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 When George Costanza lost it all to Bernie Madoff
It was more than a great idea. It was more than a couple million dollars. Of the many victims of Bernard L. Madoff, the Ponzi scheme mastermind who died in prison April 14, was a visionary entrepreneur: George Costanza, whose app, iToilet, directed its user via global positioning technology to the nearest acceptable public toilet…
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News A reader’s guide to the Forward’s coverage of Bernie Madoff
Say what you will about Bernie Madoff, he made news. Given that his crimes had an inordinate effect on the Jewish world, the Forward was at the frontlines of much of the coverage. Here is a guide to some of our reporting on the infamous financier, who died in prison April 14 at the age…
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Culture Tovah Feldshuh played RBG and Golda — now she wants to play her mom
Actor Tovah Feldshuh has spent the last two years channeling the ultimate baleboste: her mom, Lily. Born in 1911 on a dining room table in the Bronx, Lillian Kaplan (later to be Feldshuh) longed to “become vivid.” She developed an alter ego named Hortense, who lived glamorously, dancing the Charleston and wearing an edgy bob…
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Culture How Jewish songwriters wrote the love theme for Philip and Elizabeth
The Kennedys, thanks to Lerner and Loewe, will forever be associated with the English setting of Camelot. Their royal British counterparts chose “Oklahoma!” for their lifelong love theme. Queen Elizabeth and her husband, Prince Philip, who died April 9 at the age of 99, had a special affinity for the musical by Rodgers and Hammerstein,…
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Culture Documentarian Ric Burns on why there will never be another Oliver Sacks
Writer’s note: Ric Burns’ “Oliver Sacks: His Own Life” premieres on television April 9 as part of PBS’ “American Masters” series. Republished below is an interview with Burns, originally published Sept. 23, 2020. In 2015, shortly before he died at the age of 82, Oliver Sacks was eating from a Tupperware container of green Jell-O,…
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Culture Seinfeld’s impossible apartment is only the tip of the show’s interdimensional iceberg
Does Jerry Seinfeld live in Bizarro World? The question, which is somehow not a judgment on the comedian’s luxe lifestyle or past relationship with a high school student, was posed on Reddit based on the specs of his onetime apartment. User PixelMagic, using a floorplan of Seinfeld’s Upper West Side bachelor pad in his eponymous…
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Culture Was Mitt Romney drinking Kedem for Easter?
Each year around the Easter-Pesach nexus we inevitably have a difficult discussion about cultural appropriation. Thankfully, it looks we don’t need to have that talk with the junior senator from Utah. While there are some differences of opinion, the holiday discourse usually goes as follows: DO attend a Jewish friend’s Seder if you are Christian,…
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Culture ‘Space Jam’ should have these Jewish Warner Bros. characters in its lineup
We live in a world of giants — some of them iron, all of them corporate. With the first trailer for “Space Jam: A New Legacy,” we have an artifact that media theorists are poking and prodding for insights into our current moment of rapacious franchise bloat and media monopoly. Like the original, it pairs…
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