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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Film & TV ‘Incitement’ isn’t about making Rabin’s murderer — it’s about making modern Israel
We meet the killer as he’s cleaning tombstones. While he scrapes and sponges, his radio broadcasts Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin’s historic Rose Garden speech announcing the signing of the first Oslo Accord. When his work is done, he leaves to join protests against the peace plan in Tel Aviv. It’s 1993. In two years, this…
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Culture ‘Vienna Blood’ is the Jewish answer to your ‘Sherlock’ craving
The latest British import to PBS, “Vienna Blood,” is not about sausage. Its title is a nod to its setting, its grisly, sanguine concerns and to a waltz and operetta (Wiener Blut) by Johann Strauss the Younger. If you already knew that last part, this show is for you. The series, based on the “Liebermann…
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Culture George Steiner, critic of Israel and literature, dies at 90
George Steiner, the celebrated and polarizing literary critic whose work was shaded by the specter of the Shoah, died February 3 at his home in Cambridge, in the United Kingdom. He was 90. A contemporary of Harold Bloom, a defender of the Western Canon and a fierce advocate of what he termed “Old Criticism,” Steiner…
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Film & TV These were the first Jewish winners at the Academy Awards
A radical Zionist Chicago newspaperman, a Belfast-born translator and a literary adapter par excellence. These were the first Jews who won Oscars at the inaugural Academy Awards in 1929. The three men — writers Ben Hecht and Benjamin Glazer and director Lewis Milestone — were connected by more than heritage. Working in the still-new world…
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Culture Recovered Sobibor photos tell a striking story of complicity
The Nazis leveled the Sobibor death camp, located around 120 miles to the southeast of Warsaw, in 1943, after 600 prisoners killed a dozen members of the SS in an October uprising. The Reich ordered the camp closed down, and the surviving officers and auxiliary guards destroyed the evidence of the atrocities committed there since…
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Culture In first trailer, ‘The Plot Against America’ looks to rewrite the book
The story goes that Philip Roth was reading the autobiography of historian Arthur Schlesinger, when he stopped short. ”I came upon a sentence in which Schlesinger notes that there were some Republican isolationists who wanted to run Lindbergh for president in 1940,” Roth recalled in 2004. “That’s all there was, that one sentence with its…
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Culture Auschwitz exhibition strikes New York archbishop silent
One day after the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, faith leaders from around New York City gathered to view artifacts from the former death camp. “We are very focused on being part of a broader effort to educate people of all faiths,” said Jack Kliger, the president and CEO of the Museum of…
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Culture A ‘2001’ exhibit that leaves them wondering — like Kubrick would have wanted
When “2001: A Space Odyssey” debuted in 1968, 15 months before the first lunar landing, audiences didn’t know what to make of it. Its early reception was far from fawning. Director Stanley Kubrick‘s daughter Katharina recalls storage boxes full of mail from viewers requesting ticket refunds. But the film’s fortunes soon changed. Theaters in major…
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