A professor at the University of Houston, Robert Zaretsky is also a culture columnist at the Forward.
Robert Zaretsky
By Robert Zaretsky
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Culture Why the Dreyfus Affair has now become our affair
This year marks the 125th anniversary of Alfred Dreyfus’ arrival at Devil’s Island. On April 14, the former captain in the French army, found guilty of treason a few months earlier by a military tribunal, began his life sentence as the sole prisoner on this malarial rock off the coast of French Guiana. As guards…
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Culture 125 Years Later, The Dreyfus Affair Remains Unfortunately Relevant
One hundred and twenty-five years ago, on the morning of October 15, 1894, Captain Alfred Dreyfus, a staff member of the French military high command, kissed his wife and children good-bye at their Paris apartment. Neither he nor his family suspected they would not again see one another for four years. Ordered to report to…
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Culture Le Corbusier — Revolutionary Architect, Nazi Apologist
“I am quite simple, even transparent. It’s the events swirling around me that are twisted.” When he wrote these words late in life to a friend, the world-renowned architect Charles-Édouard Jeanneret, better known as Le Corbusier, seemed to anticipate the controversies that his revolutionary ideas and crowded life would eventually inspire. In light of a…
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Culture How Notre Dame Became A Symbol Of Inclusion For All Of Us
In early 1981, Pope John Paul II announced his choice as the new Archbishop of Paris, Jean-Marie Lustiger. Not only did Lustiger share the pope’s youth and dynamism, but he apparently shared his ethnic background. Lustiger was, in fact, widely (and not always kindly) known as “the Pole”—a reference to his parental heritage. Upon being…
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Culture 125 Years Later, The Dreyfus Affair Remains Unfortunately Relevant
One hundred and twenty-five years ago, on the morning of October 15, 1894, Captain Alfred Dreyfus, a staff member of the French military high command, kissed his wife and children good-bye at their Paris apartment. Neither he nor his family suspected they would not again see one another for four years. Ordered to report to…
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Culture Why Serge And Beate Klarsfeld Became Nazi Hunters
“My father had died in Auschwitz and I had behind me the suffering of French Jews. Beate carried with her the knowledge of Germany’s role in this suffering. Besides, we were naive and full of energy, so we did things we might not do when older and wiser.” Serge Klarsfeld paused and smiled at me….
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Culture In An Era Of Faux News, Let’s Set The Record Straight On Vichy France
The State Versus The Jews By Laurent Joly Grasset, 368 pages, 20,90 € In 1994, the French historians Henry Rousso and Éric Conan published “Vichy, un Passé Qui ne Passe pas.” While titled “Vichy: The Ever-Present Past” in the excellent American translation, the phrase nevertheless has a slightly different resonance in the original French. The…
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Culture Sartre, The Kavanaugh Hearings And The Politics Of ‘Bad Faith’
Bad faith is very much in the news. As the media relentlessly remind us, Republicans are tirelessly accusing Democrats of bad faith, while Democrats relentlessly blast Republicans for the same sin. But Jean-Paul Sartre, the thinker who immortalized the phrase, would argue that what he called “mauvaise foi” is not only quite different, but it…
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Culture Why saying ‘L’shana Tova’ on Rosh Hashanah may not be the correct phrase
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Culture A Jewish prophet of the 1980s would be horrified to see that we didn’t heed his warnings
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Opinion With killing of Hezbollah’s chief, Israel occupies the inarguable moral high ground
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Opinion This is the most disorienting Rosh Hashanah in memory
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Film & TV How Leonard Cohen — and a Yom Kippur prayer — inspired a coming-of-age epic
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Opinion A year after Oct. 7, Israel has the chance to remake its future — for better or worse
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Opinion Campus protests defined the year since Oct. 7. Could they actually change U.S. policy?
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Special Report At the kibbutz hit hardest on Oct. 7, a wrenching debate over how to rebuild
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