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: On Primo Levi’s Centenary, Reflecting On A Writer Who Was ‘The Perfect Scientist’
Primo Levi was, by any measure, a remarkable man. The chemist and writer, born in Turin, Italy on July 31, 1919, is most famous in America for his memoirs of his experience during the Holocaust. And those memoirs, foremost among them “If This is a Man,” which surveys Levi’s time in the Italian resistance and…
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Culture At Philip Roth’s Estate Auction, Paying To Own A Piece Of Genius
Philip Roth had style, but he liked utilitarian things. He owned many lamps, all easily adjustable and fairly unpretty. His chairs were mostly comfortable and lived-in. He furnished his house with library tables of varying charm, and two radios that could kindly be described as aged. When he died at 85 on May 22, 2018,…
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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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