Jon Kalish: Print Stories

Douglas Kelley, the real-life U.S. Army psychiatrist portrayed by Rami Malek in the recently released motion picture Nuremberg, wrote a book titled 22 Cells in Nuremberg that came out in 1947, a year after he finished his five-month stint at the Nuremberg trials.

Nearly 60 years later, interviews conducted by Leon Goldensohn, a Jewish psychiatrist who replaced Kelley at the historic war crimes trials, were published in The Nuremberg Interviews: An American Psychiatrist’s Conversations with the Defendants and Witnesses. Goldensohn who spent more time with Nazi prisoners than Kelley did, and this book, translated into 16 languages, arguably sheds more light on the Third Reich criminals.

Goldensohn and Kelley were responsible for monitoring both the physical and mental health of the Nazi prisoners, and both their lives ended tragically: Goldensohn died of a heart attack in 1961, five days after his 50th birthday; Kelley died by suicide in front of his family at the age of 45.

Read the whole story at:

https://forward.com/culture/783484/is-the-movie-nuremberg-about-the-wrong-jewish-psychiatrist/

How a Jewish schoolteacher from New Jersey made it to Hollywood and Broadway at the same time

Jon Kalish — Thu, 16 Oct 2025 17:46:12 GMT

Robert Kaplow, a retired high school English teacher, has been publishing a monthly newsletter in Metuchen, a small New Jersey town a few miles southwest of Menlo Park, where Thomas Edison set up his laboratory. Kaplow can’t match Edison’s thousand plus patents but the 71-year-old writer has had an impressive creative output. Over the years, he’s churned out a play, a screenplay, nine novels and hours of radio comedy that gained a cult following on NPR.

Full story in The Forward:

https://forward.com/culture/film-tv/776365/robert-kaplow-blue-moon-linklater-hawke-npr/