Allan M. Jalon
By Allan M. Jalon
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Culture How To Listen to Tchaikovsky While Looking Past His Anti-Semitism
When the conductor Semyon Bychkov arrived at a Russian-style cafe in midtown Manhattan to discuss the upcoming Peter Illyich Tchaikovsky festival at the New York Philharmonic, I handed the conductor a one-page document I’d found that morning that had unveiled a new Tchaikovsky for me. It summarized two boxes at the Columbia University Rare Book…
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Culture EXCLUSIVE: Paul Newman’s Lost Masterpiece — And How We Rediscovered It
Paul Newman directed a pioneering, independent film shot at a Yiddish theater on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, and you’ve probably never heard of it, much less had a chance to see it. It was never released beyond a short run, in 1962, for an Oscar nomination that it never got. Newman’s biographers apparently have never…
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Culture These Were Paul Newman’s 5 (or 6) Greatest Screen Performances
Revisiting many of Paul Newman’s films for a story about his first directorial effort, “On the Harmfulness of Tobacco,” one thematic constant stays so clear it’s as if he’d made them for the purpose of stressing it: The search for principles to steer by as a man making one’s way through the world. 1) The…
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Music Being BFF’s at the New York Philharmonic
Critics aren’t liable for the headlines the copy desk gives to reviews, so no point chiding The New York Times’s James Oestreich for the burdened praise pinned on a rising Israeli pianist’s recent New York recital: “Inon Barnatan Soldiers Through Hallowed Works.” I winced, because the review itself described a “fascinating and rewarding” evening of…
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Culture When Bernie Sanders Walked Out of Allen Ginsberg’s Poetry Reading
When did Allen Ginsberg and Bernie Sanders first meet? What were the circumstances? Even people close to Sanders and Ginsberg do not agree on that history, explored in a recent piece in the Forward. But a photo that surfaced after the story went to press shows the poet, whose outlook reflected socialist ideas and the…
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Culture That Time Allen Ginsberg Wrote a Socialist Poem — About Bernie Sanders
Last June, while digging through 50 boxes of archival material about Bernie Sanders’s four terms as the mayor of Burlington, Vermont, a reporter for the British newspaper the Guardian found a poem by Allen Ginsberg. Written by hand on a 1986 visit to the city, “Burlington Snow” didn’t name Sanders, but he was clearly the…
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Culture The Unseen Marc Chagall and Chaim Soutine
At Art Basel in Miami a few weeks ago, it rained a lot, and some critics scorned the commercial excess with extra sharpness. For Basel art in Washington on a recent morning, the sun lit the season’s last leaves and intimate galleries showed rarely seen paintings. A room devoted to Chaïm Soutine and Marc Chagall…
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Music How Evgeny Kissin Became a One-Man Yiddish Pride Movement
In a poem Evgeny Kissin wrote in Yiddish, he looks forward to the Jewish program he’s set to perform on December 16 at Carnegie Hall: In Kenedi-Tsenter af yidish hob ikh shoyn geshalt, / un opgeshatst hobm es hoykh i a yid, i a goy / Kh’vel es ton in kumendikn yor oykh in Karnegi…
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