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 Everyone Is Baffled By Batsheva
If you are a short person in New York you will experience certain uncomfortable things. Men reaching for the subway pole will put their elbows where your head ought to be. At events filled with tall women, you will feel like a child even as you mutter “I AM 26.” In your impractically tall-ceilinged apartment,…
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Culture Who To Read For Women’s History Month, Part Eight: Amy Levy
“This poem — surely a most remarkable one to be produced by a girl still at school — is distinguished, as nearly all Miss Levy’s work is, by the qualities of sincerity, directness, and melancholy.” That was Oscar Wilde on Amy Levy’s poem “Xantippe,” a 30-page imagined narration by Socrates’ wife. Levy originally published the…
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Culture Who To Read for Women’s History Month, Part Seven: Ruth Prawer Jhabvala
“If it hadn’t been for Yasi!” Ruth Prawer Jhabvala wrote in “The Judge’s Will,” a short story she published in The New Yorker shortly before her death in 2013. “He was born in Delhi and in this house — a gloomy, inward-looking family property, built in the nineteen-twenties and crowded with heavy Indo-Victorian furniture inherited…
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Culture Who To Read For Women’s History Month, Part Six: Grace Aguilar
During her short life in 19th-century Britain, around the same time the Brontë sisters found they could only publish their masterly novels under male pseudonyms, Grace Aguilar wrote books with unabashedly feminine titles under her own name. And she gained real literary recognition for them. There were novels, among them “Woman’s Friendship,” “Home Influence” and…
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Culture Was Meyerbeer Forgotten Because He Was Jewish — Or Because Of A Goat?
The composer Giacomo Meyerbeer got pushed out of the operatic canon because of anti-Semitism. That much is fact. But if you’re looking for a reason that Meyerbeer’s 1859 opera “Dinorah” hasn’t been performed in the United States since 1925 — that is, until now — the first thing you really have to reckon with is…
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Culture Who To Read For Women’s History Month, Part Five: Rahel Varnhagen
If you know about Rahel Varnhagen, it’s probably because of Hannah Arendt. Arendt called Varnhagen, born Rahel Levin in 1771, “my closest friend, though she has been dead for some hundred years.” The two shared a background; both were well-off German-born Jews. They shared an intellectual daring and determination; while Arendt, born in 1906, would…
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Culture Who To Read For Women’s History Month, Part Four: Natalia Ginzburg
There it was, in Natalia Ginzburg’s obituary in The New York Times: A quick description, not even a full sentence, of the trouble of being a woman writer. It was 1991, and Ginzburg, born to a Jewish father and Catholic mother in Palermo, Sicily, in 1916, was seen as one of the great Italian authors…
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Culture Who To Read For Women’s History Month, Part Three: Fran Ross
Fran Ross was black and Jewish, and she wanted you to know just how difficult that identity could be to manage. In her only novel, “Oreo” (1974), the Jewish Samuel Schwartz and black Helen (Honeychile) Clark make a match, an attachment that provokes outrageous reactions in both their parents. “When Honeychile had broken the news…
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