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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Culture Barry Manilow on dueling cantors, Levy’s Rye and his musical’s New York debut
Barry Manilow never meant to become a pop star, and his Grammy, Emmy and Tony-winning career as a songwriter is a source of perennial tsuris for his lyric-writing partner Bruce Sussman. If you ask them, “Mandy” came, gave and (forget what you heard) did some taking. That breakout hit diverted the pair’s original ambition: writing…
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Culture What would Otto Frank tell Anne about Charlottesville? A new play tells us.
Roger Guenveur Smith had been meaning to play Anne Frank’s father for some time – but first he had to embody someone quite different. “I was finally ready to really dive into the archives, and lo and behold, we lost Rodney King,” said Smith, who performed a one-man show as King, the Black victim of…
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Culture How a radio pioneer named Steve Post set the stage for Howard Stern and Marc Maron
The best part of “Playing in the FM Band,” a new documentary about revolutionary radio personality Steve Post, finds our hero trapped in the bathroom of WNYC. “In the instant before my flesh made contact with the seat, I realized that I was clutching a cold, metal object in my right hand,” Post says in…
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Culture Can a Christian theater company put on a good Purim spiel?
I learned about "Queen Esther" from a TV ad. How could I resist going?
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Culture In two rarely-shown films, a different view of Israel
Nina Menkes made two films set in Israel nearly 30 years apart. Both are about not belonging anywhere. The director, who just debuted the documentary “Brainwashed” at Sundance, comes to her setting and subject in earnest, if perhaps at some remove. Born to European immigrant parents, who fled the Nazis and fought in the Palmach…
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Culture Shunned no more? Alan Dershowitz joins Cameo to build a Martha’s Vineyard Chabad house
More Jews than ever are coming to Martha’s Vineyard; Alan Dershowitz doesn’t seem to have many friends among them. In a stroke of genius, the criminal defense attorney is hoping to fill both his needs and the needs of his coreligionists by doing his favorite thing: pontificating on camera. Yes, Dershowitz has a Cameo account…
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Culture ‘The Automat’ remembers when a nickel could buy the American dream
It was my grandmother who tipped me off to “The Automat,” a new documentary about the rise and fall of Horn & Hardart restaurants. It’s no wonder why. These eateries, which for over a century drew a diverse crowd of New Yorkers and Philadelphians with the promise of cheap, quality food and mechanical pageantry, seem…
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Culture He made Moon Knight Jewish. He doesn’t care if Disney+ has other ideas.
Moon Knight – aka Marc Spector, aka Steven Grant, aka Jake Lockley, aka the vessel of Khonshu – has an identity crisis. At least some of the time, that crisis is a Jewish one. Stretching over many comic runs and iterations, from his first introduction as a silver-clad mercenary in a 1975 issue of “Werewolf…
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