
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.
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…
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…
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…
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…
Every Sukkot, families with sukkahs invite the spirits of the seven biblical matriarchs and patriarchs into their tent. These guests – or ushpizin – cut impressive figures. While we earthly chosen spend our time schmoozing outdoors, kvetching and noshing and pontificating on all manner of mundane things, Abraham, Sarah, Isaac, Jacob, Rebekah, Leah and Rachel…
On Saturday, President Donald Trump appeared before a crowd at the Values Voter Summit in Washington, D.C. and let loose at House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and House Intelligence Chair Adam Schiff. “Maybe we should just impeach them, because they’re lying and what they’re doing is a terrible thing for our country,” Trump said, according to…
Two Soviet-born, Florida-based men were indicted Thursday for suspicion of campaign finance violations, allegedly performed to benefit President Trump and his Republican allies and tied to a larger dirt-gathering campaign on his Democratic challenger Joe Biden and Biden’s son Hunter. The men, Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, are known as Giuliani’s “Florida Fixers” by the…
On October 8, the eve of Yom Kippur, Romanian President Klaus Iohannis announced plans for the country’s first Holocaust museum. The announcement comes 16 years after Romania first acknowledged its role in the Shoah, following a decades-long cover-up under the communist regimes of Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej and his successor, Nicolae Ceaușescu. Many countries under the USSR…
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