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 For National Book Lovers Day, join our next book club
It’s National Book Lovers Day, and there’s one great way to celebrate: Join the Forward’s book club! For our next set of meetings, we’re reading Fran Ross’s “Oreo.” The 1974 book, Ross’s only novel, has in recent years been hailed as an underappreciated masterpiece. Like Ross, its central character, Oreo — given name Christine Clark — is…
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Books Pete Hamill was New York’s last great storyteller
The summer before my freshman year of high school, I was required to read two books. The first was “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” And the second was “Snow in August” by Pete Hamill, who passed away on August 5 at 85. For most of my life, growing up in Denver, Colorado, I had only two Jewish…
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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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