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 80 Years Ago Today, Hitler Threatened Genocide Of European Jews — Was Anybody Listening?
January 30, 1939. Adolf Hitler had been chancellor of Germany for exactly six years. Thousands of Jews were already imprisoned in concentration camps. Legally defined as anyone possessing at least one Jewish grandparent, Jews were prohibited from marrying so-called Aryans, and had their businesses destroyed. But his annual speech to the Reichstag, Germany’s legislative body,…
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Music Julia Wolfe’s Triangle Shirtwaist Oratorio Is Jarringly Cynical. That’s A Good Thing.
With the country in a dire state, there’s a conundrum facing artwork with progressive ideals: It’s easy for them to sound cursory, like Twitter activism, except onstage. That’s the difficulty that might have faced Julia Wolfe’s oratorio “Fire in my mouth,” which had its world premiere at the New York Philharmonic on January 24 and…
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Culture Mirjam Pressler Showed The World The Real Anne Frank
Anne Frank’s story could seem straightforward. Mirjam Pressler knew it was anything but. To start, there were the multiple versions of Frank’s diary, Frank revised her journal entries exactingly, leaving behind multiple drafts. On top of that, her father, Otto Frank, had censored various aspects of her work. Then there was the matter of filling…
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Culture Mourning Mary Oliver, America’s Spiritual Conscience
Is it possible to be born in a place that sounds more poetic than Maple Heights? That was where Mary Oliver came from: Maple Heights, Ohio. Not everyone from that town was destined to live out the lyric simplicity promised by their birthplace’s name, but Oliver was, and she did. The Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, who…
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Culture Alice Walker Still Doesn’t Get It
When it comes to anti-Semitism, Alice Walker still doesn’t get it. Or to be more precise, she still wasn’t getting it when she wrote her most recent blog post, which contains a poem titled “Conscious Earthlings.” The post begins with an email that Walker writes was sent to her by Nurit Peled-Elhanan, an Israeli scholar…
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Culture Michael Chabon, Ayelet Waldman To Bring ‘Yiddish Policemen’s Union’ To TV
Proving they’re more than just a literary dream couple, Ayelet Waldman and Michael Chabon are in the thick of a new endeavor: Overseeing a TV show. The duo has collaborated on TV projects before, starting with a 2011 project titled “Hobgoblin” that remains unmade. But their latest project is different, because it’s an adaptation of…
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Culture Ehud Barak, Alice Shalvi And Nazi-Hunting Couple Win National Jewish Book Awards
The winners of the 2018 National Jewish Book Awards include one of Israel’s foremost statesmen, a couple who kept their love alive by hunting Nazis together and the matriarch of Israeli feminism. Announced on January 9, the winners of the Jewish Book Council’s annuals awards present a broad vision of contemporary Judaism and its interests….
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Culture In Italy, A Famous Museum Is Shaming Germany For Keeping Nazi-Looted Art
The painting hung for over a century in a Florentine palace, framed against a wall covered in red silk. Petite and extraordinarily detailed, the 18th-century work shows full-blown roses and peonies spilling from a vase, surrounded by a tangle of leaves and smaller flowers. The scene suggests opulence, pleasure, ease. But the recent history of…
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