
Talya Zax is the Forward’s opinion editor. Contact her at [email protected] or on Twitter, @TalyaZax.

Talya Zax is the Forward’s opinion editor. Contact her at [email protected] or on Twitter, @TalyaZax.
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…
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…
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….
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…
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,”…
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,…
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…
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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