Talia Lavin is a fact checker for the New Yorker and a Forward columnist writing about Jews in American politics.
Talia Lavin
By Talia Lavin
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Opinion No, We Don’t Have To Be Friends With Trump Supporters
On Monday, Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced a ruling that would change the course of American asylum policy: the closing of America’s doors to those escaping domestic violence and gang violence. Asylum seekers from Central America and elsewhere else, fleeing desperate conditions and frequently in terror for their lives, are now officially unwelcome. Coupled with…
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Opinion 24 Yiddish Curses For Jared Kushner Now That He Has A Security Clearance
Editor’s note: The following is a satirical piece. Dear Jared, Mazel tov on finally getting your security clearance after 18 months of working in the administration and despite myriad conflicts of interest! When I told my bubbe about it, she began to curse in Yiddish — and asked me to translate her thoughts. May every…
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Opinion When Men Tell The #MeToo Story, They’re Always The Victims
We seem to have entered round two (or three or four) of #MeToo revelations. On Friday, the writer Zizi Clemons alleged via Tweet that Junot Diaz had forcibly kissed her. Last week, Tom Brokaw was accused of sexual misconduct. And New York Times editor Wendell Jamieson resigned amid accusations of misconduct made by three female…
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Letters Dear Mr. Dershowitz: I Didn’t Invent Anti-Semitism
Hi Alan! It’s not every day I get to wake up and find that a world-famous lawyer fifty-one years my senior has called me a Nazi propagandist-cum-McCarthyist-and-cringing-Jew. Most people would struggle embracing so many contradictory ideologies, but me? I’m a striver. I appreciate the scrutiny, to be honest; it’s flattering. I mentioned your name once…
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Opinion Trump’s Jews Are A Shonda For Di Goyim
My first job in journalism was at the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, a venerable, century-old newswire which provides coverage to Jewish papers around the world. As a jack-of-all trades intern, one of my jobs was to monitor our web traffic. To my surprise, I found that one of our top referrers was frequently Stormfront.org, a neo-Nazi…
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Opinion Twitter Is Today’s Talmud. Which Is Why Men Suck At Following Women.
Over the past few days, Facebook has seen a righteous backlash for its promiscuous use of data, hoovering up our phone numbers, our predilections and our loved ones’ birthdays like so many profitable nuggets of ore for their data-mining operation. But over the past few years, much of the surging and chaotic energy of social…
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Opinion Actually, Blaming The Jews Is Bad, And So Is Putin For Doing It
Blaming the Jews is an old-school rhetorical move. It’s also, dispiritingly often, quite effective. You can see it in American far-righters blaming George Soros for financing their political opponents; in Steve Bannon’s menacing rhetoric about the influence of “globalists;” and, yes, in Louis Farrakhan’s screeds about Jews controlling the FBI. The notion of the Jew…
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Opinion No, That Muslim Model’s Tweets Were Not Anti-Semitic
On Monday, hijabi beauty blogger and model Amena Khan announced that she was voluntarily stepping down from her role in a L’Oreal Paris ad campaign — over some tweets that criticized Israel. In a statement posted to Instagram, Khan apologized for the tweets, which were posted in 2014 during the Gaza War. Her apology and…
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