Talya Zax is the Forward’s opinion editor. Contact her at zax@forward.com or on Twitter, @TalyaZax.
Talya ZaxOpinion Editor
By Talya Zax
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Culture Philip Roth doesn’t live here anymore: A writer, a stonemason, an American friendship
Editor’s Note: This essay, originally published by the Forward on May 17, 2020, won this year’s Deadline Club award for arts reporting. Philip Roth and Russ Murdock trudged through the woods behind Roth’s Litchfield, Conn., home, looking for Roth’s tombstone. It was summer, 2008 or 2009. The crickets were singing. The estate, a 200-year-old former…
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Culture He survived the Holocaust, then interrogated Eichmann. 60 years later, he remembers.
60 years ago this week, Adolf Eichmann, one of the primary architects of the Holocaust, was captured in Argentina by a secret group of Mossad and Shin Bet agents. It was a stunning development. When Israel’s then-Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion announced Eichmann’s capture on May 22, 1960, 11 days after he was whisked out of…
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Culture Three things Alice Walker gets dead wrong about anti-Semitism
Editor’s note: We’ve republished this piece, originally published on December 20, 2018, after Walker’s appearance this week on writer Cheryl Strayed’s podcast for The New York Times, “Sugar Calling,” created new outrage. Earlier this week, the internet issued a collective groan when Pulitzer Prize-winning author Alice Walker recommended a book by the anti-Semitic conspiracy theorist…
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Culture Join the Forward’s next book club — featuring Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Geraldine Brooks
We organized The Forward Book Club on a whim, hoping to give our readers, and ourselves, a sense of community in a time of distance. Our first book was “Bread Givers” by Anzia Yezierska. Over our month of conversations about that novel, our meetings became something we looked forward to every week, an opportunity to…
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Culture Coronavirus makes May Day a moment for radical action — and hope
On May 1, employees at several major companies, including Amazon, Whole Foods, Target and Instacart, will stage a one-day walkout. At the same time, tenants in cities across the United States will begin a rent strike, predicted to be one of the largest the country has ever seen. The workers’ concerns: Lack of adequate paid…
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Culture When Gloria Steinem and Phyllis Schlafly battled for the American soul
“Mrs. America” begins with a cake. It’s a fluffy, gorgeous dome of meringue, left isolated and static on the screen before being shuttled into a crowded political fundraiser. At the fundraiser, the wives of the local elite put on a fashion show; backstage, they chat unhappily about the threat of “women’s libbers.” That housewives-versus-libbers clash…
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Culture In Stephen Sondheim’s birthday concert, notes of a better, more human Broadway
Streaming live on YouTube, the concert started late, then stopped abruptly, started, stopped, then abruptly disappeared. All in all, the star-studded, highly hyped “Take Me to the World: A Sondheim 90th Birthday Celebration” finally got rolling an hour and 15 minutes after it was supposed to. In the meantime, would-be viewers anxious to watch Broadway…
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Culture Let’s talk about Andrew Cuomo’s oddly thirsty Yom HaShoah photo
In the public eye, the last two months have been something of a high point for New York Governor Andrew Cuomo. His clear, forceful daily briefings on the coronavirus crisis — accompanied by blunt, unintentionally hilarious homemade PowerPoints — have won him legions of new fans. New Yorkers, accustomed to viewing their elected officials with…
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