Jon Kalish is a Manhattan-based writer and radio journalist.
Jon Kalish
By Jon Kalish
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News The Twersky Family Tree
The Twersky family tree has more than 25,000 names on it, and stretches back to the early 1700s, in the town of Chernobyl. The family not only boasts a legacy as a Hasidic dynasty — with the exception of a handful of Hasidic groups from Hungary, almost all Hasidic sects can trace their lineage to…
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Culture Shedding Grim Light
The Lampshade: A Holocaust Detective Story from Buchenwald to New Orleans By Mark Jacobson Simon & Schuster, 368 pages, $26 In this podcast, Jon Kalish speaks with Mark Jacobson, author of ‘The Lampshade.’: Why are people so reluctant to publish a photograph of Mark Jacobson’s lampshade? Because the lampshade is almost certainly made of human…
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Culture Bluffing the Bolshoi
At the beginning of Radu Mihaileanu’s mischievous new comedy film, “The Concert,” we meet an observant Jewish trumpet player in Moscow named Viktor and his son, Moshe, who seems to have no connection to Yiddishkeit. At the end of the movie, Viktor’s yarmulke has been replaced by a cowboy hat, while Moshe has peyes and…
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Culture Shakespeare in the Shtibl
In 2006, film director Eve Annenberg stumbled onto Chulent, a weekly gathering of young, alienated Orthodox and formerly Orthodox Jews in Manhattan. She had no idea that she was about to embark on one of the most improbable movies of her career. Four years later she is sending DVDs of her feature-length motion picture “Romeo…
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Culture Broza Dons Cowboy Boots
At one point during a Writers in the Round concert that took place in Houston in March 1994, Townes Van Zandt gestures at his fellow songwriters — David Broza, David Amram and Linda Lowe — and declares that they are “genuine giant talents!” He did not use the word “we” in that assessment, but most…
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Culture Fug Right Off
Tuli Kupferberg, came into this world speaking Yiddish, and he’s apparently determined to leave it making wisecracks on YouTube. The 86-year-old poet and songwriter, best known as a member of the outrageous 1960s rock band The Fugs, is now blind and confined to his Manhattan loft. But that hasn’t stopped him from recording short humorous…
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News Pioneer Songs, Revisited
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. They sang and played in an unoccupied three-story home, where a drum kit was often set up in the 18-foot octagonal foyer inside…
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News The Counterfeit Saga(s): What Really Happened at Sachsenhausen?
‘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…
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