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 Remembrance of Jews’ Past
It was 30 years ago that Yosef Yerushalmi’s” Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory” was first published. The shortest book by Yerushalmi, a prolific professor of Jewish history at Columbia University until his death in 2009, it has had the longest reach. The issues raised in the book, Yerushalmi suggested, are not “necessarily confined to…
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Culture The Jews Who Plumbed Hitler’s Brain
The Pursuit of the Nazi Mind: Hitler, Hess, and the Analysts By Daniel Pick Oxford University Press, 368 pages, $35 More than 20 years ago, Neal Gabler declared that Hollywood was the creation of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe. In his remarkable book “An Empire of Their Own,” Gabler in fact suggested that the Meyers…
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Opinion Terror on the Rue des Rosiers
Thirty years ago today, a terrorist commando exploded into the famed Jewish restaurant Jo Goldenberg’s, located on the rue des Rosiers in the Marais district of Paris. Spraying machine gun fire and grenades, they killed six people, wounded nearly two dozen others and escaped by foot into the neighborhood’s dense warren of streets. None of…
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Opinion France’s Jewish Archbishop
In the United States, no one born abroad can grow up and become president. In France, any citizen can grow up and become president, or archbishop of Paris — even the son of Jewish immigrants from Poland. August 5 marks the fifth anniversary of the death of Cardinal Jean-Marie Lustiger. With his passing, France lost…
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Opinion Jewish Leader of Hungary’s Anti-Semites
If history does act with cunning, as Hegel claimed, recent events involving Hungary’s extreme right wing Jobbik remind us that it does not always keep a straight face when doing so. A better Hungary, according to Jobbik, the country’s third largest party, is a Hungary emptied of its Roma and Jewish communities. As a result,…
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Opinion France’s Jewish Problem
Along with other post-industrial nations, France has long struggled with structural unemployment. Seismic shifts in its economy has led France to tolerate a level of joblessness — currently more than 10% — that would have been unthinkable a generation ago. But as events in the wake of the horrific massacre at a Jewish school in…
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Opinion Hollande Faces Challenge of Winning Over Jews
“I’m not criticizing, but simply making an observation” — “Je ne critique pas, je constate” — is a favorite rhetorical dagger of the French. It was unsheathed on Monday when CRIF, the Council of Representative Jewish Institutions in France, acknowledged Francois Hollande’s victory over Nicolas Sarkozy in a press release. Under the (awkward) title, “In…
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Opinion Le Pen Is Real Winner in Vote in France
Several years from now, historians may recount a conversation at the Elysée Palace, the residence of France’s president. While watching the returns of the first round of the presidential elections on Sunday night, Nicolas Sarkozy shrugs: “It’s a rebellion.” And an adviser, in turn, replies, “No, Monsieur le Président, c’est une revolution.” Or they may…
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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
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