
Talya Zax is the Forward’s opinion editor. Contact her at [email protected] or on Twitter, @TalyaZax.
Talya Zax is the Forward’s opinion editor. Contact her at [email protected] or on Twitter, @TalyaZax.
When Michael Phelps arrived at the pool for his first race of the 2016 Olympics, there was one question on everyone’s lips. No, it wasn’t whether the 31-year-old swimming phenomenon, the most decorated Olympian of all time, would be able to live up to his reputation as an unstoppable force in the pool. It was…
“Life doesn’t imitate art,” Woody Allen said in “Husbands and Wives,” “it imitates bad television.” Come September 30th, when the writer, director, and actor’s series “Crisis in Six Scenes” is released on Amazon video, audiences will have their first chance to see how he handles that much-maligned format. The news that Allen was creating a…
Deborah Kass made headlines in November when her sculpture “OY/YO” was installed in Brooklyn Bridge Park. The much-Instagrammed, bright yellow aluminum sculpture of the letters “O” and “Y,” close to 8 feet tall, reads “OY” to viewers from Brooklyn and “YO” to those from Manhattan. Earlier today, Lena Dunham’s Lenny published parts of an extensive…
The Blue Card, a nonprofit that provides financial assistance to Holocaust survivors, has donated a substantial collection of its records and documents to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. The collection’s contents date to shortly after The Blue Card’s establishment in the United States in 1939. (The Blue Card was originally founded in Germany in…
Louis Armstrong, the late, great, gravel-toned jazz genius, would have been 115 today. From his childhood, the legendary singer, trumpeter, composer and actor, who wore a Star of David for much of his life, was personally and professionally shaped by a number of rich connections with Jews. Most significant among them were those he had…
For many, Tony Bennett – the singer whose standards, from “Fly Me to the Moon” to “I Left My Heart in San Francisco,” are near-universal – has always felt a little bit like family. Today, as the world celebrates Bennett’s 90th birthday, Jews have an extra reason to rejoice: for us, he almost is. That…
Colson Whitehead’s new novel “The Underground Railroad” was announced earlier today as the next Oprah’s Book Club pick. It’s the Club’s first book since February 2015, which featured Cynthia Bond’s “Ruby.” While Whitehead isn’t Jewish, it seems possible the New York-born author has taken the famous Lenny Bruce declaration that “If you live in New…
As we’ve learned from the title sequence of “The Unbreakable Kimmy Schimdt,” females are strong as hell. Living through fifteen years as a kidnap victim in a bunker is one way to prove that; giving birth, as Kemper recently did, is another. Kemper and her husband Michael Koman have kept quiet on the subject of…
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