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 Q & A: The Freedom Rider rabbi arrested on the same day as John Lewis
In 1961, the story of the Freedom Riders captured the American imagination: young, mostly white Northern students teaming up with Southern, mostly black civil-rights activists to stage acts of civil disobedience by simply riding together on segregated buses. Traveling through the South in Integrated groups, the activists faced violence and arrests, followed by weeks-long stays…
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Culture Will Jewish schools finally address their segregationist past?
Editor’s note: In observance of Martin Luther King Jr. Day, the Forward is resurfacing some of our recent coverage related to the Black-Jewish experience and racial justice. This article originally appeared in July, 2020. In the two months since George Floyd was killed by Minneapolis police, American Jewish day schools have begun to rethink how…
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Fast Forward Trump grants pardon to Jared Kushner’s father, Charles Kushner
President Trump has granted pardons to a group of high-profile allies including Charles Kushner, father of Trump’s son-in-law and senior advisor Jared Kushner. The elder Kushner pleaded guilty to 16 counts of tax evasion in 2004, as well as additional counts of lying to the Federal Election Commission and retaliating against a federal witness. He…
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Culture I was an outsider at Christmas — until I found ‘The Nutcracker’
Until I discovered “The Nutcracker,” December was the season of fruitlessly trying to explain Hanukkah to my mostly non-Jewish friends. I never wished to be anything but Jewish, but I secretly longed to experience the kind of Christmas cheer I read about in books. I wanted a big family gathering, with a tree and mistletoe…
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Culture For Joseph Epstein and The Wall Street Journal, the control is the point
You might have heard about a little Wall Street Journal op-ed that went viral this weekend for arguing that future First Lady Dr. Jill Biden should drop the title “Doctor” from her name. Many decried the column, by the Jewish essayist and former editor of The American Scholar Joseph Epstein, as sexist from its first…
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Culture Trump aspired to be a master propagandist. This week, he failed.
President Trump’s Twitter feed looks different these days. It’s not because Trump’s tweets, in the wake of his loss in the presidential race to former Vice President Joe Biden, are rife with disinformation about the integrity of the American electoral process. That was the case even long before election results began rolling in. It’s because…
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Culture When COVID hit, I went home to my parents. For Election Day, I came home to New York.
My roommate and I struck out early to vote Tuesday morning. Close to our polling place, a school in deep Brooklyn, we began to pass strangers wearing voting stickers. It wasn’t a very New York thing to do, but we waved at them, and they waved back. I couldn’t help it: despite the extenuating demands…
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Fast Forward Breaking: Fatality confirmed in shooting near Vienna synagogue
This is an evolving story and will be updated as we receive further news. A fatality has been confirmed in a shooting near Vienna, Austria’s Seitenstettengasse synagogue, the Jewish community’s main temple in the city. Vienna’s police force confirmed on Twitter that one person had been killed in the attack, and that the police had…
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