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 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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Culture Who To Read For Women’s History Month, Part Two: Nadezhda Mandelstam
When it came to Nadezhda Mandelstam, the scholar Clarence Brown might have put it best: She was a “vinegary, Brechtian, steel-hard woman of great intelligence, limitless courage, no illusions, permanent convictions and a wild sense of the absurdity of life.” Or perhaps it was the poet Seamus Heaney, who wrote of Mandelstam’s transformation into a…
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Culture Who To Read For Women’s History Month, Part One: Tillie Olsen
Tillie Olsen can be difficult to read. The content of what she wrote isn’t the issue; her subjects could be grim, yes, but in a way that demands rather than repels attention. But Olsen’s visceral prose — her willingness to adopt a character’s perspective so fully as to surrender lucidity — can be a barrier….
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Culture A Collegial Interrogation Of Debut Novelist Andrew Ridker
Andrew Ridker was writing about Jewish novelists before he became one. I know this because we were college classmates, and I read a fair portion of Andrew’s thesis on Philip Roth. Before the close reading of “American Pastoral,” I read some of Andrew’s early poetry — more on that, later — and at least one…
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Culture Q & A: How Benjamin Dreyer’s Style Guide Ended Up An Unlikely Bestseller
In the world of nonfiction, the past year has been one of headline-making bestsellers, many of them fueled by the allure of inside gossip on President Trump. See: Michael Wolff’s “Fire and Fury,” Bob Woodward’s “Fear,” James Comey’s “A Higher Loyalty” and Omarosa Newman’s “Unhinged.” All of which made the skyrocketing sales of a style…
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