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 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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Culture The best (and worst) Jewish ads of the 2022 Super Bowl
While football diehards gnawed their nails as the Rams managed a last-minute victory over the Bengals, those once-a-year watchers had a quite different, but equally suspenseful, experience of Super Bowl LVI. Tuning in for the commercials, casual sports fans wondered which of the night’s two top products was being advertised in each spot: Electric vehicles…
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Culture Israeli goldfish can drive cars — but they’re not quite ready for the carpool lane
In Israeli author Etgar Keret’s short story collection “Fly Already,” a goldfish exits his bowl, puts on a pair of slippers and tunes into CNN. Of course it’s fanciful, but in real-life Israel, goldfish are already learning to drive – sort of. A team of researchers at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev have trained fish…
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Culture Woody Allen’s latest is playing in a New York theater — but is anybody going to see it? Anybody?
On Tuesday I opted to spend a gorgeous afternoon in New York City going to a movie. The movie was “Rifkin’s Festival,” Woody Allen’s latest and a film that presently has a 42% on Rotten Tomatoes with a 50% audience score. Given this tepid reception, I wondered who was going to see Allen’s film, which…
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Culture Soup Nazis? Marjorie Taylor Greene calls out Pelosi’s ‘gazpacho police’ in a gaffe best served cold
It’s becoming clearer by the day that Marjorie Taylor Greene learned nothing from her obligatory visit to the U.S. Holocaust Museum in D.C., made after she likened the Holocaust to mask mandates – but she may have picked up a soup recipe there. In an interview Tuesday night, Greene was heard comparing Nazis and Nancy…
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