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 it matters whether we describe Putin’s appalling crimes against humanity ‘genocide’
The horrors produced by Russian soldiers in Bucha and Borodyanka have spurred countless commentaries on two concepts: crimes against humanity and the crime of genocide. Commentators rightly note that these notions differ not on the heinous nature of certain acts, but on how they should be defined. But often missing from these discussions is the…
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Culture Like Albert Camus, Zelenskyy has learned to resist the plague of the absurd
When the novel coronavirus claimed the world’s attention in 2020, so too did a novel by Albert Camus. With the quickening of the pandemic, “The Plague” became an item almost as essential as toilet paper and facemasks on both sides of the Atlantic. In France, 1,700 copies of “La Peste” were sold in January 2020…
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Culture Why we must keep talking about the horrors of Toulouse — even if we still can’t comprehend them
“Ten years have passed.” With these four words, French president Emmanuel Macron began a speech yesterday in the southern city of Toulouse. Using a biblical cadence, over the course of his speech, Macron repeated these four words, which formed a leitmotif, one that announced both a matter of fact and a fact that will always…
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Culture Jews are joining the fight to defend Ukraine — we’ve been here before
On February 26, just two days after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the Ukrainian Embassy in Israel issued an invitation to its “dear compatriots, brothers and all caring citizens of Israel.” This was an unusual invitation: it was directed to all of those “who wish to participate in combat actions against the Russian aggressor. The response…
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Culture Once exceptional, the lives of American Jews have become lachrymose
“The Tears of History: From Kishinev to Pittsburgh,” by the renowned French historian Pierre Birnbaum, takes its title from the work of the influential Jewish-American historian Salo Baron. In rejecting what he called the “lachrymose” account of Jewish history, Baron instead insisted that, both in medieval Europe and modern America, our history was more fortunate…
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Culture In America, as in Ukraine, the unthinkable has become thinkable
In his classic work “The Captive Mind,” the Polish poet and Nobel laureate Czeslaw Milosz remarks on our tendency to see the world we have always lived in as natural. The buildings on our street “seem more like rocks rising out of the earth” and the clothes we wear as we do our jobs in…
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Culture How a career in performance prepared Volodymyr Zelenskyy for this moment in Ukraine
One of Karl Marx’s best-known lines appears in “The Eighteenth Brumaire,” his merciless vivisection of the revolution of 1848 in France. Torn between crying and laughing at the words and actions of the French revolutionaries, who seemed to see themselves as characters in a remake of the earlier revolution of 1789, Marx panned their performance….
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Culture Is this particular strain of antisemitism and bigotry becoming endemic?
The past two years have made amateur epidemiologists of us all. We have learned that “aerosol” applies to more than hairsprays, that “crushing the curve” means more than slamming a pitch into the bleachers, and that ingesting bleaches will not crush the coronavirus. We have also learned the distinction between pandemic — the exponential explosion…
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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
In Case You Missed It
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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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