Jon Kalish

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Editorial

Pioneer Songs, Revisited

By Jon Kalish

Over the past year, a who’s who of Jewish performers has made a pilgrimage to Livingston, N.J., a well-to-do suburb of New York City, to record interpretations of old Israeli pioneer songs.Read More

The Counterfeit Saga(s): What Really Happened at Sachsenhausen?

By Jon Kalish

‘The Counterfeiters” purports to tell the story of how Jews at Sachsenhausen concentration camp produced near-perfect forgeries of the British pound for the Nazis. But be forewarned: Austrian director Stefan Ruzowitsky’s 2008 Academy Award winner for best foreign film lacks a great deal of the drama inherent in the real-life story. That’s the word from veteran American journalist Lawrence Malkin, whose book “Krueger’s Men” (Back Bay Books) is widely regarded as the definitive nonfiction work on the saga. Originally published by Little, Brown and Company in 2006, the book was recently released in paperback, bearing a small sticker referring to “the true story that inspired the Oscar-winning movie.”Read More

For Adults Only: An Alternative Roadmap to Peace

By Jon Kalish

There is one place in the Middle East where Arabs and Jews seem to be getting along quite well. It’s the Israeli Web site Parpar1.com, where amateur pornography features Arabs and Jews at each other’s throats — but only for erotic purposes.Read More

Challenging Community’s Traditional Boundaries

By Jon Kalish

A new documentary about a Philadelphia boy with Down syndrome preparing for his bar mitzvah is at turns inspiring, heartbreaking and likely to spark some soul-searching in the Jewish community about the inclusion of disabled people in religious life.Read More

Ravensbruck’s Famous Survivor

By Jon Kalish

Back in the 1980s, a number of Holocaust scholars and “people who should know better” told historian Rochelle Saidel that Ravensbrück, a women’s concentration camp located about 60 miles north of Berlin, was used for political prisoners and that “there wasn’t a Jewish story there.” Saidel proved them wrong by writing what many consider to be the definitive book on the estimated 20,000 Jewish prisoners that passed through the camp.Read More


 

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