
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.
Even in death Karl Marx can’t rest easy. The Father of Communism’s life was disrupted by exile and expulsion as his profile and radical ideas spread throughout Europe. He finally made a home for himself in London where he wrote “Das Kapital,” helped found the German Workers’ Educational Society and died of pleurisy in 1883….
Beginning in the mid-1960s, Matt Salinger’s father — yes, J.D. Salinger, the celebrated author of “Franny and Zooey” and “The Catcher in the Rye” — largely retired from public life and grew estranged from the literary word. Perhaps it should come as no surprise, then, that the author chose his next of kin over editors,…
On February 20, 1939, 20,000 Americans met at Madison Square Garden. They pledged their undivided allegiance to the United States, stood for the National Anthem and, before the remarks of the keynote speaker (Fritz Julius Kuhn, the leader of the German American Bund), they held their arms out in a Nazi salute. These everyday men…
Dachau. Treblinka. Chelmno. These words are startling in their power to recall the darkest period in Jewish history. But Auschwitz is different. Auschwitz produced Dr. Mengele and Rudolf Höss, two of the most infamous figures of the Shoah. Auschwitz was where thousands of everyday Germans worked alongside war criminals. At Auschwitz the Nazis established the…
Pulitzer-winning playwright, director and filmmaker David Mamet is very good at a few things. He reinvented the American theater with his roughneck, elliptical and profanity-laden dialogue. He founded the Atlantic Theater Company with William H. Macy and wrote several controversial but influential books on acting and directing. As a political agitator he stirs the pot…
In 1938 when the Germans annexed Austria, the art world suffered a major blow. Modernists like Egon Schiele and Gustav Klimt had their work labeled degenerate. Jewish artists were forced to flee and many more were unable to. One more casualty of the Anschluss is often overlooked — the many women sculptors and painters whose…
Following a new complaint against Purdue Pharma brought by the State of Massachusetts, the Metropolitan Museum of Art is reviewing its gift acceptance policy. The court filing, reported on by The New York Times last week, alleges that the Sackler family, the founders of Purdue Pharma and longtime donors to the Met, directed a misinformation…
In the art world, forgeries are an unfortunate inevitability; painters, sculptors and photographers are copied for their work’s cachet, artistic merit and monetary value. But it’s more rare for an artist to be imitated not for their talent, but for their extreme notoriety. Yet on January 24, police arrived at the Kloss auction house in…
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