
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.
“In a political culture of managed spectacles and passive spectators, poetry appears as a rift, a peculiar lapse, in the prevailing mode,” wrote Adrienne Rich in her 1993 essay “Someone is Writing a Poem.” Later, in the same essay, she tried to explain just how: “In the wash of poetry the old, beaten, worn stones…
In the end, the Jews come back. They’re warmly dressed, smiling, clean and apparently none the worse for wear. It’s a convivial scene, a meeting between men who misunderstood each other but never meant harm. Two young girls in light-colored dresses present flowers, in recognition and appreciation: We’re so glad you’re here. The end of…
What movies make essential viewing for someone seeking to understand the United States? Ask Martin Scorsese, and he might say — as he did, per a Film Journal International report, at a recent panel discussion in New York — that movies that meet the criteria “look squarely at the struggles, violent disagreements and the tragedies…
Like you, many of us at the Forward will be spending much of this weekend focused on Passover. As you prepare for the holiday, make time for some of the Forward’s most powerful articles about it: Founding editor Ab Cahan’s newly translated essay of his first Passover in America, Itzik Gottesman’s account of Eastern European…
The nicest way to view the Jewish Museum’s new exhibit “Marc Camille Chaimowicz: Your Place or Mine,” the London-based artist’s first solo show in the United States, is alone. As the last straggler at a recent preview showing of the exhibit, I wandered in near solitude through the playfully arranged last section, called “Le Jardin…
When Nora Ephron passed away in 2012, you may have caught a mention, in her New York Times obituary of a “tart, sharply observed” profile of Ayn Rand she had penned in the 1960s. The idea might have struck you as odd: Ephron on Rand? Sure, both were Jewish writers who were among the defining…
The publishers of an Indian children’s book that included Adolf Hitler on a list of “amazing leaders” have yanked the title from sale, following an outcry sparked by the Simon Wiesenthal Center, The Guardian reports. The book “Leaders,” which had been listed on its publisher’s website under the title “Great Leaders,” was published in 2016…
Norman Mailer, who passed away in 2007, remains a big deal kind of writer: Big enough for the Library of America to be releasing a two-volume edition of his selected books and essays, big enough for his namesake 2004 episode of “Gilmore Girls” to continue to make lists of the show’s most notable and big…
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