
Thea Glassman was an associate editor for the Forward. Follow her on twitter @theakglassman.

Thea Glassman was an associate editor for the Forward. Follow her on twitter @theakglassman.
Mindy Indy sits in her apartment, head bent over a large piece of sketch paper, carefully outlining a young boy’s glasses with her ink pen. She’s already penciled out the scene — two teens sitting on a porch, as the boy tries in earnest to explain the symptoms he experiences from familial dysautonomia, a Jewish…
Jesse Andrews is having another moment. Three years ago, the 32-year-old’s debut novel “Me and Earl and the Dying Girl” hit bookstores, topped the New York Times best seller list and proved that a story of friendship between high school senior Greg and his cancer-stricken friend Rachel, could deliver pure comedy and gentle poignancy, without…
Joseph Feingold first laid eyes on the violin at a flea market outside of Frankfurt. The year was 1947, and the 23-year-old Holocaust survivor, who was living in a displaced persons camp, traded a carton of American cigarettes for the instrument. As the young man picked up the bow for the first time since his…
“It’s almost my birthday!” Irving Fields announces, no sooner have I arrived at the doorstep of his Midtown apartment. He gleefully declares that he will be turning “100 years young” in a couple of weeks and then promptly invites us to his birthday party. And so begins my afternoon with Fields, a pianist who has…
About halfway through “The Overnight,” a raunchy comedy romp released on Friday, Adam Scott and Jason Schwartzman strip down and dance completely naked. Oddly enough, that’s actually not one of the most outrageous scenes of the film, which takes two married couples on a boozy, trippy journey of exploration and self-discovery. It all starts out…
Leah Meyerhoff is tired of the straight, white, male perspective. The 35-year old director sat in a small back room at the IFC Center on Tuesday morning and emphatically expressed her desire for new voices to populate the big screen. “I think female filmmakers who have been shut out of the process and whose voices…
Israel Irenstein is trying to explain chemistry. Neatly dressed in a grey suit and closely cropped hair, the 37-year-old dating coach stands before his all-female audience and addresses a young woman in the front row who is perplexed by a recent rejection. It had been a great first date. They laughed, they talked for hours,…
A film by Thea Glassman about Economy Candy, a 70-year-old wonderland with the distinction of being the oldest Jewish family-owned business on the Lower East Side. Mitchell Cohen stands behind a counter teaming with coconut macaroons, wedges of fruit slices and chocolate-covered grahams — milk, dark and dark with jelly. Nearby his father, Jerry Cohen,…
אין דער פּיעסע אַנטפּלעקט ער די פּראָבלעמען אַרום שפּילן שעקספּירס באַרימטן ייִדישן אַנטאַגאָניסט — באמת, אַ פּיעסע אין אַ פּיעסע.
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