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 Adam Sandler Speaks! Some New Jewish Facts About The Comedy Legend
In his first magazine profile since 1996, Adam Sandler, primed to debut an intense and morally itchy performance as diamond dealer Howard Ratner in the Safdie Brothers’s “Uncut Gems,” appears menschy and family-oriented. The November 27 write-up by The New York Times’s Jamie Lauren Keiles is also, unsurprisingly, an insanely Jewish affair. It begins at…
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Culture ScarJo Regrets Casting Controversy, But Won’t Apologize For Backing Woody Allen
Responding to her continued and controversial defense of Woody Allen, Scarlett Johansson has stated that she will not censor her personal opinions in the interest of optics. In a November 26 Vanity Fair profile, journalist Chris Heath asked Johansson about widespread criticism of her stated belief in Allen’s innocence in the case of his daughter…
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Culture Taffy Brodesser-Akner, Deborah Levy And More Crack NYT 100 Notable Books Of 2019
Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s debut novel, Megan Twohey and Jodi Kantor’s account of their Pulitzer-winning reporting on Harvey Weinstein and a collection of stories by Peter Orner are among The New York Times’s 100 Notable Books of 2019. Brodesser-Akner’s “Fleishman Is in Trouble” is one of a number of significant works of fiction on the list, including…
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Culture A Brief Guide To Martin Scorsese’s Jewish And ‘Jew-ish’ Films
Martin Scorsese, the Little Italy-raised, second-generation son of Italian-American garment workers, was born into the piping-hot melting pot he spent a lifetime committing to film. His awareness of America, while observed from a particular — often extralegal — vantage point, is supreme even among his impressive cohort of auteurs: Spielberg, Coppola and De Palma. Naturally,…
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Culture Today In Corrections: Lt. Col Vindman Was Wounded By An IED, Not An IUD
Did you hear about how Lt. Colonel Alexander Vindman, the decorated Jewish war hero, childhood refugee and damning witness in the Trump impeachment probe received his Purple Heart? For a moment in GQ magazine, the cause was depicted as quite a private matter, thank you very much. Every so often corrective italics at the end…
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Culture Ben Lerner, Rachel Louise Snyder Round Out New York Times’s 10 Best Books Of 2019
Stories of escape, abduction, friendship, growth and crisis make up The New York Times’s 10 Best Books of 2019, announced November 22. The Times’s fiction picks include Ben Lerner’s “The Topeka School,” the writer’s third novel. In it, Lerner, through the voices of several characters, evokes the Kansas of his Clinton-era late adolescence. The novel’s…
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Culture At ADL Conference, Sacha Baron Cohen Breaks Character To Call Out Mark Zuckerberg
For the first time in his career, Sacha Baron Cohen delivered a speech out of character. The occasion was the Anti-Defamation League’s 2019 Leadership Conference, held November 21 at the Javits Center in New York. Baron Cohen, the recipient of the ADL’s International Leadership Award, came to the lectern with no shoulder-secured Speedo, no prosthetics…
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Culture Climate Activist Apologizes For Holocaust Remarks After German Publisher Cancels His Book
Following the cancelation of the German edition of his book, the controversial British climate activist Roger Hallam has apologized for remarks that were criticized for making light of the Holocaust. In excerpts from an interview with German daily Der Zeit that appeared Wednesday, Hallam, a co-founder of the London-based climate group Extinction Rebellion — also…
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