
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.
In 1944 Harvard installed Mark I, a computerized calculator, to aid physics professor John von Neumann’s work on the Manhattan Project. The one-of-a-kind machine took up most of a room. Today, for $500, you can keep an exponentially more rapid and versatile smartphone in your pocket. Imagine what similarly rapid technological growth might look like…
Earlier this week, Sony Pictures Classics acquired the rights to Israeli director Joseph Cedar’s “Norman: The Moderate Rise and Tragic Fall of a New York Fixer” in North America, Asia outside of Korea, Eastern Europe, Scandanavia, and Benelux. The fixer in question is played by Richard Gere, who co-stars in the film with Charlotte Gainsbourg,…
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…
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