Jon Kalish is a Manhattan-based writer and radio journalist.
Jon Kalish
By Jon Kalish
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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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Culture A Beatnik Finds Treasure In His Grandfather’s Beats
A Manhattan record label and a Minnesota distributor/publisher of spoken word audio, including books and radio programs, are among the companies that have expressed interest in a rare collection of Jewish liturgical recordings made in the 1950s, much to the relief of Lionel Ziprin, who has been trying to get the recordings out in the…
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News Pretender or Contender?
Is a Sabbath-observant boxing phenom with the Star of David on his trunks ready to become a contender? On August 25, Dmitriy Salita next enters the ring, where he may well extend his undefeated professional record of 22-0, but the question remains whether he has what it takes to make the transition from a promising…
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Israel News Countercultural Cabal Lends a Hand to Radio Legend
For more than 40 years, Bob Fass has presided over a program called “Radio Unnameable” on listener-sponsored WBAI-FM in New York. It’s an apt name for the show, which features a genre-defying mix of talk, recorded music, live performance and just about anything else that Fass can patch into a mixing console. Asked to describe…
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Israel News Filmmaker Confronts ‘Protocols’ Myth in Documentary
In the weeks and months after the attacks of September 11, 2001, filmmaker Marc Levin kept hearing from New York City cab drivers that no Jews had died in the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center. One Egyptian driver not only repeated the canard that “Jews were warned about 9/11,” but posited that the…
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Culture A Jewish Doctor Who Put Nazis on the Couch
In 1946, Dr. Leon Goldensohn, a Jewish psychiatrist from Newark, N.J., spent six months conducting lengthy interviews with dozens of Nazis during the Nuremberg trials. Unfortunately, he died before he could write a book about the experience. But now, nearly 60 years after the trials, thanks to his brother, Goldensohn’s copious and detailed notes are…
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Culture They Might Be Giants
In Our Hearts We Were Giants By Yehuda Koren and Eilat Negev Carroll & Graf, 305 pages, $25. —- Imagine the terror of a having a vicious German Shepherd bark at you on the train platform at Auschwitz. Now imagine that the dog is barking at you as your tiny body is lifted from a…
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News Unlikely Music in an Unlikely Place
In the 1970s, Andy Statman emerged as a celebrated mandolin player in the “newgrass” movement. In the 1980s, he became a driving force behind the neo-klezmer movement. In the 1990s, he released collections with mandolin-master David Grisman and Itzhak Perlman, and was eventually lauded by The New York Times as “a master of two idioms…
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