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 Children’s Opera Travels From Terezin to Madrid
For many, the very idea of opera is antiquated, yawn-inducing and vaguely stuffy. For Hans Krása and Arnold Schoenberg, Jewish composers whose careers were marked by rising anti-Semitism in Europe in advance of the Holocaust, it was a matter of both political and personal urgency. In Madrid, audiences are getting a chance to experience that…
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The Schmooze Broadway “Crucible” Tries To Shake Off Memory of Ted Cruz’s Performance
Let’s start by acknowledging that when discussing Ted Cruz performing in “The Crucible” it is impossible to avoid using the pun “Cruzible.” (This pun, which conjures images of Cruz as a “Grease”-era John Travolta type gyrating on a car roof whilst spouting poetic on mortality, feels oily to even write, let alone say. Poor Arthur…
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Culture This Isn’t Boris Fishman’s First ‘Rodeo’
I read most of Boris Fishman’s “Don’t Let My Baby Do Rodeo” on a bus that was bringing me back to New York City after a weekend spent upstate. The wintry landscape flashing by was beautiful in a bleak way: leafless forests, gentle hills. That afternoon, as I worked my way through the second part…
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The Schmooze Recalling Supreme Court Nominee Merrick Garland’s Toughest Gig Ever: Theater Critic
“Moreover, the progress of human isolation is now complete as well.” That grammatically iffy quote, a morose musing on the inevitable shortfalls of human communication, stems from an unlikely source: a review of a triple-bill of Harold Pinter plays, written in 1973 by a Harvard undergraduate by the name of Merrick Garland. Yes, it’s true:…
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Culture Remembering Geoffrey Hartman — Wordsworthian, Critic and Holocaust Scholar
“Heaven lies about us in our infancy!” wrote William Wordsworth, one of Geoffrey Hartman’s beloved Romantics. “Shades of the prison-house begin to close/Upon the growing boy.” For Hartman, in 2010 proclaimed by his Yale colleague Paul Fry to be “arguably the finest Wordsworth critic who has ever written,” those lines from “Ode on Intimations of…
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The Schmooze Arthur Koestler Fans Should Brace Themselves For a New ‘Darkness at Noon’
Fans of Arthur Koestler’s 1940 novel “Darkness at Noon,” the formerly communist author’s allegorical take on Stalin’s increasingly totalitarian grip on the USSR, are in for a shock. According to the New York Review of Books, a German doctoral student named Matthias Weßel has discovered one of the novel’s original German drafts. “Darkness at Noon,”…
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The Schmooze Remembering Anita Brookner, “Mistress of Gloom”
“Dr. Weiss, at forty,” Anita Brookner wrote, “knew that her life had been ruined by literature.” The point she was aiming to make, through that first line of her first novel — published as “A Start in Life” in England and “The Debut” in America — was one she would return to frequently in her…
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The Schmooze 3 Reasons Ted Cruz Should Actually Call for Ban on ‘Satanic’ Tritone
Sadly, today’s report that Ted Cruz has issued a call to ban the tritone — in music theory terms, the musical interval of augmented fourth or diminished fifth, and in conspiracy theorist terms, the dangerously alluring sound of the devil — is satirical. (Importantly, it was issued by the website Submediant, which is a satirical…
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