A professor at the University of Houston, Robert Zaretsky is also a culture columnist at the Forward.
Robert Zaretsky
By Robert Zaretsky
-
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…
-
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…
-
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…
-
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…
-
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…
-
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…
-
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,”…
-
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…
Explore
Most Popular
- 1
News Student protesters being deported are not ‘martyrs and heroes,’ says former antisemitism envoy
- 2
News Who is Alan Garber, the Jewish Harvard president who stood up to Trump over antisemitism?
- 3
Fast Forward Suspected arsonist intended to beat Gov. Josh Shapiro with a sledgehammer, investigators say
- 4
Politics Meet America’s potential first Jewish second family: Josh Shapiro, Lori, and their 4 kids
In Case You Missed It
-
Opinion Why can Harvard stand up to Trump? Because it didn’t give in to pro-Palestinian student protests
-
Culture How an Israeli dance company shaped a Catholic school boy’s life
-
Fast Forward Brooklyn event with Itamar Ben-Gvir cancelled days before Israeli far-right minister’s US trip
-
Culture How Abraham Lincoln in a kippah wound up making a $250,000 deal on ‘Shark Tank’
-
Shop the Forward Store
100% of profits support our journalism
