
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.
Last week, the New York Times named its “100 Notable Books of 2016.” Included in their number were many reviewed by the Forward. Those included Jonathan Safran Foer’s “Here I Am,” Michael Chabon’s “Moonglow,” Affinity Konar’s “Mischling,” Boris Fishman’s “Don’t Let My Baby Do Rodeo,” Deborah Levy’s “Hot Milk,” Adam Kirsch’s “The People and the…
The Sweatshop Tour at Manhattan’s Tenement Museum, oriented around the homes and workplaces of two Lower East Side Jewish families at the turn of the 20th Century, includes some surprising facts. Among them is one sure to provoke outrage: that at the time, Eastern European Jews were primarily motivated to immigrate to the United States…
Late in his new novel, “Moonglow,” Michael Chabon describes the surreal, hastily-constructed lunar landscape of a play produced at a mental hospital. The set is clearly absurd – it’s mostly tinfoil – but it still exudes some sourceless magic. “And yet the foil shone in the subaqueous light,” Chabon writes. “The coat racks raising their…
Auguste Rodin’s “Thinker,” a ubiquitous image in high-art circles and meme-generating communities alike, has new competition: Haaretz reports an archaeological dig in Yehud has uncovered a Bronze Age ceramic jug featuring a “Thinker”-like figure. (Make that old competition.) Quoted by Haaretz’s Nir Hasson and Ruth Schuster, Gilad Itach, directing the excavation for the Israel Antiquities…
In March of 1942, just four months before her family went into hiding from the Nazis, Anne Frank sent a friend an 8-line poem. That handwritten note, recently put up for auction in the Netherlands, just sold for €140,000, the equivalent of $148,000, the BBC reports. Frank sent the poem to the late Christiane van…
On the brink of Thanksgiving, your mind is likely on the holiday – its pleasures and stresses alike – but find some time this week to indulge in great new reads, the long-heralded return of Amy Sherman Palladino’s “Gilmore Girls,” and, if you can drag yourself off your couch, concerts and plays in Chicago, Los…
In perhaps the most quintessentially New York interaction of 2016, Nicole Kidman showed up to the Manhattan premiere of her new film “Lion” this past week to receive an unexpected Yiddish lesson from Page Six columnist Cindy Adams. “You won’t believe this conversation,” Adams confided, before providing a transcript, which colorfully opened with Adams complimenting…
Participating in a Hollywood Reporter Actress Round Table with Emma Stone, Taraji P. Henson, Annette Bening, Naomi Harris, Isabelle Huppert, and Amy Adams, Natalie Portman unleashed a demand for an increased emphasis on female leadership, especially in local communities. In an abridged transcript of the conversation, Portman had a serious answer to a question on…
100% of profits support our journalism