Austrian writer had taken refuge there in 1938 with his Jewish wife Martha, and as the war progressed, he spent his time trying to make ends meet and to complete his novel, “The Man Without Qualities.” Neither effort was successful: Musil’s life ended in poverty when…
-
Opinion Harvey Is Biblical For Me And My Family — But Not For The Reason You Think
This morning I took a break from clearing my yard of the tree limbs and debris to google the name of the storm that caused the damage, along with the adjective “biblical”. The number of links that appeared—nearly seven million—rivaled the magnitude of the event. No doubt, many have nothing to do with the event…
-
Opinion 42 French Muslims Condemn Terrorist Attacks — Except When Victims Are Jewish?
Over the past two years, the debate among French Muslims over Islam’s place in France — who it represents, what it stands for, why a small minority murder in its name and how to stop them — has intensified with each new terrorist attack on French soil. Following last week’s appalling events in St Etienne…
-
Culture Reconstructing a Child’s Life During the Holocaust
A History of the Grandparents I Never Had By Ivan Jablonka Stanford University Press, 352 pages, $30 Perhaps no moment in modern history has been written about as much as the Shoah. Historians and memoirists, in particular, have striven to re-create or retell this event. While the two genres are distinct, the dividing line between…
-
Opinion Meet the French Jews Who Love Marine Le Pen and Her Far Right Party
Samuel Johnson’s riff on female preachers and walking dogs — “It is not done well, but you are surprised to find it done at all” — comes to mind with the news from France of the creation of the UPFJ, a bland acronym that stands for the Union des Patriotes Francais Juifs, or the Union…
-
Culture How A.J. Liebling Became BFF’s With Albert Camus
Seventy years ago, on March 27, 1946, the renowned New Yorker writer A.J. Liebling fell in love. Bard of battered boxers and Bowery boozers, Liebling had not, however, fallen for one of the many dolls in his life. Instead, he fell for a guy — or, better yet, an ideal embodied by this particular guy….
-
Film & TV How a Holocaust Film Earned Jacques Rivette’s Deepest Contempt
With the death last week of Jacques Rivette, a certain idea of French cinema took one step closer to death. Along with François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard and Alain Resnais, Rivette was one of the enfants terribles of the so-called Nouvelle Vague, or New Wave. Rebelling against the reign of studios and what they scorned as…
-
Opinion Every Single Frenchman Can Don a Kippah and It Still Won’t Help French Jews
To be or not to be…willing to wear a kippah in public? That is the question the French Jewish community, with Hamlet-like intensity and introspection, has been debating over the last few weeks. Even France’s non-Jews are making their opinions known, most notably by donning kippot in symbolic gestures of “solidarity.” It is, inevitably, a…
Explore
Most Popular
- 1
News Who was Horst Wessel, and why are people comparing Charlie Kirk to him?
- 2
Culture Charlie Kirk kept a ‘Jewish Sabbath.’ What did he mean by that?
- 3
Film & TV Robert Redford’s legacy is surprisingly Jewish
- 4
Antisemitism Decoded Israel is being blamed for Charlie Kirk’s death. Here’s what that conspiracy theory says about the far right’s divide
In Case You Missed It
-
Culture This Israeli photographer’s work is all about ‘subverting masculinity’
-
Opinion The terrifying Nazi precedent for Jimmy Kimmel’s suspension — and the reasons to stay hopeful
-
Fast Forward Freed hostage Edan Alexander says he’s returning to the IDF next month
-
Yiddish World How a Yiddish acting troupe fooled the Tsarist government
-
Shop the Forward Store
100% of profits support our journalism
