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 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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Culture The Gorgeous, Grungy New York Values Of ‘Sesame Street’
If you want to really understand “Sesame Street,” watch any segment in which Oscar the Grouch springs out from the tin can he calls home to sing about how much he loves trash. He’s done so many times over the decades, starting in 1970 during the show’s very first season, when a gleeful Oscar —…
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Culture Let’s Call André Aciman’s Sequel By Its Name
Find Me By André Aciman Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 272 pages, $27.00 In fairness to André Aciman, it would have been very difficult to write a good sequel to “Call Me By Your Name,” his stunning 2007 novel about an Italian-American teenager’s coming-of-age via his sun-soaked affair with a visiting male graduate student. That book…
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Culture For Jerome Robbins At 101: The Quintessential Jewish American Genius
On May 6, 1953, Jerome Robbins was front-page news in the Forward for an act that would haunt him for the rest of his life. An above-the-fold headline — published next to an unrelated photo of a handsome young harbor boss named Francis Kelly, who appeared to be wearing lipstick — read “Acclaimed Dancer Gives…
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Culture The New Nobel Prize In Literature Is Scandalous. Here’s Why.
In the hours since the Swedish Academy announced Olga Tokarczuk and Peter Handke as newly-minted winners of the Nobel Prize in Literature, much has been made of the contrast between then. Tokarczuk, the 2018 laureate — whose award comes a year late, after a scandal derailed 2018 committee’s deliberations — is a Polish novelist whose…
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Culture Carolyn Forché, Ilya Kaminsky Among National Book Award Finalists
Finalists for the National Book Awards, winners of which will be announced on November 20, include Ilya Kaminsky, László Krasznahorkai and Carolyn Forché. Kaminsky, a Ukrainian-born Jewish poet, is nominated for “Deaf Republic,” his second full-length poetry collection. Krasznahorkai, a Jewish Hungarian novelist, is a finalist in the category of fiction in translation, for his…
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Culture Inside The Mind Of Arnold Schoenberg, The Genius Who Defined 20th Century Music
Editor’s note: Arnold Schoenberg was born on this day in 1874. 145 years later, we look back at the genius of the Austrian Jewish composer. What happens in the mind of a genius? Mozart’s mind was puerile; if his extraordinary sophistication with music extended to other aspects of his psyche, he didn’t show it. Van…
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