
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.
Three of the United Kingdom’s most prominent Jewish authors stepped forward yesterday to condemn anti-Semitism in one of the country’s leading political parties. In a Letter to the Editor published in The Times, Simon Schama, Howard Jacobson and Simon Sebag Montefiore criticized the Labour Party, led since 2015 by Jeremy Corbyn, for failing to check…
You have suffered a loss. You are grateful to God. You rage, you plead, you express your love. You are a sinner, a mourner, a citizen, alive. There is a psalm for most every experience in the handbook of humanity. And through a monumental program currently running at Lincoln Center, “The Psalms Experience,” audiences can…
What is Movie Thursday? We’re thrilled you asked. Starting today, every Thursday the Forward will publish a roundup of its best film coverage from the last week. This is where you can find movie recommendations for the weekend, essays on filmmakers, film history and more, and the latest news about Hollywood. Thus: Lights, camera, action!…
The craze of Halloween has passed; if you’re still feeling sick from all that candy, there’s luckily a bundle of good, recently-released books with which you can happily stay at home and recover. If you’re not quite ready to hibernate there’s still plenty to do out and about, including more celebrations of Leonard Bernstein’s centennial,…
Did it ever occur to you, upon encountering a woodpecker, to wonder about the structure of its tongue? If so, congratulations: You may be the next Leonard da Vinci. Well, only if you’re also curious about some other things: How to divert a river, say, or walk on ice, or measure the sun, or turn…
Has there been a more consequential story to the history of humanity than that of Adam and Eve? In the assessment of Stephen Greenblatt, Shakespeare scholar and Pulitzer Prize-winning author of “The Swerve,” probably not. But for Greenblatt, the significance of the origin story of Abrahamic religions ranges past its tangibly profound impact on the…
1955, the Lower East Side: Eight years after immigrating to the United States, two Holocaust survivors make a home in a six-room apartment. The rooms are big enough to live in comfortably, but only just. In a bedroom decorated in bright colors, its one slit of a window looking down at a staircase, their daughter…
What, exactly, has Stephen Sondheim contributed to musical theater? Lin-Manuel Miranda, in a profile of Sondheim penned for The New York Times Style Magazine, has an answer. “He is musical theater’s greatest lyricist, full stop,” Miranda writes. “The days of competition with other musical theater songwriters are done: We now talk about his work the…