Jon Kalish is a Manhattan-based writer and radio journalist.
Jon Kalish
By Jon Kalish
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Music How Brooklyn klezmer great Andy Statman got a Grand Ole Opry welcome in Nashville
The clarinet and mandolin virtuoso and Orthodox Jew got a standing ovation in his debut at the country music mecca
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Culture ‘His Russia is now illegal in Russia’ — how exiled musicians are finding a home away from home
JetLAG bills itself as the largest festival of Russian, Slavic, Balkan and East European music in the US
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New York Voices The history of Jews and marijuana goes back a lot farther than you think
'Am Yisrael High,' an exhibit at YIVO, finds evidence of weed consumption all the way back in the Cairo geniza
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Culture Once a Jewish hero of the counterculture, Aron Kay looks back on his pie-throwing days
At the end of a 1995 oral history recorded for the USC Shoah Foundation, Holocaust survivor Mary Kay was asked about her children and grandchildren. When she got to her eldest son, she indicated that he lived in New York but declared, “I can’t tell you what he does.” Kay was not about to kvell…
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Culture A fond farewell to Bob Fass, rabbi of a radical radio congregation
I’ve been a member of two unconventional congregations in New York. One was in the East Village and was financed by several lawyers in the Bronx. Hardly anyone paid dues but our Hasidic rabbi still fed his gaggle of converts, Baal Tshuvahs and crusty Lower East Side geezers, including a Jew known as Murphy who…
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Culture Up for sale: Letters from Lenny Bruce and Charles Manson, a Disneyland orgy and the story of a generation
The political upheaval of the 1960s is certainly having a moment in Hollywood. Among the films up for the best picture Oscar are “Judas and the Black Messiah” and “The Trial of the Chicago 7.” And, of course, Best Supporting Actor nominations went to Daniel Kaluuya for his portrayal of the murdered Black Panther Fred…
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Culture For the real-life Alice of ‘Alice’s Restaurant,’ a new reason to be thankful
This is a story about Alice of “Alice’s Restaurant” fame. “Alice’s Restaurant” is a song and a movie and once was an actual restaurant. But more than anything, “Alice’s Restaurant” is a frame of mind, one that might best be illustrated by the thousands of people who have helped the real-life woman immortalized in the…
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News Burial society organization suggests new rituals; Brooklyn funeral home overwhelmed
An Orthodox funeral home in Brooklyn, where a video shows nine shrouded bodies stacked on the floor, is so overwhelmed that on Tuesday it called for volunteers with minivans and SUVs to ferry the dead to cemeteries for burial. In a message circulated via What’s App, Menachem A. Bloom, who works at the funeral home,…
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Opinion Right-wing insurrectionists tried to topple the German government in 1920 — it’s happening again in Trump’s America
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Theater Can a kinky new Yiddish musical resurrect a lost art — and one man who got spanked to death?
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Fast Forward Josh Shapiro’s Judaism was not why Kamala Harris snubbed him, new book claims
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Yiddish דאָקטוירים פֿון אַן אַנדער שניטDoctors of a different sort
די ווילנער דאָקטוירים יעקבֿ וויגאָדסקי און צמח שאַבאַד זענען אויך געווען געזעלשאַפֿטלעכע טוער.
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