Jon Kalish is a Manhattan-based writer and radio journalist.
Jon Kalish
By Jon Kalish
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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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News For Adults Only: An Alternative Roadmap to Peace
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. Founded by two Tel Aviv computer professionals, the Web site has been serving…
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Culture Challenging Community’s Traditional Boundaries
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. “Praying With Lior,” which opens at Cinema Village in New York on February 1, received a…
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Culture Ravensbruck’s Famous Survivor
Fiorello’s Sister: Gemma La Guardia Gluck’s Story Edited by Rochelle G. Saidel By Gemma La Guardia Gluck Syracuse University Press, 184 pages, $16.95. 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,…
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News Scoop: Heritage Foundation plans to ‘identify and target’ Wikipedia editors
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News ‘Do you have the Torahs?’ Synagogue races LA wildfire to rescue its past and future
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Opinion What a remarkable Torah rescued from Iran — then LA’s fire — can teach about community amid devastation
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Fast Forward Israel’s judicial overhaul is back. So are the protests.
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Opinion After 15 months of war, Israelis are all scaffolding, helping hold each other up
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Fast Forward Their Pacific Palisades synagogue is standing, but all three rabbis lost their homes
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