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 Award-Winning Memoirist Lucette Lagnado Dies At 62
Lucette Lagnado, the award-winning author who documented her family’s exodus from Egypt to America, has died at 62. The Jewish Book Council, which awarded Lagnado the Sami Rohr Prize in 2008, announced her passing. Lagnado was born to a Jewish family in Cairo in 1956. In 1963, during a wave of mass exodus by Jews…
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Culture Philip Roth’s Estate Auction Shows His Simple, Sturdy, American Side
You can now own Philip Roth’s Balinese shadow puppet, area rugs or Pat and Richard Nixon collectible plate. Litchfield County Auctions, which runs estate auctions for the Connecticut county in which Roth lived part-time for decades, has posted a lineup of over 100 items owned by the Pulitzer-winning author, who died in May of 2018….
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Culture Woody Allen: ‘I Would Probably Die On A Film Set’
Woody Allen plans to die in the director’s chair. “Since I started, I’ve always tried to focus on my work, no matter what happens in my family or with politics. I don’t think about social movements,” Allen told press at San Sebastian, Spain on July 9, a day before he began filming a new project,…
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Culture Midnight Movie Maven And Coen Brothers Patron Ben Barenholtz Dies At 83
Film producer and distributor Ben Barenholtz, who spent his youth hiding from Nazis in the Ukrainian woods and grew up to popularize midnight movie screenings, died June 27 at a Prague hospital. He was 83. His death was reported by his executor, Sony Pictures Classics executive Tom Prassis, who said that Barenholtz, who had been…
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Culture ‘Leaving Eden’ Gives The Creation Story A Feminist Spin
Playwright Jenny Waxman has been obsessed with Adam’s first wife, Lilith, since she was a student in Orthodox Jewish day school. Of course, they didn’t teach about her there. “I knew there was more and I was hungry for more than what I was being told,” Waxman, who is also a theatrical producer with her…
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Culture Q&A: Lexi Rabadi On Bringing Hannah Senesh To Life
Hannah Senesh was just 23 when she was captured, tortured and executed by Nazi-allied Hungarian authorities – but she had already lived many lives. Born the privileged daughter of a Hungarian journalist and playwright, Senesh became a Zionist at an early age, moving to Mandatory Palestine after graduating high school in 1939. She was by…
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Culture ‘Annie’ Lyricist And Director Martin Charnin Dies At 84
Martin Charnin, the Emmy, Grammy and Tony-winning director, composer and lyricist who brought a white-eyed, red-haired comic strip orphan to vivid life on stage died July 6 at the age of 84. Charnin’s daughter Sasha Charnin Morrison reported his death to The Washington Post. Charnin passed at a hospital in White Plains, N.Y. three days…
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Culture Kafka Would Love ‘Spider-Man: Far From Home’
In “Spider-Man: Far From Home,” which sees our titular hero on a world tour with his high school class, Peter Parker does something Michael Cohen has long denied: Goes to Prague. Naturally, the Forward wondered what Franz Kafka would think of our web-slinging friend. Spoilers ahead. Peter’s arrival in the Czech Republic comes with some…
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