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 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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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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Yiddish ווידעאָ: יוטוב־פּערזענלעכקייט רעדט אויף ייִדיש וועגן אַ משפּחה־טראַגעדיעVIDEO: Youtube personality speaks in Yiddish about a tragedy in the family
מאַטי מענדלאָוויטשעס ברודער, וואָס האָט יאָרן לאַנג געליטן פֿון דעפּרעסיע, האָט הײַיאָר זיך גענומען דאָס לעבן. .
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