Jon Kalish is a Manhattan-based writer and radio journalist.
Jon Kalish
By Jon Kalish
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News Nechemya Weberman’s Unique Band of Relatives
You think your family has issues? Consider the Weberman clan. Nechemya Weberman was convicted December 10 for child sexual abuse in a landmark case that underlined the massive support he enjoyed in the Satmar Hasidic community. But it turns out that he is just one high-profile member of a sprawling brood, whose diverse activities have…
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News The Collector of Bedford Street Meets Sandy
For more than 30 years now a developmentally disabled man in Greenwich Village has been collecting donations for a variety of charities. His name is Larry Selman and he was the subject of an Oscar-nominated documentary titled “The Collector of Bedford Street.” He’s been doing the same thing for years. But his life took a…
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News Living With Two Identities
For Orthodox Jews, being both observant and actively gay, is a theological taboo. Producer Jon Kalishspoke to four gay Orthodox Jews who are trying to merge their two identities. The group includes an ordained Orthodox rabbi and a Hasidic lesbian living in a frum section of Brooklyn.
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News The Ruins of Jewish Brownsville
Brownsville, Brooklyn is perhaps most famous as a rough neighborhood and the birthplace of boxer Mike Tyson, but in the 1940s and 1950s the community was home to a large Jewish community. In this podcast reporter Jon Kalish rides along with the late Greg Jackson, a former basketball player who was born and raised in…
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The Schmooze Loving Look at Radio Pioneer
Those of you who are up on your 1960s counter-culture know that the Yippies were formed, for the most part, by a group of Jewish troublemakers from Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Some of those mischievous Yidden are no longer with us: Abbie Hoffman committed suicide in 1989, Jerry Rubin got hit by a car in…
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The Schmooze Watching YouTube With Itzhak Perlman
At Itzhak Perlman’s home on the East End of Long Island, the great violinist wakes up his MacBook to play back some khazones through a huge flat screen TV on the wall. As he flips through his iTunes collection and some YouTube videos, he recalls listening to such cantorial greats as Gershon Serota, Moshe Kousevittsky,…
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Culture For The Love of Pure Khazones
Few outside the world of cantorial music know the name Yitzchak Meir Helfgot, but when Itzhak Perlman listens to the Brooklyn-based cantor’s tenor, he gets goose bumps. Perlman, who has had a love of khazones, synagogue chants, since his boyhood in Tel Aviv, compares Helfgot to Plácido Domingo and Luciano Pavarotti, two opera giants with…
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News Winding Road from ‘Casablanca’
In 1972, shortly after Thilde Foerster died, her son and granddaughter went to clean out her apartment in Santa Barbara, Calif. There they found an old battered suitcase hidden under her bed, filled with film scripts, plays and an unfinished novel. Foerster’s son, Michael Forster, knew that his mother had worked in the film industry…
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