Simi Horwitz is a feature writer and film reviewer based in New York City. In 2022, she received first place for film criticism from the Society for Feature Journalism, and in 2023, a New York Press Club Award for an Entertainment News feature; and three Los Angeles Press Club Awards, including first place for film criticism — all for pieces published in the Forward.
Simi Horwitz
By Simi Horwitz
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Culture How two visionary Jewish nightclub owners changed the face of entertainment
From the early 1950s to the mid-1970s, Mr. Kelly’s — a nightclub on Rush Street in Chicago — was a new kind of entertainment venue. Intimate (just 200 seats) and relatively inexpensive, it merged a range of programs, including jazz and stand-up comedy, on the same program. Mr. Kelly’s helped to launch the careers of…
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Culture Remembering a visit with the late Ed Asner, star of ‘Mary Tyler Moore’ and ‘Lou Grant’
Editor’s Note: Ed Asner, who starred in ‘The Mary Tyler Moore Show’ and ‘Lou Grant’ died Sunday at age 91. Today, we look back on a 2012 interview with Simi Horwitz in which he spoke about Judaism, journalism and his final wishes. Ed Asner was seated in a makeshift living room in a large, garishly…
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Culture In Facebook’s first documentary, a self-taught photography expert becomes an unlikely 9/11 hero
Even before it opened its doors in 2014, the 9/11 Museum at Ground Zero was awash in controversies, not least its designated mission: Was it supposed to be a memorial or a “living exhibition” — and what does “living exhibition” even mean? Now as we approach the 20th anniversary of the terrorist attacks, “The Outsider,”…
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Culture Confronting America’s ugly history of forced sterilization
Peabody and Emmy award-winning documentarian Erika Cohn has been an activist-artist for a long time. Her film “The Judge” detailed the unprecedented experiences of the first woman judge appointed in the Middle East’s Shari’a courts, and “In Football We Trust” she explored the struggles of young Pacific Islander men determined to play professional football. Her…
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Culture Is the organ donation system run by a ‘God Committee’? This writer-director wants us to ask.
When writer-director Austin Stark, 42, heard about a wealthy man in desperate need of a liver transplant bribing a hospital for an organ, he was shocked and appalled — and couldn’t stop thinking about it. “And then I read a powerful play by Mark St. Germain, which explores a very similar situation, and in doing…
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Culture In Hebron, a soldier’s life filled with brutality and boredom
Depending on your point of view, Rona Segal’s short documentary “Mission: Hebron,” is either a hatchet job designed to make Israel look bad or a justifiable indictment of the country’s brutal military presence in Hebron, home to approximately 30,000 Palestinians flanked by an encroaching wave of Jewish settlers — to date an estimated 1,000. Six…
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Culture How a former Anglican monk’s story inspired a gay French-Jewish romance
British writer Aiden Chambers, whose 1982 young adult novel, “Dance on my Grave,” inspired the movie “Summer of ’85,” says he couldn’t be more delighted with the results. Specifically, that Francois Ozon, a French filmmaker, adapted and directed the gay love story. Hollywood would have sentimentalize it while a British director might have turned it…
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Culture In 21st century America, where arranged child marriages remain a scourge
Kate Ryan Brewer’s “Knots: A Forced Marriage Story” is one disturbing, though important, documentary, one that grows increasingly unsettling as three articulate and intelligent young women matter-of-factly recount their belittling, exploitive, and ultimately dehumanizing experiences in forced marriages. Mercifully each has escaped and forged successful, independent lives; one has become a recognized outspoken activist on…
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