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 How Roy Cohn’s Shame Made Him – And Trump – Shameless
Everyone was afraid of Roy Cohn — until no one was. A fixer, a liar, a self-loathing Jew and viciously homophobic homosexual, he seized on the Big Lie advanced by Adolf Hitler to advocate for his clients, smear his opponents and shield himself from a mountain of indictments. His first case to gain national attention…
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Culture Exhibit On Nazi Design Sparks Concern And Protests
A Netherlands museum’s multimedia exhibit on design in Nazi Germany has drawn protests and condemnation over fears that the show does not do enough to contextualize its provocative content. “Design of the Third Reich,” now running at the Design Museum Den Bosch in the Dutch city of ‘s-Hertogenbosch, features the propaganda films of Leni Riefenstahl…
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Culture Jonathan Safran Foer Is ‘Extremely And Very Cautiously Hopeful’ On Climate Change
On page 64 of Jonathan Safran Foer’s latest book, “We Are The Weather: Saving the Planet Begins at Breakfast,” he admits he’s been burying the lede. “This is a book about the impacts of animal agriculture on the environment,” Foer writes, owning that he evaded the issue for 63 pages because he feared readers would…
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Culture Netflix’s ‘The Spy’ Raises The Bar For Mossad Thrillers – But It Doesn’t Break New Ground
In July of 2018, the Mossad recovered a battered Eterna-Matic Centenaire 61 wristwatch from Syria. The timepiece belonged to Eli Cohen, an Israeli spy who, over several years in the 1960s, gained the confidence of Syrian generals and politicos before they publicly hanged him for conspiracy in 1965. The watch was returned to his widow….
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Culture How Michael Bloomberg Keeps Reinventing Himself
Michael Bloomberg might be a more compelling figure on paper than he ever was in person. Coming from a family of humble means in Medford, MA, and betraying no great promise as a student, Bloomberg managed to make his way into Johns Hopkins’ prestigious engineering program and, from there, Harvard Business School. He got a…
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Culture Yes, Really: There’s A Sculpture Of Hitler Praying At Winston Churchill’s Birthplace
Update, September 14, 10:40 a.m.: This article has been updated subsequent to the September 14 theft of Catellan’s “America,” a 19-karat gold toilet. Winston Churchill’s birthplace has just received an unlikely visitor: One Adolf Hitler. The Italian artist and provocateur Maurizio Cattelan’s sculpture “Him,” which depicts a kneeling, child-sized Führer, has been placed before a…
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Culture Venice Audiences Horrified By ‘Painted Bird’ Film
Jerzy Kosinski’s 1965 novel “The Painted Bird” has never been a story for the faint of heart. Following a young boy’s brutal tale of survival during the Holocaust in a vague Eastern European locale, the book includes sequences of incest, rape, murder and the terrible pecking-related death of the titular bird. Now, a film adaptation…
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Culture Bruce Lee? Yes. Shammai? Yup. The Talmud Meets Kung Fu In A New Play
In a dramatic episode in the Gemara, the part of the Talmud containing rabbinical commentary on the Mishnah, Rabbi Yohanan ben Zakkai is smuggled out of the walls of besieged Jerusalem in a coffin. Once free of the city, the rabbi encounters the general Vespasian in a Roman camp and misidentifies him as “king.” Providence…
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