Jon Kalish is a Manhattan-based writer and radio journalist.
Jon Kalish
By Jon Kalish
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The Schmooze End of an Era for Judith Malina’s Living Theatre
Judith Malina will not go gentle into that good night. The fiery 86-year-old director of the Living Theatre is losing both her apartment and the Lower East Side home of the world renowned theater troupe she co-founded 66 years ago. Later this week Malina will move into an elder care facility in New Jersey, but…
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News Larry Selman, Star of Oscar-Nominated Documentary, Dies
They sat shiva for Larry Selman on Monday night on Bedford Street. Selman, 70, died Sunday morning in a Manhattan hospital from heart failure. Alice Elliot’s Oscar-nominated documentary, “The Collector of Bedford Street,” chronicled the developmentally disabled man who collected donations for charity in his Greenwich Village neighborhood for decades. Elliot and her neighbors established…
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The Schmooze This Israeli Life
A young Israeli grad student named Mishy holds up a cardboard sign that says “anywhere” as he hitchhikes out of Cambridge, England. He catches a ride with a Gypsy family bound for the ferry to France. In the vessel’s cafeteria Mishy meets a truck driver name Vladimir who agrees to take him to Spain. Only,…
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News Nechemya Weberman’s Unique Band of Relatives
You think your family has issues? Consider the Weberman clan. Nechemya Weberman was convicted December 10 for child sexual abuse in a landmark case that underlined the massive support he enjoyed in the Satmar Hasidic community. But it turns out that he is just one high-profile member of a sprawling brood, whose diverse activities have…
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News The Collector of Bedford Street Meets Sandy
For more than 30 years now a developmentally disabled man in Greenwich Village has been collecting donations for a variety of charities. His name is Larry Selman and he was the subject of an Oscar-nominated documentary titled “The Collector of Bedford Street.” He’s been doing the same thing for years. But his life took a…
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News Living With Two Identities
For Orthodox Jews, being both observant and actively gay, is a theological taboo. Producer Jon Kalishspoke to four gay Orthodox Jews who are trying to merge their two identities. The group includes an ordained Orthodox rabbi and a Hasidic lesbian living in a frum section of Brooklyn.
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News The Ruins of Jewish Brownsville
Brownsville, Brooklyn is perhaps most famous as a rough neighborhood and the birthplace of boxer Mike Tyson, but in the 1940s and 1950s the community was home to a large Jewish community. In this podcast reporter Jon Kalish rides along with the late Greg Jackson, a former basketball player who was born and raised in…
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The Schmooze Loving Look at Radio Pioneer
Those of you who are up on your 1960s counter-culture know that the Yippies were formed, for the most part, by a group of Jewish troublemakers from Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Some of those mischievous Yidden are no longer with us: Abbie Hoffman committed suicide in 1989, Jerry Rubin got hit by a car in…
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