Writer and editor
Hi, I'm Talya
I'm a culture critic, journalist and editor based in Brooklyn. My criticism and reporting has appeared in The Atlantic, The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Washington Post and Literary Hub, and extensively in the Forward, where I currently edit the Opinion section. My writing has received honors from Poynter, the Deadline Club, the Religion News Association, the Society for Features Journalism and American Jewish Press Association . My fiction, non-fiction and playwriting have received awards from the BBC, Crab Orchard Review and Jewish Quarterly.
SELECTED JOURNALISM
For The Atlantic:
​
"Literature’s Enduring Obsession With Strange Sisters"
"The Most Infamous Narcissist in Literary History Gets a Smartphone"
"Two Murder Mysteries’ Surprising Window Into Human Genius"
"The Sense That Most Defines a Culture"
"When Wellness Can’t Bring Happiness"
"A Vision of the City as a Live Organism"
​"The Case of the Unknowable Human"
"History is Never Only One Person's Story"
"The 19th-Century Feminist Novel Pushed Out of the Russian Canon"
​
For The New Yorker:
​
"The Woman Who Reimagined the Dystopian Novel"
​
For The New York Times:
​
"Looking at Epic Poetry Through 21st-Century Eyes"
"A Book So Far Ahead of Its Time, It Took 87 Years to Find a Publisher"
"Revisiting Hitler, in a New Authoritarian Age"
​
For The Washington Post:
"‘Little World’ is the brief, transporting story of a young saint"
"Charles Dickens’s Fagin gets rehabilitated, again"
"Booker finalist ‘The Safekeep’ is a moving look at history’s horrors"
"Roddy Doyle brings back Paula Spencer to find humor and tragedy in resilience"
"A coming-of-age story unfolds in one day, with help from Shakespeare"
"This trip to ancient Sicily is heartbreaking — and fun"
"‘The Ukraine’ is more interested in the human than the heroic"
"‘Vengeance Is Mine’ brilliantly keeps readers guessing"
"Louisa Hall tries to reproduce the Mary Shelley magic in ‘Reproduction’"
​
For the Forward:
"How this Marc Chagall painting explains Pope Francis’ soul"
"What Stephen Sondheim knew about Donald Trump’s would-be assassin — and the American culture that produced him"
"‘I haven’t really accepted he’s dead’ — scenes from the Stephen Sondheim estate sale"
"How a utopian Eurovision became a microcosm of a world divided over Israel and Gaza"
"How Richard Serra found infinity within the void"
"In London, an antisemitism scandal has sparked a play about antisemitism. Is it helping?"
"Philip Roth doesn't live here anymore"
"The unbearable emptiness of being Woody Allen"
"The Gorgeous, Grungy New York Values Of 'Sesame Street'" The Forward
"Like Philip Roth, But Feminist: Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s Debut Novel" The Forward
"Men Explain Anne Frank To Me" The Forward
​
For Literary Hub:
​
GET IN TOUCH
