Talya Zax is the Forward’s opinion editor. Contact her at zax@forward.com or on Twitter, @TalyaZax.
Talya ZaxOpinion Editor
By Talya Zax
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Culture Why Did Lillian Hellman Get Sick Of ‘The Little Foxes’?
‘I like ‘Little Foxes,’ but I’m tired of it,” the playwright Lillian Hellman told The Paris Review in 1965. She might think differently were she to see the current Broadway revival of her best-known play, starring Laura Linney and Cynthia Nixon. Why might that production catch Hellman’s eye? Those actors alternate with each other in…
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Culture These Are The Best Terry Gross Interviews In The Last 30 Years
No one conducts an interview quite like Terry Gross. The host of NPR’s “Fresh Air” has a knack for getting people to open up and entertain in utterly, well, fresh ways. This week, “Fresh Air” celebrates 30 years on air. In order to join in, we chose eight of Gross’s best interviews with Jewish notables,…
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Culture ‘I Love Dick,’ And More To Read, Watch, And Do This Weekend
Jill Soloway’s show “Transparent” has been an audience and critic favorite; on Friday, the Jewish director’s new series, “I Love Dick,” will premiere on Amazon Prime. The show stars Kathryn Hahn, who also plays Rabbi Raquel Fein on “Transparent.” Hahn spoke to JTA about the challenges and opportunities of being a non-Jew playing a rabbi…
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Culture When Oprah Met Rosie O’Donnell At ‘Indecent’
The current buzz about Rosie O’Donnell’s Twitter feed (yes, really) is mostly centered on the fact that President Trump revived one of her old tweets to throw some unabashedly petty shade at James Comey, the FBI Director he abruptly — and with confused reasoning — fired on Tuesday. We finally agree on something Rosie. https://t.co/BSP5F3PgbZ…
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Culture 20 Years Ago, Deep Blue Beat Garry Kasparov — And Changed The World
On May 11, 1997, something utterly unexpected happened to then-world chess champion Garry Kasparov: He conceded defeat in the last of six chess games with the IBM supercomputer Deep Blue, losing the match. It wasn’t the first time Kasparov had faced off with a machine. In 1985, he beat 32 computerized opponents at the same…
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Culture Is ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ Anti-Feminist?
Hulu’s television adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s dystopian novel “The Handmaid’s Tale” has gained general acclaim as a feminist manifesto for our times. But critic and novelist Francine Prose isn’t buying it. Writing in The New York Review of Books last week, Prose wrote that the show, which explores a fictionalized future United States in which…
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Culture How Does Ben Platt Handle Pressure Of ‘Dear Evan Hansen’? Ask His Rabbi
At 23, Ben Platt is a Broadway star, a member of Time’s 2017 list of the world’s 100 Most Influential People, and generally expected to win a 2017 Tony Award. The son of theater and film producer Marc Platt, the actor has been immersed in musical theater effectively since birth, but his big break has…
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Culture New Novel Will Imagine Hillary Rodham Without Bill Clinton
Novelist Curtis Sittenfeld has rewritten Jane Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice” and the life of former first lady Laura Bush. Now, she has a new subject: Hillary Rodham Clinton. As part of a three-book deal with Random House, Sittenfeld, who is half-Jewish, will write a novel imagining what the former Secretary of State, senator, and first…
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