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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News He died in the Towers. In a Manhattan synagogue, his legacy continues to grow.
'I remember him being quiet but powerful, this comforting voice'
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Culture Isaac Bashevis Singer’s return to Ellis Island, in never-before-seen photos
The day Isaac Bashevis Singer returned to Ellis Island was “a beautiful, cold day,” said the photographer Robert A. Cumins. Singer, who was born in Poland, had first set foot there in 1935 as a refugee fleeing antisemitism. Nearly half a century later, in 1979, he returned with a delegation of international Jewish leaders brought…
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Culture ‘Pride is also a Yizkor’: Remembering LGBTQ Jews we’ve lost
“Pride is also a Yizkor.” Those were the words of the Forward’s archivist, Chana Pollack, early in Pride month, as she and I discussed her planned dive into the Forward’s archives in search of its queer history. Her point: Generations of LGBTQ Jews who have faced exclusion from their families and communities have wondered who…
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Archive Timeline | How the Forward covered LGBTQ history
If an American reader had glanced casually at the front page of the Forward on May 7, 1933, they would have had no idea that one of the most pivotal events of the early Nazi regime had occurred the day before. No, it wasn’t the decision of Adolf Hitler’s Justice Department to allow for the…
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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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