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 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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Culture White Boy Summer is a bad idea — but are its shirts racist?
“White Boy Summer” is one more item in a line of Chet Hanks’ bad decisions — but does it also have a racist aesthetic? Son of Tom Hanks and Rita Wilson, the 30-year-old actor-rapper, who is the recent subject of a protective order requested by his ex-girlfriend, went on Instagram last week to announce (or…
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Culture 2 generations of Germans look to the past and future of the country’s Jews
Semon Shabaev and Anja Baron were born in two different Germanys. Baron, 55, grew up in a Berlin with no visible Jewish life; filling that absence was a profound sense of guilt. Shabaev, who turns 21 in April, is a member of a thriving Jewish community and part of a generation committed to thinking beyond…
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Culture The WeWork documentary will keep you guessing how Adam Neumann got away with it
Adam Neumann is a sweaty, frazzled, farting mess. In the opening moments of “WeWork: Or the Making and Breaking of a $47 Billion Unicorn,” we see the coworking visionary struggling through buzzwords and business speak. He rocks on his feet and paces as he reads from a prompter. It’s hard to see how anyone might…
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