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 Jerome Charyn, The Half-Wild Novelist
Jerome Charyn lives in a well-preserved pocket of old New York. Within a block of his home on West 12th Street, near where the grid’s order gives way to angled avenues, is a park that dates back to the early 19th century; a grubby magazine stand; a handful of bodegas; a regularly-location-scouted luncheonette as seen…
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Theater Why The Edelweiss Is Not A Nazi Anthem
I won’t waste any time. “Edelweiss,” the Rodgers and Hammerstein song, penned for their 1959 musical “The Sound of Music,” that played at the White House before a press conference on the day the Mueller report was unsealed, is not a Nazi anthem. In the show and film, it’s sung in a moment of defiance…
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Culture How To Talk To Your Four Sons About The Mueller Report
On April 18, Attorney General William Barr will make public a redacted version of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report on the Trump campaign and administration. The report, a record of a wide-ranging probe launched nearly two years ago, is said to be nearly 400 pages long and to offer insights into the president’s ties to…
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Culture Swiss Court Rules Unpublished Kafka Papers Transferred To Israel
Contemporary audiences nearly missed the chance to read most of Franz Kafka’s work. When the writer died in 1924 at the age of 40, he entrusted his manuscripts to his friend Max Brod under the condition that he burn them. The fact that we still abuse the adjective “Kafkaesque,” is proof that these terms weren’t…
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Culture FolksbienRU’s ‘DOM №’ Is A Cool And Immersive Passover Event — But Is It For English Speakers?
Perhaps because I lack some self-awareness, I rarely feel like an outsider in my Spanish Harlem neighborhood. But last Friday night, I arrived at a secret location one block from my apartment and found myself thoroughly bewildered by surroundings that should, by rights, be more familiar to me. FolksbieneRU, (a Russian-centered partnership initiative of Genesis…
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Film & TV You Can Have A ‘Game Of Thrones’ Haggadah For Your Seder
The first episode of the final season of “Game of Thrones” arrived Sunday night, and while some are already crying shame at the show’s loss of momentum, the series has picked up the pace on one score: cynical brand tie-ins. You can now learn the High Valyrian language on Duolingo and use your phrasebook to…
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Culture Pittsburgh Post-Gazette Wins Pulitzer For Tree Of Life Coverage
On April 15, the Pulitzer Prize announced its 2019 winners and finalists in the fields of journalism, literature and drama. Among the winners was the staff of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, which was recognized in the category of Breaking News Reporting for coverage of the Tree of Life shooting. The Post-Gazette was lauded for reporting that…
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Art The Washington Post Condemns School District Apology Over ‘Jewish People’ Drawing
A month after a Virginia high school student’s drawing solicited concerns from community members who believed the artwork to be anti-Semitic, The Washington Post ran an editorial condemning the school district’s official response as “a groveling apology” with a “feeble reference to students’ First Amendment rights.” The editorial was titled “A High Schooler’s Controversial Artwork…
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