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 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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Culture Amos Oz, Remembered By Those Who Knew Him
Amos Oz was enormously influential, a literary giant whose work helped shape his fledgling country, Israel. But, Jessica Cohen says, he was also kind. “Even though he was famous, an internationally renowned author and intellectual, when you sat and talked with him in his living room it was just like talking with a nice guy,”…
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Culture The Navy Is Disciplining Sailors With Ayn Rand (Yes, Really)
The Russian-Jewish novelist Ayn Rand’s books are many things: A surprisingly formative force in modern conservatism, the subject of the hilarious scorn of Nora Ephron, something your high school boyfriend felt, like, really passionate about, alarmingly attractive to Rand Paul and unconscionably long. Now, as the United States Navy seeks more humane forms of discipline,…
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Culture From Pittsburgh To Canary Mission: Our Best Stories Of 2018
Ah, 2018: Year of political turmoil, Manhattan’s swoon of adoration over a particularly handsome duck, a doubtful detente with North Korea, the ascendancy of our queen Meghan Markle, a Supreme Court confirmation process that excavated some of the ugliest facts about sexism in America, and the Winter Olympics. (Yes, those really happened in 2018!) We…
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The Schmooze 19 Definitely Accurate Pop Culture Predictions For 2019
Wipe that perspiration off your brow: We’ve almost made it to 2019. But in today’s fast-paced news cycle, who knows what might have changed by the time you wake up on New Years Day? Maybe Gwyneth Paltrow will have thrown her hat in the ring for 2020 — the nation could really use some self-care….
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Culture How A MacArthur Genius Summoned The Voices Of The Triangle Shirtwaist Fire’s Victims
In New York City, you are always walking past a story. A beaming stranger on the subway. A building going up or coming down. A commemorative sign: the site of Manhattan’s slave market; the site of a battle; the site of a fire. For a long time, the composer Julia Wolfe often walked past the…
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Culture Alice Walker Endorsed A Book By An Anti-Semite In The NYT
The New York Times’s “By the Book” column is no stranger to scandal. Male authors who participate in the feature, in which an author answers questions about the books that have formed them, tend to mention few female authors among their picks. It’s a phenomenon so notable that when Lauren Groff was a “By the…
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