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 Martin Heidegger’s Black Notebooks Reignite Charges of Anti-Semitism
On this side of the Atlantic, the imminent publication in Germany of Martin Heidegger’s “Black Notebooks” (“Schwarzen Hefte”) has caused few if any ripples. For better or worse, the philosopher who theorized about “absence from the world” has been largely absent from our world. Yet in Europe, a surf-like pounding in newspapers and magazines has…
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Opinion Why All of France Should Shiver When Demonstrators Shout: ‘Jews Out’
Eighty years ago, on February 6, 1934, the French Republic had a near-death experience. On that wintry evening, tens of thousands of protestors, mostly young and mostly male, massed along the boulevards of Paris. Their aim was to bring down the Republic—or, as they called it, “la gueuse” or whore. In the eyes of contemporaries,…
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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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