The 10 most Jewish things to happen to me in 10 years at the Forward

10 years of office selfies, outfit pics in the bathroom mirror, and the best colleagues a girl could ask for. Courtesy of Talya Zax

By Talya Zax September 19, 2025

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The decade since I started at the Forward, as an intern on the culture desk in September 2015, has been full of change — for the Forward, and for me.

I was such a wet-behind-the-ears journalist that when Adam Langer, the editor who hired me, sent me off to profile the novelist Geraldine Brooks, I turned in a straightforward Q&A — I didn’t know there was a difference.

So I learned.

I learned how to do a really good interview; what an eruv is; how to build a relationship with a source; the differences between Hasidim and Chabadniks; how to edit a story; where to get the best babka in New York City.

Reporting on an auction of Philip Roth’s estate, I learned the age-old journalistic lesson that talking to strangers can lead you to amazing stories; that one resulted in a profile of the longtime caretaker of Roth’s Connecticut property. Covering the conflict over Israel’s participation in Eurovision in 2024, I learned how to report from the middle of a moving protest. Writing about the theatrical clown Alex Tatarsky, I learned that you can tell a lot about a person by how they embody a three-headed beast at the gates of hell.

The news is a challenging business. These days, that’s true of Jewish news, specifically. But the joy of my life is that I still get to learn, every single day. The biggest lesson of all: The Jewish community is funny, bizarre, full of unusual characters with odd connections, and incredibly vibrant. And so, to celebrate my anniversary with this publication, I am proud to present the 10 most Jewish things to happen to me in the past 10 years.

10) A cautionary tale about the perils of Jewish dating

In the span of 72 hours in July 2018, my ex-colleague and now-pal Jenny Singer and I unwittingly went out with the same guy. (If this story sounds familiar, it’s because Jenny wrote an excellent essay about it.) The clue that helped us figure it out: A telltale phrase he’d used on his Coffee Meets Bagel profile about the importance of his Jewish identity.

Yes, he knew we worked together. How he thought he’d navigate this situation with neither of us the wiser — given the propensity of 25-year-old Jewish women to immediately share details of their personal lives — remains a mystery.

9) A cautionary tale about the perils of sourcing

In 2020, I received this indelible Slack message from our former reporter Ari Feldman:

If you are any of the above Abraham Wurzbergers, or a separate uninvolved Abraham Wurzberger, I have nothing in particular to ask you — but please be in touch.

8) An unsolved celebrity mystery

In 2019, a colleague bounded into the office with an astonishing report: The actor Rachel Weisz was in the women’s restroom.

Before COVID, a smattering of other Jewish nonprofits operated on our floor, which meant that you sometimes encountered a Jew you didn’t expect. (My first serious boyfriend and I broke up just before I started working at the Forward; mere weeks into my tenure, I ran into his best friend’s brother unexpectedly waiting in front of our elevators.) This meant there was a non-zero chance that Weisz had been visiting with our peers across the hall.

I set off at a sprint to investigate, and caught the woman in question as she was washing her hands. We exchanged a smile; she looked extraordinarily like Rachel Weisz. But not definitively. I returned to the office in glee, and confusion.

A stranger shows up; gossips investigate; a small Jewish community is invigorated by a strange new influence — it was Manhattan’s Financial District, but it could have been any old country shtetl.

7) A piece of useful advice

About a year into my employment at the Forward, I was introduced to a Jewish feminist icon, who shall remain nameless, at a fancy Manhattan to-do. She gave me a stern gaze, then said that the headshot I was using on our site had to be replaced, as I was much prettier in person.

If you have ever experienced the force of a Jewish grandmother’s willpower you can imagine how this ended: I walked into the office and requested a new headshot the very next day.

6) An Upper West Side interlude

In 2018, I successfully convinced Sheldon Harnick, the lyricist of Fiddler on the Roof, to write an appreciation of Joel Grey, the director of an all-Yiddish revival of the show, for our then-annual “Forward 50.” One problem: Harnick did not use email (good for him).

