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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Books Her name is Ozick, look on her works, ye mighty, and despair
Antiquities By Cynthia Ozick Knopf, 192 pages, $21.00 Thornton Wilder’s classic play “Our Town” proposes a remarkable idea: That after death, we get to re-experience a single day from our lives — just one perfectly ordinary day. It’s a painful, startling scenario, a striking conclusion to a complicated existence. “I can’t look at everything hard…
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Culture How Blake Bailey embodied Philip Roth’s spirit — and betrayed his legacy
When I spoke last month with Blake Bailey, the disgraced author of Philip Roth’s biography, I asked one question that seemed to shock him. It wasn’t the one about what he had to say to critics who suggested his biography of Roth was marred by deep misogyny. Bailey — whose book has been permanently pulled…
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News What ultimate Frisbee can teach us about Jon Ossoff
It’s a muggy day in Atlanta, sometime in 2004 or 2005. Jon Ossoff takes off toward the disc. He’s sprinting, but it stays just out of reach. So he digs a cleat into the ground and throws himself forward horizontally, a lithe streak in flight. Faster in air than on foot, Ossoff gets his fingers…
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Books ‘This man is not going to daunt me:’ Talking with Philip Roth’s biographer, Blake Bailey
Editor’s note: Two weeks after this interview with Blake Bailey was published, multiple women came forward to accuse him of sexual assault and other sexual misconduct. Details of the allegations may be found here. A masterful writer obsessively preoccupied with whether and how he’d be valued by history; a deeply sensitive charmer with a real…
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Opinion ‘We simply feel forgotten about:’ 9 Asian American Jews speak
The United States is in the middle of a devastating spike in hate crimes against Asian-Americans, with nearly 3,800 incidents of hate reported to the organization Stop AAPI Hate in the last year. (AAPI refers to Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders.) Between broad under-reporting of hate crimes against Asian Americans and the lack of a…
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Culture Woody Allen’s extraordinary violence, laid bare
“Allen v. Farrow,” HBO Max’s new four-part documentary about Dylan Farrow’s allegations of sexual assault against her adopted father, Woody Allen, has an almost soothing domestic aesthetic, full of long shots of rustic Connecticut homesteads and rippling lakes. But the series, which investigates the deep and constant violence experienced by survivors of abuse, is anything…
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Culture The Forward was a socialist mainstay — until it endorsed FDR. What changed?
Editor’s note: This story was originally published in 2020 as the fifth installment of a special series exploring the Forward’s election coverage throughout its 123-year history. We’ve republished it for Presidents Day; find earlier installments of the newsletter here. “Nothing in this campaign happened to change my mind about there being no difference between the…
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Culture For Mozart’s 265th birthday, remembering his great Jewish collaborator
This story, initially published in October, 2018, has been republished in honor of Mozart’s 265th birthday on Jan. 27, 2021. The librettist Lorenzo da Ponte — an exiled Jewish-born Venetian who turned to the arts after proving too irreverent for the Church — had a lot in common with Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. The two shared…
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