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 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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Culture Susan Choi, László Krasznahorkai Take Home National Book Awards
On November 20, the National Book Foundation feted six diverse winners for its 70th annual National Book Awards. Novelist Susan Choi, the daughter of a Korean father and a Russian-Jewish mother won the fiction prize for her fifth book, “Trust Exercise,” a narratively-inventive, #MeToo-informed story about a performing arts high school in the 1980s. The…
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Culture Lin-Manuel Miranda Almost Did ‘My Name Is Asher Lev’ Instead Of ‘Hamilton’
Lin-Manuel Miranda is a household name. He made Alexander Hamilton one, too. Might he have done the same for a young ultra-Orthodox painter named Asher Lev? During a November 19 Reddit Ask Me Anything, Miranda said that he once owned the theatrical rights to Chaim Potok’s novel “My Name is Asher Lev” (1972), which follows…
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Culture Vampire Weekend, Babs And RBG’s Son Pick Up 2020 Grammy Nominations
As with all things Jewish, there are ups, and there are downs. At first glance 2020’s Grammy nominees, announced November 20, find our people performing admirably, but not necessarily with the degree of success to which we’ve become accustomed. Drake, for example, only has two nominations, down from last year’s seven. But the Grammys distributes…
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Culture What’s Jewish About The 10 Democratic Debaters: A Visual Guide
From the earliest stirrings of our republic, American presidents have been connected to the Jewish people. General Washington relied on financier Haym Salomon for ready cash for the Continental Army, and as our population climbed, Jews have served as Supreme Court justices, cabinet secretaries, speechwriters, senators and security experts called on to testify in impeachment…
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