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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Film & TV ‘The Eugenics Crusade’ On PBS Sheds Light On An Ugly American Phenomenon
For most Americans, eugenics exists in the cobwebs of history. It’s a musty, bogus relic now universally dismissed by the scientific community as a racist doctrine that misunderstands sociological factors. But watching the documentary “The Eugenics Crusade,” which premieres on PBS October 16 at 8:00 PM, one finds eerie echoes of the current discourse around…
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Culture Netflix’s ‘Big Mouth’ Is Boldly Jewish
Netflix’s “Big Mouth” is not for everyone. Though its charming animation and middle-school aged characters suggest something for the K-12 set, its excessively filthy humor makes it inappropriate for a large chunk of that demographic. By the same token, its extreme ribaldry, often paired with useful but sometimes didactic lessons about puberty, contraception and body…
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Culture On The Books: 5 Questions For Stephen Shepard, Author Of ‘A Literary Journey To Jewish Identity’
Following a long career as a writer and editor with Newsweek and Businessweek and a storied tenure as the Founding Dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at the City University of New York, Stephen Shepard has been spending his retirement revisiting the books of his youth. The result of these re-readings is a book…
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Culture Don’t Compare Stephen Miller To Pig-Pen!
In an October 10 article in the Hollywood Reporter, Stephen Miller’s former third-grade teacher from Franklin Elementary School compared Trump’s Senior Advisor to the beloved “Peanuts” character Pig-Pen. How dare she? “Do you remember that character in ‘Peanuts,’ the one called Pig Pen (sic), with the dust cloud and crumbs flying all around him?” Miller’s…
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Music A Yearlong Celebration Of Kurt Weill Is Off To An Operatic Start
Responding to the current debate over immigration policy inside the nearby Beltway, the University of Maryland has declared a Year of Immigration. Part of the yearlong initiative is the University’s first Kurt Weill Festival, which kicked off October 6 with the German-born composer’s 1937 opera-oratorio “The Road of Promise.” “The reason why we’re studying Kurt…
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Culture A Nazi Commandeered Her House. She Survived The Holocaust By Hiding In It Anyway.
An inquiry into the provenance of a painting by Egon Schiele has produced an extraordinary account of its former owner’s life in Nazi-occupied Vienna. Elsa Koditschek, a Jewish widow who sent her children to safety ahead of the German invasion, spent much of World War II living in hiding in an upstairs apartment of her…
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Culture 8 Questions For Mitch Albom
Mitch Albom has written his first sequel. Following his 2003 bestseller, “The Five People You Meet in Heaven” the prolific, Detroit-based author has returned to the story of Eddie the theme park maintenance man and the little girl, Annie, he died saving. The new book, “The Next Person You Meet in Heaven” out Tuesday, October…
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Culture How Columbus Brought America Its First Jew
For all their clout in the American imagination, the Niña, Pinta and Santa Maria don’t appear to factor much into the American Jewish tapestry. But Christopher Columbus, a devout Italian Catholic sailing at the behest of the king and queen of Spain, was certain that, when he arrived in Asia, he’d encounter descendants of the…
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