
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.
Since its debut in 1956, Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett’s play “The Diary of Anne Frank,” has been used to educate audiences around the globe about the Holocaust. Sadly, not everyone has learned the play’s lessons. On August 10, an unknown vandal spray-painted a red swastika on a billboard advertising the Melbourne-based Peridot Theater Company’s…
Somehow Armie Hammer, despite his square jaw and absurdly heroic given name, is not in any of the Marvel films. This seems like an oversight, given the existence of a hammer-happy member of The Avengers and a separate character whose last name is also Hammer. But the “Call Me By Your Name” star has said…
An artist from Saskatoon, in the Canadian province of Saskatchewan, was banned from a local art and theater festival for attempting to sell a painting that prominently included Nazi imagery. She now says the work in question “may or may not have been a publicity stunt.” Shannon Gauthier displayed a painting titled “Never Again,” which…
Like many a student of the American school system, I remember my English-class issued copy of J.D. Salinger’s “The Catcher in the Rye” — a threadbare, dog-eared volume with names stretching back decades written on the inside cover. While that novel has fallen somewhat out of favor among the Gen Z cohort, the book is…
Five years ago, the murder of four teens sparked a 50-day war between Gaza and Israel. It began on June 12, 2014, when three Israeli Jewish adolescents hitchhiking home from an Israeli settlement in the West Bank went missing. Their disappearance led to a wide-ranging search for their abductors, called “Operation Brother’s Keeper,” which saw…
Musician and writer David Berman, whose provocatively-named band Silver Jews brought poetry to the ragged world of ‘90s indie rock, has died at age 52. Berman’s label, Drag City, announced his passing on August 7. It did not share a cause of death. Known for his cryptic, verbose lyrics, steady baritone and resistance to performing…
No joke: Israeli author David Grossman’s award-winning “A Horse Walks into a Bar” is coming to a cinema near you. The Australian-American studio Village Roadshow will adapt the 2017 novel into a feature film, Variety reports. The book, which snagged Grossman and his English translator Jessica Cohen the Man Booker International Prize in 2017 and…
It’s been almost a year since “American Dharma,” Errol Morris’s Steve Bannon documentary, premiered at the Venice Film Festival. In the interim, another Bannon documentary, Allison Klayman’s “The Brink,” came out to considerably more acclaim; FBI Director Christopher Wray identified white nationalism of the kind winked at by Bannon as America’s major source of domestic…
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