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 Dreyfus Affair Continues To Intrigue and Confound After a Century
● An Officer and a Spy By Robert Harris Knopf, 448 pages, $27.95 ● Dreyfus: Politics, Emotion, and the Scandal of the Century By Ruth Harris Picador, 572 pages, $28 Why is it that people named Harris tend to have affairs with the Dreyfus Affair? Just three years ago, the British historian Ruth Harris published…
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Opinion Tunisia Makes Progress on Minority Rights — And the World Ignores It
“News of disaster is the only narrative people need. The darker the news, the grander the narrative.” This observation, made by a character in Don DeLillo’s novel Mao II, has never seemed truer than today. Just ask the citizens of Tunisia, who are marking on January 14 the third anniversary of the overthrow of Zine…
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Opinion How ‘Quenelle’ Salute Creator Dieudonne Built Bridge to Anti-Semitic Far Fight
The comedian Dieudonné M’bala M’bala, according to French authorities, is under investigation for inciting racial hatred. They have also urged city officials to consider barring Dieudonné from public performances during his upcoming tour. Prodding the government to act was the video clip of Dieudonné’s current show in Paris, when he mentions the name of Patrick…
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Opinion Roma Girl’s Deportation Drama Forces France To Relive Holocaust History
It’s déjà vu all over again for the French, with memories of the past washing up against experiences in the present. Tragically, an innocent teenage girl named Leonarda Dibrani has served as the spark for the most recent episode of this recurring national trauma. Two weeks ago, the French police stopped a bus taking Leonarda…
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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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