Jon Kalish is a Manhattan-based writer and radio journalist.
Jon Kalish
By Jon Kalish
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News The Ruins of Jewish Brownsville
Brownsville, Brooklyn is perhaps most famous as a rough neighborhood and the birthplace of boxer Mike Tyson, but in the 1940s and 1950s the community was home to a large Jewish community. In this podcast reporter Jon Kalish rides along with the late Greg Jackson, a former basketball player who was born and raised in…
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The Schmooze Loving Look at Radio Pioneer
Those of you who are up on your 1960s counter-culture know that the Yippies were formed, for the most part, by a group of Jewish troublemakers from Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Some of those mischievous Yidden are no longer with us: Abbie Hoffman committed suicide in 1989, Jerry Rubin got hit by a car in…
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The Schmooze Watching YouTube With Itzhak Perlman
At Itzhak Perlman’s home on the East End of Long Island, the great violinist wakes up his MacBook to play back some khazones through a huge flat screen TV on the wall. As he flips through his iTunes collection and some YouTube videos, he recalls listening to such cantorial greats as Gershon Serota, Moshe Kousevittsky,…
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Culture For The Love of Pure Khazones
Few outside the world of cantorial music know the name Yitzchak Meir Helfgot, but when Itzhak Perlman listens to the Brooklyn-based cantor’s tenor, he gets goose bumps. Perlman, who has had a love of khazones, synagogue chants, since his boyhood in Tel Aviv, compares Helfgot to Plácido Domingo and Luciano Pavarotti, two opera giants with…
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News Winding Road from ‘Casablanca’
In 1972, shortly after Thilde Foerster died, her son and granddaughter went to clean out her apartment in Santa Barbara, Calif. There they found an old battered suitcase hidden under her bed, filled with film scripts, plays and an unfinished novel. Foerster’s son, Michael Forster, knew that his mother had worked in the film industry…
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The Schmooze Klezmer Musician Awarded Highest Folk Honor
The National Endowment for the Arts announced today that klezmer clarinetist Andy Statman is among the recipients of its 2012 National Heritage Fellowships. The Brooklyn-based musician will be awarded the nation’s highest honor in folk and traditional arts during a ceremony in the fall. Reached at his home in Midwood, the 61-year-old bluegrass and klezmer…
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News Making Matzo in a Chametz-Free Zone
From the Kalish archives: In a story that originally aired on WNYC, Jon Kalish takes us inside a Shmura matzo bakery in Boro Park, Brooklyn. <strong>Subscribe to Forward podcasts on iTunes</strong>
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News Ira Cohen’s Art and Alchemy
Ira Cohen was a filmmaker, photographer and poet, but many people would agree that Cohen’s most amazing work of art was himself. A self-described “multimedia shaman,” Cohen passed away in April 2011. Jon Kalish reports from the Living Theatre on New York’s Lower East Side, where Cohen’s friends and admirers gathered this past month to…
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News Texas schools want to add Queen Esther to the curriculum. Here’s why Jews (and many Christians) are opposed.
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