
PJ Grisar is a Forward culture reporter. He can be reached at [email protected] and @pjgrisar on Twitter.
PJ Grisar is a Forward culture reporter. He can be reached at [email protected] and @pjgrisar on Twitter.
In late January, Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett received a call from an unfamiliar Israeli number. It was the president of Tel Aviv University, informing her she had received an award of half a million dollars. “It’s like a TV show when they call you completely out of the blue,” said Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, the Ronald S. Lauder Chief Curator…
WRITER’S NOTE: During a February 2020 Democratic debate in Nevada, NBC’s Chuck Todd asked Mayor Pete Buttigieg about a 2000 essay he wrote in praise of Bernie Sanders. “The qualities I admired then are qualities I still respect a great deal,” Buttigieg responded. “I never said that I agree with every part of his policy…
Theodor Herzl did not live to see Israel realized, but he is arguably the country’s most enduring visionary. In less than a decade, before his early death in 1904, at the age of 44, Herzl lifted the Zionist movement from obscurity to a palpable political force through his magnetism and dedication. Many Israelis and Zionists…
The opening credits of Amazon’s “Hunters,” a new series about a crew of Nazi-killing avengers in late 1970s New York, unfold over the backdrop of a chess board. The game’s hand-painted pieces take on the shape of the central players — a bloodied young man with a knife, a black woman with an afro and…
“It’s been almost a year since I left the museum, actually,” said Professor Dariusz Stola. “I waited quite patiently, I must say.” Stola was formerly the director of POLIN, Poland’s Jewish museum in Warsaw, until February 2019, when his five-year contract ended. For a year, he took no other job, hoping that he would be…
For 26 years, the only museum devoted to Jewish life throughout the American South operated on the grounds of a Reform summer camp in Utica, Miss. Since opening its doors in 1986, the Museum of the Southern Jewish Experience was a hub for Southern Jews looking to get in touch with their region’s vibrant past…
We sometimes like to imagine the private rooms of Wes Anderson: The pastel wallpaper, staid geometry, old knick-knacks and, most of all, the reading material. Works on oceanography accrued for “The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou” (2004); the collected works of Stefan Zweig, who inspired “The Grand Budapest Hotel” (2014) and J.D. Salinger, whose work…
President Trump has a busy cable news-viewing schedule, so perhaps he can be forgiven for not being up to date on “Curb Your Enthusiasm.” On Monday night, the president tweeted a (NSFW) clip from the show’s season 10 premiere that aired on January 19. He appeared to miss some crucial context, but that doesn’t mean…
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