Jon Kalish is a Manhattan-based writer and radio journalist.
Jon Kalish
By Jon Kalish
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Culture Should We Mourn WBAI? Or Did That Time Pass Long Ago?
Is it time to say Kaddish for WBAI — or should we summon some rabbis to exorcise it? The legendary listener-supported radio station, once a counter-cultural institution that actually had an impact on the culture, finally lost its voice earlier this week. After decades of declining audience and financial support, the Pacifica Foundation, which acquired…
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Culture A Holocaust Museum Tells The Untellable Story — Through Orthodox Eyes
NEW YORK (JTA) — Like Holocaust museums the world over, the Amud Aish Memorial Museum in Brooklyn focuses on European Jewish communities that thrived before the Nazis came to power, the killing machine that led to millions of deaths, and the resilience of survivors both during the war and in rebuilding their Jewish lives in…
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Culture KlezKamp Lives On With ‘Yiddish New York’
When the announcement was made last fall that KlezKamp, the Yiddish folk arts gathering that took place in the Catskills every winter for the last 30 years, was ending, some of the movers and shakers in the klezmer scene resolved to organize a replacement. Now comes word that Yiddish New York will take place in…
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Culture Michigan Opera Director Turns His Hand to Yiddish Theater
“You can’t dance at two weddings with one tukhes,” goes the old Yiddish saying. Tell that to Michael Yashinsky, a 26-year-old Detroit area Yiddishist who divides his time between a Jewish day school and Michigan Opera Theatre. Yashinsky, whose showbiz lineage includes grandparents who were professional actors and an uncle who was a rock star,…
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News Judith Malina, Edgy Theatrical Rebel for the Ages, Dies at 88
Judith Malina loved to tell a story about her experience playing the role of Grandmama in “The Addams Family,” which was filmed during the First Gulf War, in 1991. A committed pacifist, Malina was known on the set for trying to engage co-stars Anjelica Huston and Raul Julia in the anti-war effort. So it was…
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The Schmooze Judith Malina, Theater Rebel, Dies at 88
Nate Lavey Photo Judith Malina, an iconoclastic actor and theater world activist who founded the Living Theater, has died at 88, the New York Times reported. Here’s the Forward’s account of her battle to save the Lower East Side drama institution. Judith Malina will not go gentle into that good night. The fiery 86-year-old director…
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News Danny Schechter Was an Observant Jew, Even if he Rarely Set Foot in Shul
Danny Schechter, the self-described progenitor of “participatory journalism” who died March 19, first burst onto my radar screen back in the late 1970s, when I was working at WBAI-FM, the left-leaning community-sponsored radio station. One day, while laboring there, I heard a news story come in from Boston with an inordinate amount of reggae music…
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The Schmooze Pete Sokolow Is the ‘Youngest Old Guy’ of Klezmer
Photo: Michael Macioce The Arty Semite wishes Brooklyn musician Pete Sokolow a speedy recovery. Sokolow suffered a stroke last month and ended up missing the last KlezKamp. The man who came to be known in the klezmer revival as “the youngest old guy” is a little weak on his right side but many are hoping…
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