PJ Grisar is a Forward culture reporter. He can be reached at grisar@forward.com and @pjgrisar on Twitter.
PJ Grisar
By PJ Grisar
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Culture Steve Martin’s greatest accomplishment? Making WASPs funny.
Toward the end of the 1983 comedy “The Man with Two Brains,” Steve Martin, as Dr. Michael Hfuhruhurr, is blasted with a drumfire of ethnic slurs. Learning that his sadistic wife, Dolores (Kathleen Turner), withheld the news of his grandmother’s death, he reaches his breaking point and fights with her for the first time. During…
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Culture How BTS and K-pop exploded the world music scene
In June, a self-contained — if not quite silent — majority made its presence known to the world. Fans of K-pop, the common shorthand for South Korean popular music, banded together to inflate President Donald Trump’s projected turnout for his widely-publicized rally in Tulsa, Okla. While their scheme, which resulted in a sea of empty…
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Culture Disney’s ‘Howard,’ a touching tribute to its master lyricist, leaves his work unfinished
Lyricist Howard Ashman and composer Alan Menken set off an age of rebirth for Disney Animation with their humorous, humanistic work on classics “The Little Mermaid” and “Beauty and the Beast.” Much has changed for the company since, and a distressing amount has remained the same. Like most major media companies, the House of Mouse…
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Culture Should Billy Graham — evangelist with an anti-Semitism scandal — get a statue in the Capitol?
The U.S. Capitol’s Statuary Hall, where two iconic figures from every state hold court, will soon have a new resident: A clay likeness of the late Reverend Billy Graham, the popular televangelist who brought the word of Jesus Christ to the masses through a series of high-profile “crusades,” evangelistic campaigns that saw massive rallies across…
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Culture What Seth Rogen’s new movie gets right and wrong about the history of pickling
Toward the end of the new Seth Rogen comedy, “An American Pickle,” time-displaced pickler Herschel Greenbaum’s millennial great-grandson informs him that Brooklyn hipsters are pickling watermelon. “They pickle fruit these days?” says Herschel, who spent a century salinating in a pickle vat before being revived in 2019. “Just when I think I figure it out,…
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Culture Let Eric Andre, the most subversive comedian working today, replace Ellen DeGeneres
After years of industry-wide whispers, high profile reports are beginning to shatter Ellen DeGeneres’ veneer of niceness. Former employees recently dished to BuzzFeed News with stories of a toxic work environment replete with microaggressions, racism and intimidation, allegations that have put DeGeneres’ image in jeopardy. But, “The Ellen DeGeneres Show” is a hit, placing NBC…
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Culture In bringing back ‘Hunters,’ Amazon fails the test of history — and good taste
The Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial Museum condemned it for welcoming “future deniers.” So did the USC Shoah Foundation. But Amazon’s “Hunters” is moving forward with a second season, all the same. Somehow, the outrage over the series’ invented Holocaust atrocities — most notably a game of deadly “human chess” — wasn’t enough to squash interest in a…
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Culture Jonathan Swan is the meme hero we need right now
Jonathan Swan’s agile interview with President Donald Trump for Axios on HBO was revelatory. The 40-minute conversation exposed the president’s dismissiveness of pandemic-related deaths, his unwillingness to praise critics like the late John Lewis and his remarkable lack of concern over Russia’s reported aid to Taliban soldiers. But for the internet, the biggest takeaway was…
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Opinion I’m a Jew of color. Ta-Nehisi Coates can’t apply US lessons to Israel.
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Culture Columbus may have had Jewish heritage — that doesn’t mean he was Jewish
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Sports 5 Jewish things about the Mets — and why Jewish fans adore them
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Culture New conspiracy theory just dropped — Jews are causing the hurricanes
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