It took two killers shooting up a Jersey City kosher-mart and one machete-wielding maniac invading a rabbi’s house in Monseyto reteach the old lesson that Jew-hatred is the most plastic hatred—adaptable, durable, artificial, and frequently toxic. Until then, even most American Jews kept folding the fight against anti-Semitism …
The Daily Beast: Forgotten History
Director Peter Glenville Was a Brilliant Artist, a Conservative—and in the Closet in 1960’s Hollywood
I am supposed to call Peter Glenville a gay director who was also a conservative Republican and a tax dodger, but it’s more accurate to call him a prominent Cold War-era Hollywood and Broadway director—who also happened to be a closeted Catholic conservative tax dodger. …
The Builder of World’s ‘Eighth Wonder’ Who Died of Stress
The Holland Tunnel, which stresses out many of the 35 million drivers who pass through it annually, has nothing to do with the Dutch and everything to do with a health warning: Beware, all that stress might kill you. The Tunnel, which opened on Nov. 13, 1927, …
The Casting Couch Perverts Who Peddled Fairy Tales
The Casting Couch is as old as Hollywood and as inescapable as bad reviews. Journalists keep blaming many different initiators of this demeaning show business “audition.” Suspects include Mack Sennett of the Keystone Comedies; Samuel Goldwyn, the G in MGM; Louis B. Mayer, the second M in MGM; Howard Hughes the …
The One-Armed Orphan Who Brought Human Rights To The World
The human wrongs many experienced during the twentieth century—individually and collectively—spawned today’s human rights movement. Even the Thomas Jefferson of human rights, John Peters Humphrey, was a one-armed orphan bullied in private school. After working in the United Nations for twenty years, he concluded that …
The Truth About Colonel Klink: When America’s Favorite Comedy Nazi Commandant Was Played by a Jewish Refugee
Imagine achieving fame as an actor playing Nazis in America – thirty years after fleeing the Nazis to America. In our dour politically correct culture, which takes comedy too seriously, it sounds like a particularly excruciating form of hell. Werner Klemperer, born in Cologne in …
The Man Who Gave America a Rock-Hard Six-Pack
Joe Gold lived by metal—and almost died by metal. The iron-pumping, machine-welding body-builder, exercise-machine maven, and gym genius who helped turn America buff barely survived a paralyzing torpedo injury in the Philippines during World War II. Young men today feel incredibly pressured to look “cut,” …
The Black Regiment That Shocked the Redcoats
In January 1778, what would be immortalized as the rag-tag Continental Army was at its raggiest and taggiest. The brutal winter at Valley Forge scared off many of the soldiers it hadn’t killed or broken. Mocked as “the Ragged Lousey Naked Regiment,” the 1st Rhode …
The Man Who Made Father’s Day a Cash Cow
Celebrating Father’s Day, 2017 feels about as festive as celebrating May Day while Communism collapsed. America’s iconic father Bill Cosby is being tried for rape. The White House is overrun by a tantrum-prone, orange-haired, man-child. And the most popular modifier before the word “dad” is …
This Baseball Great Stared Down Rioters
He never made Baseball’s Hall of Fame. Few fans remember him. He shares a name with an infamous criminal. But when his city was burning on July 23, 1967, Willie Horton entered history with a memorable, hall of fame move—hitting a moral grand slam far …