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 The Bitter Nostalgia Of Italian Jews, Captured By A Modernist Master
Italy: We long to be there. Red stone buildings and gelato; sun-struck days and soaring basilicas. “A Room With a View.” Katharine Hepburn in “Summertime.” Audrey Hepburn, liberated and love struck in “Roman Holiday.” One of the many fascinations of Giorgio Bassani’s “The Novel of Ferrara,” a compendium of six interlinked novels examining the lives…
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Culture Inside The Mind Of Arnold Schoenberg, The Genius Who Defined 20th Century Music
What happens in the mind of a genius? Mozart’s mind was puerile; if his extraordinary sophistication with music extended to other aspects of his psyche, he didn’t show it. Van Gogh was subject to psychotic episodes, a struggle that may have impacted his work, although we can only speculate. Bits of Einstein’s brain are preserved…
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Theater This Would-Be ‘Fiddler On The Roof’ Sequel Was A Flop. Is It Better In 2019?
The musical “Rags” has a complicated history. It premiered on Broadway in 1986, closing after four performances and 18 previews. It’s been rewritten and restructured and revived so many times that, reading a plot synopsis for a previous version after seeing a dress rehearsal of NYU’s new iteration of the show, I barely recognized the…
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Culture Henry Ford Was Anti-Semitic. Bill McGraw Wrote About It — And Got Fired.
When Bill McGraw became the editor of the Dearborn Historian last summer, he hoped to grow the audience of the city-funded Michigan journal, which has 230 subscribers and no website. He was not expecting to make national news. But when Dearborn mayor John B. O’Reilly first objected to the cover of the journal’s January issue…
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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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