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 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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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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