Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice

Articles written by Pj Grisar


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  • Remembering Siskel and Ebert's great debate: Mel Brooks or Woody Allen?

    PJ Grisar|May 1, 2026

    Of the great debates in film history, a few dominate. How much of Citizen Kane did Orson Welles really write? Is the auteur a film’s true author? And the one that will never be resolved, can we separate the art from the artist? In 1980, Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert devoted an episode of their PBS review series “Sneak Previews” to the following question: Who’s funnier, Mel Brooks or Woody Allen? The camps fall out as one might expect. Ebert, the Pulitzer Prize-winning critic for the Chicago Sun Times, whose work spoke to the everyman, preferr...

  • Marx Brothers fans rejoice: There's a recording of Harpo speaking

    PJ Grisar|May 1, 2026

    Harpo Marx’s wife, Susan Fleming, once remarked that, when you got him talking, you couldn’t shut him up. The proof was there for those who chanced to see him on tour with his brothers in the 1930s and ‘40s, performing material they would later commit to film. If a crowd was good, he’d deliver what was known as “Red’s Speech,” a reference to the red wig he wore on stage. The speech grew more verbose with each recitation, with input by Harpo’s friend, the critic Alexander Woollcott, a fount of $5 dollar words. It got so long, in fact, that Harpo...

  • Book Review: How New York Jews made pickles a big dill

    PJ Grisar|Apr 10, 2026

    Forward Culture reporter "The Pickled City: The Story of New York Pickles"" By Paul van Ravestein and Monique Mulder Chronicle Books, 224 pages, $27 "Pickles are a favorite food in Jewtown," muckraker Jacob Riis, referring to the Lower East Side, wrote in "How the Other Half Lives," his seminal exposé on poverty. "They are filling and keep the children from crying with hunger. Those who have stomachs like ostriches thrive in spite of them and grow strong - plain proof that they are good to...

  • In a stylish mystery, Jodie Foster releases the dybbuk of French Jewish identity

    PJ Grisar|Jan 23, 2026

    Dr. Lilian Steiner isn't really listening. Yes, she hears the thunderous strains of the Talking Heads' "Psycho Killer" playing from an upstairs neighbor's apartment above her psychiatry practice in a tony arrondissement of Paris. She is committed to recording the sessions on mini-discs for future reference, even if she has to bug her digital native son to buy replacements on Amazon. But when a patient dies from an apparent suicide, without any of the usual warning signs, she knows she's missing...

  • Movie review: Is 'Nuremberg' the Holocaust movie we need right now?

    Mira Fox PJ Grisar and Olivia Haynie|Nov 28, 2025

    Holocaust movies have become such a genre of their own that it is hard for them to find anything new to say. Yet directors keep trying - perhaps out of a sense of duty, or the assumed prestige of the subject matter - to keep the atrocities front of mind. "Nuremberg," a star-studded new film written and directed by James Vanderbilt (the writer of Zodiac and both installations of the Adam Sandler-Jennifer Anniston hit Murder Mystery), focuses on the trial of Hermann Goering, Hitler's second-in-com...