Jon Kalish is a Manhattan-based writer and radio journalist.
Jon Kalish
By Jon Kalish
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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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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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