So, one afternoon in October, I left work early to take the train up to Harnick’s apartment building, where he had left his draft, carefully packed in a manila envelope, with the doorman. If my memory is correct — and why shouldn’t it be? — it was typed in all caps.

5) An unorthodox new naming convention

As a journalist, you sometimes work late nights. Occasionally, you all become slightly loopy. One such time in summer 2024, Jodi Rudoren — then our editor-in-chief — suggested I abandon all previous norms of Jewish naming if I ever have children.

4) A suburban Chicago interlude

In spring 2021, Bernie Madoff died, and I sent out inquiries to synagogues that had been particularly affected by his misdeeds. It happened that the chief rabbi at one of them was a parent of my first serious boyfriend’s best friend — and, of course, said best friend’s brother, of the unexpected meeting at the Forward elevators. I had met this parent once years before, during a long afternoon spent lounging in and around their pool in my role as “son’s best friend’s new girlfriend.” So I did what any sane person would do, and sent the rabbi an email, acknowledging the oddity of us having previously met, long ago, in swimsuits.

The rabbi didn’t want to comment, and all of us moved on, until the ex-serious boyfriend and I attended a mutual friend’s wedding in Wisconsin that summer. We drove back to Chicago together — in the company of yet another mutual friend — and the ex asked to be dropped at his best friend’s house.

When we got there, all the parents were hanging around the pool. So, months after sending an email saying, “Once I was at your pool, now I am an editor at the Forward,” I found myself making a sheepish reintroduction: “I recently emailed you as an editor of the Forward, now I’m reappearing at your pool.” My ex and our friend decided to swim, and I didn’t have a suit, so I spent the afternoon swanning about in the water in a tennis dress, reflecting on the ways in which being Jewish is like finding meaning, over and over again, in the same pool — no matter whether you’re prepared, or have even chosen to be there.

3) An unorthodox proposal

In January 2018, I received an email with the tantalizing subject line “Crazy idea? Could be worse.”

“Talya Zax,” it began: “I think you are so very smart, strong, liberal, adorable, and well read.”

So far, so good. Then came the pitch. “If you are straight, single and like living in NYC,” my correspondent asked, would I “want to marry and have children with a great Jewish guy 44, who is very well educated, semi observant, progressive, studies Hebrew, and very smart, literate, and single (straight)”?

I was flattered, but not single. When I expressed as much, I was met with a model of hope springing eternal. “So as we are old friends now,” the mother of the man in question wrote, “know anyone else?”

2) A Jew I didn’t expect

One Friday in July 2020, my mom got in touch with me about the Forward’s pre-Shabbat newsletter, which had that week told the backstory of a series of articles we’d published about a Torah that had ended up at a Goodwill in Virginia. The reader who tipped us off to the Torah’s existence, my mom said, happened to have the same name as the obstetrician who saw her through her pregnancies with my brother and myself.

So I got the tipster’s email, and sent the strangest email of my career — the second strangest, of course, being to the rabbi with the pool — asking if she was, in fact, the same doctor who had viewed my fetal self via ultrasound back in 1992.

She was. “I hope you have a happy life (despite the weirdness of life during a pandemic),” she wrote me, before inviting me to visit her at the New Jersey beach, an offer on which I have yet to make good. Deb, if you’re reading this, I’ll be in touch.

1) A dental disaster

In September 2022, bagels were brought into the office. I opted for an everything, because I am a woman of taste. Then, as I ate at my desk, I managed to chip one of my front teeth on what proved to be an exceptionally hard sesame seed.

I’ve never bothered to get it fixed. As the Forward will forever be a part of my soul, my smile will forever be just a bit more asymmetrical. Sometimes, during this past decade, I’ve examined my face in the mirrors of that same bathroom where I once maybe met Rachel Weisz, trying to understand the ways in which my expression was changing with the years. Now I can identify something specific. As with most things in life, you never really get to choose how Judaism shapes you. But shape you it will.