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 Maurice Sendak’s Designs For Opera And Ballet Are A Testament To Joy
Maurice Sendak had many reasons to be unhappy. He was born to Polish Jewish immigrants in Brooklyn in 1928, and his childhood was defined by the deaths of his extended family in the Holocaust, a loss that scarred him early and deep. He was a gay man who, sure his parents wouldn’t accept him if…
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Culture Eating Cake With Maira Kalman
When I met Maira Kalman at her apartment a year ago, I was in some upheaval. My boyfriend had ended our relationship. My apartment was becoming comically unlivable. (If you’ve never woken up to the sounds of a large rodent trapped in your ceiling, I don’t recommend it.) I’d spent months lying awake most nights…
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Culture Here’s What The Forward’s Editors Are Reading This Summer — And What You Should Be
It’s summer, although if you live in New York City, you’ve likely been somewhat too rain-bedraggled to tell. But no matter how many recent days we’ve spent sloshing around in waterproof shoes, it really is the season of days at the beach and lazy afternoons in the park with nothing to do but read. (Yes,…
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Culture A White Supremacist Murderer Devastated Chicago 20 Years Ago. Why Didn’t Anything Change?
Just before sunset on July 2, 1999, a Ford Crown Vic approached 15-year-old Ephraim Wolfe in Chicago’s West Rogers Park. A bullet had just torn a dime-sized hole in Wolfe’s leg, a couple of inches below the knee. The friend with whom he’d been walking had run to a nearby house for help, and Wolfe…
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Culture Q & A: Stephanie Burt On Whether Poetry Matters
Does poetry matter? If you ask Stephanie Burt, the poet, Harvard University English professor and co-editor of poetry at The Nation, the answer is no. Well, almost. Burt, author of the newly-released “Don’t Read Poetry: A Book About How to Read Poems,” thinks the word “poetry” does a disservice to poems, obscuring the diversity of…
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Culture Like Philip Roth, But Feminist: Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s Debut Novel
On page 266 of Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s “Fleishman Is in Trouble,” I was filled with sadness, immediately and brutally, as if I had been injected with it. There is nothing particularly sad about page 266; the New York Times Magazine staff writer’s debut novel, while often funny, is pervasively sad, in an intimate, unavoidable way. But…
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Culture Anne Frank Would Have Turned 90 Today. We’re Still Telling Her Story.
90 years ago today, Anne Frank was born in Frankfurt, Germany. Her life was short and full of difficulty. She became an immigrant at age 4, moving to the Netherlands as her family attempted to escape the Nazis. At 13, she moved into the cramped attic, known as the Secret Annex, where she and her…
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Culture Varian Fry Saved Europe’s Artists From The Nazis. His Story Is Stranger Than Fiction.
The Flight Portfolio By Julie Orringer Knopf, 576 pages, $28.95 If you frequent progressive circles, you have likely encountered some form of this refrain: “If you ever wondered what you would have done during the Holocaust, now is the time to find out.” The answer, as it often happens, is wait. You wait for those…
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