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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Opinion Lance Armstrong and the Meaning of Chutzpah
Two confessions: I am neither a speaker of Yiddish nor a fan of professional cycling. But as we hover in the halftime break of Lance Armstrong’s interview with Oprah Winfrey, I can’t help but wonder if the televised confession has implications for the meaning of chutzpah. Most of us are familiar with Leo Rosten’s classic…
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Opinion French Jews Picked as Most Loved — and Hated — Figures
The results are in from France’s annual flurry of end of the year polls to determine who is in and who is out, embraced or disgraced by the public. According to the newspaper Le Parisien, the nation’s most admired public figure is the singer and songwriter Jean-Jacques Goldman. More or less at the same time,…
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Culture The Depardieu Affair
One hundred and fifteen years ago, Cyrano de Bergerac leapt into history. Following the opening performance of Edmond Rostand’s play on December 28, 1897, a dazzled audience obliged the cast to make forty curtain calls. The following night, government officials came to the theater and awarded Rostand with the Chevalier de la Legion d’Honneur. A…
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Opinion France’s Rising Star Takes on Extremists
The French media are feasting on this week’s revelation that the fading star Gérard Depardieu, who brought to the screen such icons of French patriotism as Astérix and Cyrano de Bergerac, is settling in Belgium. The move, it appears, is dictated less by the scenery (there is none) than the lower tax bracket, an issue…
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Opinion Behind the French ‘Oui’ for Abbas
The announcement, made by Laurent Fabius, France’s foreign minister, that his government will support the Palestinian Authority’s bid for “non-member observer status” at the United Nations next week is hardly news, but nevertheless newsworthy. The news, of course, has been in the offing for quite some time. France’s Socialist Party, which has historically enjoyed closer…
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Culture Uncertain Future for Jews in French Provinces
An Uncertain Future: Voices of a French Jewish Community, 1940-2012 By Robert I. Weiner and Richard E. Sharpless University of Toronto Press, 344 pages, $29.95 Much rarer than Dijon’s mustard and wine is the small and, until recently, vibrant Jewish community that called this small French city home. But as its title warns, “An Uncertain…
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Opinion Imagine an Israeli Arab Alfred Dreyfus
Once again, France is having an affair with the affair — the Dreyfus Affair. On November 4, Le Monde published a controversial essay by Israeli sociologist Eva Illouz, titled “Israel: Justice or Tribalism,” in which she views contemporary Israel through the prism of this 19th-century event. Israel, she concludes, lacks the political and legal ingredients…
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Opinion France Confronts Sins of Past — And Present
Despite its claim as une ville fleurie (city of flowers), Drancy is a dim and dreary northern suburb of Paris. This was fitting, however: President François Hollande was there in late September to address the town’s grim role as the transit camp for French and foreign Jews to Auschwitz, and the burden this past places…
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In Case You Missed It
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Yiddish ווידעאָ: היסטאָריקערין וויווי לאַקס באַשרײַבט געשיכטע פֿון לאָנדאָנער ייִדישער פּרעסעVIDEO: Historian Vivi Laks tells history of the London Yiddish Press
שבֿע צוקער פֿירט דעם שמועס מיט וויווי לאַקס און ביידע לייענען פֿאָר עטלעכע פֿעליעטאָנען פֿון יענע צײַטן.
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Yiddish World Puppet Monty Pickle is guest on the Forward’s ‘Yiddish Word of the Day’
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Culture We tried to fix Hallmark’s Hanukkah problem. Here’s the movie we made instead
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Fast Forward Holocaust survivor event features a Rob Reiner video address — recorded just weeks before his death
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