
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.
Jill Bialosky, the poet, memoirist, novelist and executive editor at W.W. Norton & Company recently accused of plagiarism in her new memoir “Poetry Will Save Your Life,” has a long list of powerful supporters. Former poets laureate Robert Pinsky and Louise Glück, Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Jennifer Egan, and some 70-odd other authors signed a Letter…
Playwright Annie Baker and opera director Yuval Sharon are among the cultural figures to be awarded 2017 MacArthur Fellowships. The Fellowships, colloquially known as “genius grants,” come with a no-strings-attached award of $625,000. They are awarded annually to between 20 and 30 Americans across a range of disciplines. The MacArthur Foundation lauded Baker, who won…
Updated, 3:30 p.m.: Mark Oppenheimer has issued an apology through Tablet for his article concerning Harvey Weinstein and Philip Roth, discussed below. Read his comments here. Harvey Weinstein can be said, definitively, to be several things: Formerly one of the most powerful men in Hollywood, a Jew, and unemployed. He can be very substantively alleged…
Simon Schama’s “Belonging: The Story of the Jews, 1492-1900” and Daniel Mendelsohn’s “An Odyssey: A Father, a Son and an Epic” have been shortlisted for this year’s Baillie Gifford Prize, one of the United Kingdom’s most prestigious literary awards for nonfiction. The award, which comes with a prize of £30,000, or close to $40,000, was…
Poet, memoirist, novelist and editor Jill Bialosky, this week accused of plagiarism in her new memoir “Poetry Will Save Your Life,” has degrees from three universities. Each of them has clear standards as to what counts as plagiarism. “Reproducing another person’s work, whether published or unpublished” counts, according to Ohio University, from which Bialosky has…
It’s Sukkot, so ideally you’ll be spending your weekend eating traditional stuffed foods in a sukkah, whether one that costs $10,000 or, uh, otherwise. In your free time, look to our weekend culture picks to supplement. 1) Read Masha Gessen’s newly released “The Future is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia,” a finalist for the National…
Michael Marrus, an emeritus professor of history at the University of Toronto’s Massey College, resigned earlier this week after making a racist remark to a student. Last week, as The Toronto Star reported, Marrus had been sitting at lunch with three of the College’s graduate students, known as junior fellows, when head of the College…
In the future, when some scholarly young Jew flirts with bankruptcy while composing an engagingly voluminous biography of noted biographer-of-length Robert Caro, he or she might note the occasion, last week, upon which Caro took to a Newark Public Library Stage to deliver that institution’s Second Annual Philip Roth Lecture. Worth particular observation would be…
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