
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.
Happy 162nd birthday, Hertha Marks Ayrton! Ayrton, a British Jewish-born inventor — who was also an engineer, mathematician, and physicist, putting those of us proud of our double majors to shame — is the subject of today’s Google Doodle. Among her many achievements, Ayrton was the first woman to present a paper of her own…
When I studied in London, I frequently ran into street vendors selling black-and-white photographs of standard city scenes – a telephone booth, Tower Bridge, Westminster Abbey – in which a single detail, like a bus or street sign, would be colored red, a shock amongst the sedate. Sometimes the result was lovely, but more frequently…
“Junction 48,” Israeli director Udi Aloni’s exploration of the tumultuous lives of Israeli Arabs, has taken top honors in the TriBeCa Film Festival’s 2016 International Narrative Competition. Aloni is the son of Shulamit Aloni, a famous Israeli politician and advocate for Palestinian human rights; he’s echoed his mother’s activism through much of his career, and…
Giving into popular, “Hamilton”-loving demand, the Treasury Department has announced that instead of replacing Alexander Hamilton with a woman on the $10 bill, they’ll be making room by knocking Andrew Jackson off the $20. And their choice to replace him? Harriet Tubman. The announcement was met with mixed responses. Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew initially promised…
Walking into artist and author Molly Crabapple’s apartment in New York City’s Financial District, I briefly thought I’d wandered into a painting I once studied in art history: David Teniers’ “Archduke Leopold Wilhelm in His Gallery.” The painting’s nominal focus is a group of men, archduke included, but they almost disappear beneath the riot of…
For a text commonly thought of as foundational, it can feel odd to think that there was a time when it didn’t really exist. The Bible, though, has a birthday, and no one knows quite when it is. On Monday, a group of scholars from Tel Aviv University published a new guess. , appearing in…
The New Yorker’s April 4th issue included a poem by Calvin Trillin entitled The poem, which addressed the many varieties of Chinese food being popularized in America, struck many as having an uncomfortably Orientalist flavor (sorry). The Forward decided to respond, in verse. Oh Trillin, our food-focused, sharply-phrased poet, You’ve bungled, you’ve mis-hit, we’re sure…
The art hoard of – the recluse who kept close wraps on the enormous collection amassed by his father, who worked with the Nazis to procure the artworks included – has made consistent headlines since it was discovered in 2012. Rarely have they been so promising as this: as the New York Times reports, museums…
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