PJ Grisar is a Forward culture reporter. He can be reached at [email protected] and @pjgrisar on Twitter.
PJ Grisar
By PJ Grisar
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Culture Meet the Tel Aviv teen bringing gender equality to playing cards
Here’s a magic trick: Imagine a standard deck of cards. Now visualize the highest value face card. I don’t need to be David Copperfield to know you’ve pictured a king. But why should that be? After all, queens have been some of the most successful, beloved and longest-serving monarchs. Why are they worth less than…
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Culture Why filmmaker Sasha Neulinger is sharing his story of abuse
In 2012, Sasha Neulinger was finishing his film degree at Montana State University. He was 23 and had a job working on a show for National Geographic. He was excited to see what the future held, but his past wasn’t done with him yet. “I was really enjoying where I was, and yet there was…
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Culture ‘Hollywood’ imagines inclusion, but snubs films about Jews
Ryan Murphy’s “Hollywood” presents a gauzy Tinsel Town where anything was possible. In it, the movie-making mecca of the postwar period supplied a panacea for all America’s ills, counting major blows against racism, homophobia and gender inequality in one, monumental evening at the Academy Awards. Hays Code be damned! Forget the trending hashtag of #OscarsSoWhite…
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Music Barbra Streisand urges relief for essential workers — through song
“You’ll Never Walk Alone” is having a moment, but Barbra Streisand is eternal. In a new video posted to her YouTube channel, the singer, known for her exceedingly rare live vocal performances, used the song to laud those working through the coronavirus pandemic. While the video, with its images of healthcare workers, grocery store cashiers…
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Culture A recently uncovered letter explains why ‘anti-Semitism’ wasn’t in the first Oxford English Dictionary
On July 5, 1900, James Murray, founding editor of the Oxford English Dictionary, penned a letter to Claude Montefiore explaining a conspicuous absence in an upcoming volume compiled some years before: An entry for the word “anti-Semitism.” The oldest hatred did appear in the first edition, but only within a list of “anti” combinations. In…
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Culture WATCH: 300 musicians perform ‘You’ll Never Walk Alone’ to lift socially-distanced spirits
The key to the success of Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II lies in how well their music works outside of its original context. It’s easy to forget — or to not even not know — the South Pacific setting of “Some Enchanted Evening” or to adapt “My Favorite Things” into a Christmas song or…
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Culture Your guide to everything Jewish about ‘Star Wars’
The temporally distant and far-flung galaxy of “Star Wars” is, like the Torah, a text touched by many hands over the years. While creator George Lucas’ initial narrative impulse — relying on dull arcana like the “Journal of the Whills” — was Midrashic, the many Jews who worked on the script, and eventually assumed the…
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Culture What is it with Jewish guys like Jerry Krause and basketball?
In the fourth episode of ESPN’s “The Last Dance,” after the Chicago Bulls’ climactic May 1991 victory over the “Bad Boys” Pistons, Bulls’ general manager Jerry Krause is shown dancing to Kool Moe Dee. Trailing Scottie Pippen on the aisle of the team’s jet, he looks — and is — remarkably square, simpering in his…
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Music After decades of waiting, we’re finally getting a Bob Dylan-Barbra Streisand duet
In Case You Missed It
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Yiddish קאָנצערט לכּבֿוד דעם ייִדישן שרײַבער און רעדאַקטאָר באָריס סאַנדלערConcert honoring Yiddish writer and editor Boris Sandler
דער בעל־שׂימחה האָט יאָרן לאַנג געדינט ווי דער רעדאַקטאָר פֿונעם ייִדישן פֿאָרווערטס.
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Fast Forward Trump’s new pick for surgeon general blames the Nazis for pesticides on our food
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Fast Forward Jewish feud over Trump escalates with open letter in The New York Times
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Fast Forward First American pope, Leo XIV, studied under a leader in Jewish-Catholic relations
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