Jon Kalish is a Manhattan-based writer and radio journalist.
Jon Kalish
By Jon Kalish
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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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News Mixing Mountain Musics
Somewhere in New York, perhaps at this very moment, someone is hosting a “picking party,” a bluegrass gathering in a private home where musicians sit and play tunes. And Margot Leverett, a 45-year-old clarinetist, is not invited. “They’re being very careful not to let me know where they are,” Leverett said in an interview with…
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News Arnold ‘The Brain’
Rothstein: The Life, Times, and Murder of the Criminal Genius Who Fixed the 1919 World Series By David Pietrusza Carroll & Graf Publishers, 496 pages, $27. * * *| Abraham Rothstein raised his family in Manhattan in the late 1800s. A Sabbath-observant Jew, he was a successful businessman known as “Abe the Just.” One of…
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News Immigrants in Their Own Words
Warren Lehrer was struggling with a book of short stories called “Leap” during the spring of 1999. They were about people whose lives were about to undergo tremendous change. At the time he was assisting his wife, Judith Sloan, in a storytelling workshop at Forest Hills High School for which the students interviewed immigrants living…
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News ‘Conservatory With a Heart’ Embroiled in Union Dispute
The Lucy Moses School bills itself as “The Conservatory With a Heart,“ but some teachers at the arts school on Manhattan’s Upper West Side say the institution has had little sympathy for their efforts to unionize. Dozens of teachers at the school voted to join Local 802 of the American Federation of Musicians in an…
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News Jewish Melodies, Latin Beats Infuse New Jazz
What do a trumpeter from a band called Sex Mob, a popular hip-hop session musician and a Latino percussionist who once played for Yiddish theater have in common? They all play jazz infused with Jewish melodies and Latin rhythms, and are all featured in Tzadik’s “Radical Jewish Culture” CD series. And this month, all three…
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דאָ וועט איר הערן דעם אַרטיקל, „וואָס אַקטיוויסטן פֿאַר שפּראַכן אין אַ סכּנה קענען זיך אָפּלערנען איינער פֿונעם אַנדערן.“
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