Jon Kalish is a Manhattan-based writer and radio journalist.
Jon Kalish
By Jon Kalish
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Culture For The Love of Pure Khazones
Few outside the world of cantorial music know the name Yitzchak Meir Helfgot, but when Itzhak Perlman listens to the Brooklyn-based cantor’s tenor, he gets goose bumps. Perlman, who has had a love of khazones, synagogue chants, since his boyhood in Tel Aviv, compares Helfgot to Plácido Domingo and Luciano Pavarotti, two opera giants with…
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News Winding Road from ‘Casablanca’
In 1972, shortly after Thilde Foerster died, her son and granddaughter went to clean out her apartment in Santa Barbara, Calif. There they found an old battered suitcase hidden under her bed, filled with film scripts, plays and an unfinished novel. Foerster’s son, Michael Forster, knew that his mother had worked in the film industry…
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The Schmooze Klezmer Musician Awarded Highest Folk Honor
The National Endowment for the Arts announced today that klezmer clarinetist Andy Statman is among the recipients of its 2012 National Heritage Fellowships. The Brooklyn-based musician will be awarded the nation’s highest honor in folk and traditional arts during a ceremony in the fall. Reached at his home in Midwood, the 61-year-old bluegrass and klezmer…
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News Making Matzo in a Chametz-Free Zone
From the Kalish archives: In a story that originally aired on WNYC, Jon Kalish takes us inside a Shmura matzo bakery in Boro Park, Brooklyn. <strong>Subscribe to Forward podcasts on iTunes</strong>
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News Ira Cohen’s Art and Alchemy
Ira Cohen was a filmmaker, photographer and poet, but many people would agree that Cohen’s most amazing work of art was himself. A self-described “multimedia shaman,” Cohen passed away in April 2011. Jon Kalish reports from the Living Theatre on New York’s Lower East Side, where Cohen’s friends and admirers gathered this past month to…
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The Schmooze Radio Legend Larry Josephson Takes the Stage
Larry Josephson’s first foray into the world of performance is titled “An Inconvenient Jew: My Life In Radio.” And the public radio legend promises that tonight’s monologue at the Cornelia Street Cafe in Greenwich Village won’t be his last stab at public performance. When he was dubbed “the original bad boy of morning radio” in…
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News Adrienne Cooper’s Musical Life
The legendary Yiddish musician and music teacher Adrienne Cooper, who died December 25 at age 65, was remembered at a New Year’s Day memorial service on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. Jon Kalish reports from the event, and speaks with Cooper’s friends and colleagues about the life, career, character of the woman who, as fellow musician…
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Culture A Sneak Preview of Itzhak Perlman
Itzhak spoke to Yitzchok in Hebrew. Hankus spoke to Yitzchok in Yiddish. The conductor made puns in English with a heavy accent that is Australian and South African. And this all happened in the studio where Bruce Springsteen recorded “Born To Run” and Madonna laid down her vocal tracks for “Like a Virgin.” We’re talking,…
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