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 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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Culture Can Jewish schools meet the challenge of Black Lives Matter?
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. Barthelemy Atsin had his first encounter with the police when he was 13 years old: They pulled over as he walked down a street with friends, and subjected…
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Culture Abolishing the police is a radical idea — that’s been around for over a century
In 1905, Pennsylvania did something unprecedented: It founded America’s first state police force. The new institution, which was more highly militarized than previous law enforcement systems, was created for one reason: The state government wanted a more organized and efficient way to break strikes. The new force approached that mission with zeal — and violence….
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Culture Trump’s church photo has no American precedent. Does it have one in fascism?
It was the photo op that transfixed the nation. Early Monday evening, President Trump, accompanied by a small cadre of staff and press, marched from the White House through Lafayette Square to St. John’s Episcopal church, where every president since James Madison has attended services. He had just given a speech threatening to use the…
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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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