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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Art These Forgotten Women Artists Shaped Vienna’s Modernist Movement
In 1938 when the Germans annexed Austria, the art world suffered a major blow. Modernists like Egon Schiele and Gustav Klimt had their work labeled degenerate. Jewish artists were forced to flee and many more were unable to. One more casualty of the Anschluss is often overlooked — the many women sculptors and painters whose…
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Art With Sackler Lawsuits Heating Up The Met Will Review Its Donor Policy
Following a new complaint against Purdue Pharma brought by the State of Massachusetts, the Metropolitan Museum of Art is reviewing its gift acceptance policy. The court filing, reported on by The New York Times last week, alleges that the Sackler family, the founders of Purdue Pharma and longtime donors to the Met, directed a misinformation…
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Art Want To Buy A Hitler Self-Portrait? Tough Luck — It Might Be A Forgery.
In the art world, forgeries are an unfortunate inevitability; painters, sculptors and photographers are copied for their work’s cachet, artistic merit and monetary value. But it’s more rare for an artist to be imitated not for their talent, but for their extreme notoriety. Yet on January 24, police arrived at the Kloss auction house in…
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Art Her Father Was Hitler’s Architect. She Devoted Her Life To Helping Jewish Artists.
Albert Speer, Hitler’s armaments minister and main architect, was known as “the Nazi who said sorry” for acknowledging his complicity in Nazi war crimes at the Nuremberg trials. While Speer maintained he never knew about the Holocaust, his daughter, Hilde Schramm, is spreading awareness of the genocide, and doing much more than apologizing for it….
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Culture Of Course We Must ‘Write Our History’ — But Do We Need To Restage It?
After the establishment of the Warsaw Ghetto in 1940, Nazi cameramen recorded countless rolls of film. Much of the material captured was repurposed for propaganda films that portrayed Europe’s Jewry as unhygienic, uncivilized and animalistic. While this documentary footage often relied on subjects that were not directed, the narrative and the conditions surrounding them were…
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Art How An English Apartment Building Reveals An Architect’s Painful Jewish Past
On the face of it, there’s not much that’s Jewish about Highpoint II. The pre-World War II apartment complex, located in the Highgate suburb of London, is a sequel of sorts to architect Berthold Lubetkin’s groundbreaking Highpoint I from 1935. The first building was the apogee of modernist architecture with its white concrete, flat roof,…
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Culture Joyce Carol Oates To Receive 2019 Jerusalem Prize
Like her greatest subject, Joyce Carol Oates has an interesting relationship with Judaism. In her Pulitzer and National Book Award-nominated novel “Blonde,” Oates channeled the inner life of Marilyn Monroe, one of our faith’s most curious converts. Now, the Jewish State is honoring the author for her contribution to literature with the 2019 Jerusalem Prize…
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Culture The Peculiar Saga Of The Black Jew Who Founded San Francisco
In 1840 or 1841, a wedding in New Orleans was abruptly canceled. The bridegroom, admitting he was born out of wedlock and that his mother was black, fled on a ship bound for the West. His well-heeled bride-to-be died soon after this, some believe of shock. That ashamed groom, who was not allowed to marry…
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