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 Meet the Ben & Jerry’s franchisee pushing back against boycott — and his customers, who just want to cool off
It’s a high of 90 in New York, but the southeast corner of 104th and Broadway is shady with scaffolding seating. It helps that there’s ice cream nearby. Joel Gasman’s Ben & Jerry’s store, a handsome scoop shop with a mosaic pillar at the entrance, is supplying the usual bonanza of flavors and, beginning this…
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Culture Jackie Mason’s racist remarks are also a part of his legacy
Jackie Mason, who died on Saturday at age 93, will forever hold a storied place in American comedy for helping introduce to the mainstream a brand of humor that was fearlessly, unapologetically Jewish. But the late comedian’s brazen style of commentary also carries a dark legacy in his history of racist remarks. In 1989, Jewish…
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Culture The dangerous disrespect of making Anthony Bourdain speak from the dead
I should have trusted my bullshit detector; Anthony Bourdain would be ashamed of me. (At least I think he would.) There were moments in Morgan Neville’s “Roadrunner” that seemed a bit too perfect. The perfection didn’t stem from cinematography or editing or the arbitrary intercuts of Kurosawa films. It didn’t come from the insights of…
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Culture Why Anthony Bourdain was his own best storyteller
The best episode of Anthony Bourdain’s food and travel show “No Reservations” is probably “Beirut.” Bourdain and his crew were in Lebanon in 2006. They filmed two scenes and then the second Israel-Lebanon war started. Bourdain’s local fixers knew what was coming and the host had to reckon with what he was doing — the…
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Culture How Judy Chicago became part of art history
Judy Chicago, whose immense body of work draws on overlooked women’s history, the tragedy of the recent Jewish past and features no small amount of literal fireworks, is having yet another moment. Born Judith Sylvia Cohen in (naturally) Chicago, the artist, whose name is regularly appended with words like “controversial,” will receive her first-ever retrospective…
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Culture Why does everyone want Jerusalem? CNN investigates in a new docuseries
Sunday night, after Jews around the world mourn the destruction of the Temples in Jerusalem on Tisha B’av, CNN will premiere a series that — in so many words — traces 3,000 years’ worth of conflict to the laying of those structures’ cornerstones. Solomon’s Temple, author Susan Wise Bauer argues in “Jerusalem: City of Faith…
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Culture Couldn’t make Cannes? The (James) Caan Film Festival awaits.
While the film industry is busy taking in the sun — and, one imagines, some movies — in the French coastal resort town of Cannes, Eric Hynes is once again thinking about Caan — James Caan. “I think he’s underrated as a sort of reader of lines,” said Hynes, curator of film at Astoria’s Museum…
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Culture Is Quentin Tarantino’s ‘Hollywood’ novel an apologia for Roman Polanski?
Quentin Tarantino changed film history with “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.” No, the film wasn’t a breakthrough work of cinema, rather, it literally rewrote the Tinseltown timeline by imagining an alternate ending to an epoch-defining tragedy. Two years later, Tarantino’s novelization of the 2019 movie — out now, complete with mass market-paperback packaging and…
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