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 Culture minister fired for giving a speech by Goebbels — literally
We live in an age of anti-Semitic political dog whistles, from President Trump’s summer comments on Jewish “disloyalty” to a Labour party member’s claim that Hitler was “misunderstood.” But there’s subtly invoking Nazi ideology, and there’s giving a speech written by Nazi Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels over the strains of one of Hitler’s favorite operas….
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Culture How the Trumps and Kushners corrupted the American Dream
American Oligarchs: The Kushners, the Trumps and the Marriage of Money and Power By Andrea Bernstein W.W. Norton & Company, 496 pages, $30 For those of us who don’t have power, it’s difficult to comprehend exactly how it works. The ordinary things we do to move our lives forward — make budgets, pay bills, try…
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Culture I Wanted To Know The Real Etgar Keret. So I Took Him To A Clowning Class.
“I think all of us love this work because we see the humanity involved. We see the sweep.” Jean Taylor, an instructor in theatrical clowning with the Barrow Group, paced a few steps in a small, white-walled studio a few blocks from Times Square while Israeli short story writer Etgar Keret and I sat on…
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Culture Q & A: She’s Sarah Silverman’s Sister — And Just Officiated Tiffany Haddish’s Bat Mitzvah
Sure, there are a lot of Jews in Hollywood. But not one of them has ever had quite as memorable a showbiz bat mitzvah as Tiffany Haddish. Haddish, whose father is an Eritrean-born Ethiopian Jew, became bat mitzvah on December 3, her 40th birthday, and simultaneously premiered her new Netflix special “Black Mitzvah.” The actress…
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Culture Famous Sholem Aleichem Statue Defaced With Swastikas In Ukraine
In 1905, the writer Sholem Aleichem fled his native Ukraine after witnessing a brutal pogrom in Kiev. In 1997, that city erected a monument to him. He eventually found his way to America, but he wrote of his homeland for the rest of his life. And this past weekend, unknown vandals painted bright red swastikas…
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Culture Q & A: Is A Conspiracy Theory Responsible For This Year’s Shocking Nobel Prize In Literature?
The October announcement of Austrian novelist Peter Handke as the winner of the 2019 Nobel Prize in Literature was greeted, by many, with confusion. Handke, apologist for Slobodan Milosevic, the Serbian president who oversaw the Bosnian genocide? Handke, who spoke at Milosevic’s funeral and told critics of his decision to do so to “go to…
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Culture A Wiser — And Much Older — ’Fiddler On The Roof’
In a black box theater at New York University, Tevye’s teenage daughters, wearing long skirts, head scarves and modern shoes — the shtetl, but with Doc Martens and duck boots — sang the last notes of “Matchmaker.” The dress rehearsal looked like any other production of “Fiddler on the Roof,” in every way but one:…
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Culture Q & A: How Should Jewish Studies Address Anti-Semitism?
A year ago, Leah Garrett left Australia, where she had been a professor at Melbourne’s Monash University since 2008, to direct the newly-founded Jewish Studies Center at Hunter College. A year into the job, Garrett, the author of four books — including 2015 National Book Award Finalist “Young Lions: How Jewish Authors Reinvented the American…
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