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 On Writing An Opera With Toni Morrison: ‘She Was The Voice Of The Nation’s Conscience’
Editor’s note: This Q & A, originally published on August 6, 2019, has been republished for the first anniversary of Toni Morrison’s death. On August 5, 2019, the revered novelist Toni Morrison died at age 88. News of her passing was met with grief around the globe, as writers, artists, political leaders and readers reflected…
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Culture The radical Chilean artist who depicted an America riven by repression and resistance
These days, the snipers stationed on top of the White House look out on a different view than they used to. Two months ago, before George Floyd’s death at the hands of Minneapolis police sparked nationwide protests, there weren’t rows of chain-link fencing and concrete blockades enclosing Lafayette Square, the public plaza at the White…
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Culture Jake Gyllenhaal’s unhinged turn in John Mulaney’s children’s special is the only thing keeping me sane
This weekend, my brother Jacob sent my mother and me a tweet by the writer Emery Lord, the sort of lightly despairing social media dispatch that the coronavirus has made so common: “my toddler,” Lord wrote, “yelling from the other room while I get her a snack: ‘I am LONELY and I want a BAGEL.’”…
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Culture The extraordinary artistic devotion of Ida Haendel
She was never quite as famous as the men: Itzhak Perlman, Joshua Bell, Jascha Heifetz. But if you heard Ida Haendel play violin once, you knew her tone anywhere: the shuddery, overwhelming pointedness she gave to any piece of music. Her music was beautiful, and unsparing. If you didn’t want to weep, you were better…
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Culture The JCC theater camp director who changed my life
There I was: 10 years old, tiny, squeaky, with a mediocre haircut and crooked teeth, delivering a Shakespearean monologue on the big stage at the Denver, Colorado JCC. I was playing Nick Bottom in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” It was a big character, and a big challenge for me, congenitally shy as I was. But…
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Culture Milton Glaser loved New York — and was its greatest observer
If you’ve ever lived in New York City — or set foot in it, or talked to someone about it, or watched one of the approximately three billion films about it — you know it has a complicated relationship with its past. On the one hand, there’s a sort of maniacal drive to the future…
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Culture Amid battle over St. Louis’s name, Archdiocese defends saint who persecuted Jews, Muslims
Weeks after activists in St. Louis, Missouri began calling for the city to tear down the most notable statue of its namesake — and rename itself — the local Archdiocese has come out in defense of the embattled 13th-century saint. King Louis IX, the only French king ever to be canonized, routinely persecuted French Jews…
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Culture St. Louis was named after an anti-Semitic crusader. Should its name be changed?
Some time after King Louis IX returned to France from his first Crusade in 1254, an anonymous French Jew wrote a letter to the king, who would become the only French monarch to ever be canonized in the Catholic Church. The letter, which was never sent, outlined the painful impact of a series of official…
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