
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.
Larry Eisenberg, commenter supreme, Has passed away, it would seem As recorded in The Times, Which he graced with his lines, His daughter reports she’s bereaved. With his limericks sublime, Eisenberg was 99, A biomedical engineer And Sci-Fi writer who endeared, He was truly one of a kind. Born to parents Sidney and Yetta, Larry…
A Jewish theater impresario, an infamous Colombian drug lord and a Japanese businessman are connected by a curious dance of life and death – more specifically “The Dance” a 1957 painting by Spanish surrealist Salvador Dalí. The New York Times reports that the chain of ownership of the artwork, which depicts two twisted, faceless figures…
For all his royal trappings, Prince Charles is still a 70-year-old white man. And like many 70-year-old white men, he loves the music of the late Leonard Cohen. In a new special for BBC Radio 3’s “Private Passions,” where well-known Brits draw up playlists of songs they’ve found to be formative, the Prince of Wales…
How can one find fresh nuance in an over 2,ooo-year-old book? If the book is the Hebrew Bible, by returning to the original Hebrew. After over two decades, the 83-year-old literary critic and translator Robert Alter has completed his translation of the Hebrew Bible, an undertaking that has resulted in over 3,000 pages of commentary…
Any good jazz performance, improvised or scored, will circle back to a theme. In “Cold War,” director Pawel Pawlikowski, the maestro behind the Oscar-winning “Ida,” about a nun who discovers her Jewish heritage, does just that. The auteur returns to the earlier film’s black and white format and a story of origins — this time…
On November 7, 1886, the guiding light of New York Harbor went dark for the first time. Only 10 days after the Statue of Liberty was unveiled to the public, her torch was snuffed. A frugal Congress refused to allocate the necessary funds for the statue to serve her role as a lighthouse. Indeed, Congress…
Colorblind casting, the practice of casting actors of one race in roles traditionally played by another, seems to be a subject of perennial controversy in the world’s highest profile theaters. Last year the grand spectacle musical “Natasha, Pierre and the Great Comet of 1812” based on Tolstoy’s “War And Peace” drew sharp criticism when it…
Thanks to the internet we have the numbers to prove poetry is still a popular medium — at least online. The Academy of American Poets has announced that the Palestinian-American poet Naomi Shihab Nye’s “Kindness” was this year’s most popular poem by a contemporary poet on its website, Poets.org. The poem, which was read by…
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