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 Q&A: Seth Rogen On Tikkun Olam, Anti-Semitism And Killing Hitler
“I get a lot of acclaim in everything I do except for movies,” actor, writer and director Seth Rogen told me over the phone from Los Angeles. On Monday December 2 in New York, Rogen will earn another accolade: The Workmen’s Circle’s Generation to Generation Activism Award, which he’ll receive with his father, Mark. Mark…
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Culture The First Yiddish Play Staged In America Gets A Timely Encore
When Boris Thomashefsky arrived in New York Harbor in 1881, before the Statue of Liberty — and before Ellis Island – he carried with him the spirit of a born performer. But he had not yet found an outlet for his talents; neither, for that matter, had America. Within a year of his immigration, things…
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Culture Mahmoud Abbas Plans To Reprint An Iraqi-Israeli Jew’s Tale Of Displacement
Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas says he wants Arab leaders to know about the historical plight of Arab Jewry. To educate them, he’s reviving a forgotten piece of the Israeli Arab canon — though it’s likely a text he misread. On November 16, at his headquarters in Ramallah, Abbas met with members of the late…
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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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