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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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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The Schmooze How a Jewish Artist Created One of the Best Places To Observe Lent
Apparently it is Lent and has been since February 10th. In The Guardian’s somewhat belated move to honor this period – or, perhaps, a “we’re nearly there, don’t lose your focus” bit of motivation – this past weekend that paper’s “Christianity” section published an intercontinental list of spaces, holy for various reasons, likely to inspire…
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Culture Maya Plisetskaya’s Spirit Dances On
As Russia’s Mariinsky Ballet prepared for the first performance of its brief residency at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, a gale-battered audience made its way to the doors. Speaking a mix of Russian and English and clad in an inordinate amount of fur, they came to pay homage to one of Russia’s premier ballet companies,…
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