
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.
The photographer Roman Vishniac resettled many times. Born in St. Petersburg, he fled to Berlin in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution; in the 1930s he returned to Eastern Europe to document shtetl life; and he ultimately fled from Germany in the 1940s to live in New York, where the bulk of his photographs have…
For all of its many merits “Hamilton” doesn’t have much to offer fans of good old fashioned show tunes. Leave it to legendary “Cabaret” composer John Kander, one half of Jewish duo Kander and Ebb, to remedy that. In one of his trademark #HamilDrops show creator Lin-Manuel Miranda released a brand new Hamilton-themed song for…
The books of 2018 brought fresh perspectives, vital voices and new ways to examine questions of identity, history and even literature itself. And many of the best were authored by members of the tribe. Admittedly, we’re a bit biased, so don’t take our word for it: Look to The New York Times Book Review, which…
Actor and playwright Steven Berkoff wants to stage and star in a production of “Harvey.” No, not the 1944 Mary Chase comedy about an invisible six-foot-tall rabbit, but a new, one-act, one-man show about the very visible movie mogul and alleged sex offender Harvey Weinstein. “I like evil people,” Berkoff said in a November 20…
Next year’s White House Correspondents’ Association dinner may not be as controversial — or funny — as this year’s. The WHCA announced on November that Ron Chernow, the Pulitzer-winning biographer of Alexander Hamilton, George Washington and John D. Rockefeller, will be the featured speaker of the festivities on April 27, 2019. The selection of Chernow…
A welcome, if counterintuitive, symptom of the age of Netflix has been the revival of old Hollywood careers. It may have all started with 2015’s “Grace and Frankie” which gave a starring platform to Lily Tomlin and Jane Fonda, whom studios had tended to neglect or bury in grandma roles. In “Grace and Frankie” Tomlin…
Oskar Rabin, a leading figure in subversive Soviet art who first gained international attention for hanging from a moving bulldozer, died November 7 in Florence. He was 90 years old. Rabin was in Florence for an exhibition of his work, The New York Times reports. The filmmaker Evgeny Smoljanski, who directed a documentary about the…
It’s next year in Midtown for the National Yiddish Theatre Folksbeine’s production of “Fiddler on the Roof.” Playbill reports that the all-Yiddish production of the musical, directed by the legendary performer Joel Grey and translated into Yiddish by Shraga Friedman, will transfer from lower Manhattan’s Museum of Jewish Heritage to Off-Broadway’s Stage 42 where it…
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