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 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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Culture Netflix ‘Roasted’ Anne Frank. They Could Have Left Hitler’s Genitals Out Of It.
Sure, you can poke fun at Anne Frank. But it may be a mistake to do so by joking about Hitler’s testicles. That’s the approach that comedian Jeff Ross takes in the “Anne Frank” episode of his new Netflix series “Historical Roasts,” in which historical figures take the stage in order to be lampooned by…
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Culture For Adrienne Rich, On Her 90th Birthday
At some point in your life, you will likely hear the maxim that the personal is political. Afterward, you will look at the paraphernalia of your existence, and wonder which parts, exactly, are covered by that idea. Your routine when you wake up? What you choose to cook? What you say when you greet a…
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Culture A Harvard Magazine Made A Sex Joke About Anne Frank. It Wasn’t Just Offensive — It Was Boring.
You can see why the staff of the Harvard Lampoon found the idea funny. Photoshop Anne Frank’s head onto the body of a woman showing off a belly button piercing and surgically augmented breasts in a string bikini. Make sure a sufficient number of shirtless men in the background are staring appreciatively at her. And…
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Culture 7 New Books To Read This May
I once read an interview with a book critic who noted that if, as a professional critic, she read five books a week for 50 years, she would only have read 13,000 books by the end of her career. 13,000 isn’t small change. But seeing the number of new and upcoming books that cross my…
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