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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Art Her Father Was Hitler’s Architect. She Devoted Her Life To Helping Jewish Artists.
Albert Speer, Hitler’s armaments minister and main architect, was known as “the Nazi who said sorry” for acknowledging his complicity in Nazi war crimes at the Nuremberg trials. While Speer maintained he never knew about the Holocaust, his daughter, Hilde Schramm, is spreading awareness of the genocide, and doing much more than apologizing for it….
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Culture Of Course We Must ‘Write Our History’ — But Do We Need To Restage It?
After the establishment of the Warsaw Ghetto in 1940, Nazi cameramen recorded countless rolls of film. Much of the material captured was repurposed for propaganda films that portrayed Europe’s Jewry as unhygienic, uncivilized and animalistic. While this documentary footage often relied on subjects that were not directed, the narrative and the conditions surrounding them were…
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Art How An English Apartment Building Reveals An Architect’s Painful Jewish Past
On the face of it, there’s not much that’s Jewish about Highpoint II. The pre-World War II apartment complex, located in the Highgate suburb of London, is a sequel of sorts to architect Berthold Lubetkin’s groundbreaking Highpoint I from 1935. The first building was the apogee of modernist architecture with its white concrete, flat roof,…
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Culture Joyce Carol Oates To Receive 2019 Jerusalem Prize
Like her greatest subject, Joyce Carol Oates has an interesting relationship with Judaism. In her Pulitzer and National Book Award-nominated novel “Blonde,” Oates channeled the inner life of Marilyn Monroe, one of our faith’s most curious converts. Now, the Jewish State is honoring the author for her contribution to literature with the 2019 Jerusalem Prize…
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Culture The Peculiar Saga Of The Black Jew Who Founded San Francisco
In 1840 or 1841, a wedding in New Orleans was abruptly canceled. The bridegroom, admitting he was born out of wedlock and that his mother was black, fled on a ship bound for the West. His well-heeled bride-to-be died soon after this, some believe of shock. That ashamed groom, who was not allowed to marry…
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Culture Forward Contributor Julia M. Klein Receives Second National Book Critics Circle Nomination
The 2018 finalists for the National Book Critics Circle were announced January 22, recognizing Jewish writers Stephen Greenblatt, for his book “Tyrant: Shakespeare on Politics”, Rachel Kushner’s novel “Mars Room” and Adam Winkler’s “We the Corporations: How American Businesses Won Their Civil Rights.” While we can’t help but bask in the tribal naches of these…
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Culture With ‘Ghostbusters 3’ Jason Reitman Is Picking Up Where His Dad Left Off
No one has ever inherited a cooler car than Jason Reitman. Yesterday, the Academy Award-nominated filmmaker announced on Instagram that he would be taking the wheel of the “Ghostbusters” franchise from his father, Ivan, who directed the first two films. The reveal came in the form of an image of Reitman, fils standing near the…
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Culture 8 Questions For Author Sam Lipsyte
No one hits a satirical bullseye like Sam Lipsyte. In “Home Land,” a Portnoy-esque series of monologues, published in 2005, the novelist sniped at the convention of the dreaded alumni newsletter; in the 2010 novel “The Ask,” Lipsyte took aim at the donor system in American higher learning. His targets have only gotten bigger: His…
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