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 ‘Oklahoma!’ Is The Go-To Score For HBO’s ‘Watchmen’
The new HBO series “Watchmen” is a puzzling property from the get-go. While it shares the universe with Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’s 1986 graphic novel of the same name, it would appear to not need its spandex trappings. The show’s ideas, as presented in the pilot episode, are sturdy enough to stand on their…
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Culture On Mars, A Jewish Quest For Life — And A Crater’s Tragic History
The discovery of life on Mars has been the stuff of scientific hope and speculative fascination for generations. Edgar Rice Burroughs put John Carter there, Ray Bradbury spun fantastic tales from the imagined landscapes of its dusty soil and, in 1976, NASA landed its two Viking spacecrafts on the Red Planet, making them the first…
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Fast Forward Did Posting Pompeo’s ‘Christian’ Speech Muddy Line Between Church And State?
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s speech, “Being a Christian Leader,” delivered to the American Association of Christian Counselors, appeared to go over well in the room. Video from the event, recorded October 11 in Nashville, showed the secretary stopping several times to field applause. Pompeo quoted scripture, said he keeps a bible at his desk…
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Culture Will This Astronaut Be The First Woman (And First Jew) To Walk On The Moon?
On October 18, the first all-female spacewalk in history will take place about 240 miles from Earth. One of the women walking is a member of the tribe – and may turn out to be the first woman (and first Jew) to walk on the moon. NASA tweeted on Monday that astronauts Christina Koch and…
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Culture ‘Big Mouth’ Mouths Off To Anti-Semites In Its Third Season
The new season of Netflix’s “Big Mouth,” the subversive-in-the-extreme sex-ed show about middle schoolers’ animated adventures in puberty, features the following: The ghost of Harry Houdini; a mist of vape smoke blown into the shape of a Magen David; Neo-Nazis and falsely philo-Semitic Evangelicals; a Passover episode involving incest; a bachelorette party game where you…
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Culture From The Archive: Portrait Of Harold Bloom As A Young Man
It’s hard to imagine the legendary literary critic Harold Bloom, who died Monday at the age of 89, as a young man. This was largely by design. Bloom playfully projected the aura of a musty, Falstaffian ancient. But, before he became an expert on the English canon, his first language was Yiddish, and like many…
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Fast Forward State Department Site Posts Pompeo ‘Christian Leadership’ Speech
The separation of Church and State is widely accepted as enshrined in our constitution. But that didn’t stop the State Department from posting a 24-minute video of Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s recent speech on “Christian leadership.” In the clip, which was posted alongside a transcript on the department’s homepage October 14, Pompeo addresses the…
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Culture Why Those Arrested Giuliani Associates Were Talking About Anatevka
The saga of the two Soviet-born associates of Rudy Giuliani, arrested last week for alleged campaign finance violations, has a head-scratching footnote connected to both Yiddishkeit and a classic American Broadway musical. As the news of the indictments of Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman spread, so did a video of the two men lounging with…
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Fast Forward Why the Antisemitism Awareness Act now has a religious liberty clause to protect ‘Jews killed Jesus’ statements
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News School Israel trip turns ‘terrifying’ for LA students attacked by Israeli teens
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Culture Cardinals are Catholic, not Jewish — so why do they all wear yarmulkes?
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Music After decades of waiting, we’re finally getting a Bob Dylan-Barbra Streisand duet
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Fast Forward A Jewish nonprofit may have accidentally caused Michigan to drop charges against pro-Palestinian activists
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Culture For Christian nationalists, Trump’s pope picture isn’t a joke
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Opinion Is Israel really going to reoccupy Gaza? Ask Trump
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Yiddish World A photo of my bubbe when Jewish stores still had Yiddish signs
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