Talya Zax is the Forward’s opinion editor. Contact her at [email protected] or on Twitter, @TalyaZax.
Talya ZaxOpinion Editor
By Talya Zax
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The Schmooze National Park Service Celebrates Jewish American Heritage Month
May is National Jewish American Heritage Month, and the National Park Service is celebrating by highlighting some of their favorite Jewish sites included on the National Register of Historic Places. The list of locations they’ve highlighted so far span from Hyde Park, a Burkeville, Virginia farm that harbored and gave work to Jewish refugees from…
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Culture Once an Obscene Scandal, a Hit Yiddish Play Returns 93 Years Later
The opening of “Indecent,” a new play by Paula Vogel co-created with director Rebecca Taichman, is reminiscent of the scene in “Inception” in which Leonardo DiCaprio takes Ellen Page through the basics of dream architecture. He escorts her through an initially recognizable world that begins inverting and contorting itself, resulting in a dreamscape created less…
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The Schmooze Oscar-Winner Juliette Binoche Takes Steven Spielberg To Task For Sexism
The message from Oscar-winner Juliette Binoche is clear: Steven Spielberg needs more women in his movies. Last week, the Forward looked at Polygraph’s study on the ratio of dialogue spoken by men to that spoken by women in Hollywood movies – to no one’s surprise, it’s depressingly high – and found Steven Spielberg complicit in…
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Culture Is Steven Spielberg the Most Sexist Director in Hollywood?
For Steven Spielberg, who has a tendency to make films concerned with various types of aliens — see: “E.T. the Extra Terrestrial,” “Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” War of the Worlds,” etc., etc. — there is, apparently, one kind of character who is just a bit too foreign to handle: a woman who speaks…
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The Schmooze Surprise! Tony Kushner at Center of Israel Kerfuffle — This Time North of the Border
Tony Kushner, the playwright and screenwriter of “Angels in America” and “Lincoln,” has found himself at the center of an unexpected scandal in Toronto. In the city for a talk hosted by the Koffler Center for the Art, he’ll be discussing his career with theatre director Philip Akin. But Kushner’s appearance has been obscured by…
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Culture “Gregor” Director Will Steinberger is Kafka Mad
Will Steinberger, part of the founding trio of InVersion Theatre, has close-cropped dark hair, rectangular tortoiseshell glasses, and flighty, energetic hands. He’s an eager young artist whose ideas seem to constantly threaten to stampede inside his mind, talking with an engaging – and sometimes terrifying – rapidity. That mindset makes a InVersion’s current production of…
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The Schmooze Gérard Depardieu, Talmud Scholar?
Gérard Depardieu, the French film star known for his roles in “The Last Metro,” “Cyrano de Bergerac,” and Kenneth Branagh’s “Hamlet” has shed some surprising light on his literary preferences: he’s currently working his way through the Babylonian Talmud. The famously intricate rabbinic text isn’t the most obvious choice for light reading, especially for a…
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The Schmooze Woody Allen Likes Bernie Sanders But Endorses Hillary Clinton
Woody Allen, for the first time in recent memory, took a tentative step outside of the bubble of stereotypical white maleness to express support for Hillary Clinton in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter to promote his forthcoming film “Café Society.” “I’m a Hillary fan,” he said, “I like Bernie very much. I think what…
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