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 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.
'If he’s not Jewish because there’s a good artistic reason, that's perfectly OK,' said Moon Knight writer Alan Zelenetz
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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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Books How an ‘unlikely rabbi’ went from Korea to Colbert
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ראַשעל װעפּרינסקיס ראָמאַן „דאָס קרײצן פֿון די הענט“ אַנטפּלעקט די אינטימקייט פֿון דער ייִדישער באָהעמישער סבֿיבֿה מיט 100 יאָר צוריק
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