Eitan Kensky
By Eitan Kensky
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Food Chubby Chickpea: Boston’s First Kosher Food Truck
It’s forty degrees and the wind is blowing, but I’m sitting on an even colder marble slab outside the Christian Science Plaza in Boston so that Avi Shemtov can keep a metaphorical eye on his food truck, The Chubby Chickpea. The Chubby Chickpea went kosher about a month ago, but only a small certificate in…
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Recipes DIY Rosh Hashanah Hard Apple Cider
The only High Holiday where alcohol is a requirement is Simchat Torah. This is a mistake. Let me explain: Drinking is a part of Simchat Torah because a rabbinic interpretation for the commandment to rejoice on festivals is to drink wine. Yet the rabbis never specify Simchat Torah. As it says in Sifra Emor 12:4,…
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The Schmooze Why Michael Cera Should Direct More Movies
This is the way the story goes in the alternate timeline: “Paper Heart” (2009), the arch and quirky romantic comedy written by and starring Charlene Yi, became the next “Juno” (2007) and earned all the money at the box office. Audiences burst in anticipation for “Youth in Revolt” (2009) and swooned over its male lead’s…
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The Schmooze Amy Schumer vs. ‘Princesses: Long Island’
I had the idea to compare Bravo’s “Princesses: Long Island,” the Jewish-tinged reality show about aspiring Real Housewives, to Amy Schumer, the Long Island-born stand-up comic and star of Comedy Central’s “Inside Amy Schumer.” The idea was to talk about how misguided these Princesses were, and about how depressing it is that their goal in…
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The Schmooze What Mel Brooks can teach us about racism
“Blazing Saddles” is generally regarded as Mel Brooks’s best movie: It was ranked sixth on the American Film Institute’s list of the 100 greatest American comedies and it was nominated for three Academy Awards. “Best,” though, is a relative term. Brooks’s Borscht Belt-meets-absurdism style is so unique and so indelible that what we call the…
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The Schmooze ‘Mad Men’ Is Best When It’s Angry
Sometimes it seems as if only Daniel Mendelsohn and the New York Review of Books can criticize AMC’s “Mad Men.” Only someone like Mendelsohn, whose work is devoted to mythic themes and to the eternal, can look past the crisp elegance of Don Draper’s pocket square and the show’s captivating visual style. Only someone like…
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The Schmooze Five Ways of Looking at Joan Rivers
1. “It’s a terrible set, not a terrible room.” There’s something strange about Joan River’s Internet talk show, “In Bed with Joan.” Maybe it’s strange that the show exists, or maybe it’s strange how seriously Joan takes the web series — that she earnestly seems to believe it will lead to a new period of…
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The Schmooze What I Learned About Anxiety From ‘Girls’
Earlier this month, HBO’s “Girls” ended its second season with Hannah Horvath (Lena Dunham) incapacitated by anxiety-induced Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, her ebook on the lost generation of 20-somethings looking more and more unlikely; I read the first few chapters of Phillip Lopate’s new book “To Show and to Tell: The Craft of Literary Nonfiction” and…
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Music For Bob Dylan’s biographer, ‘A Complete Unknown’ is a dream come true — even if it’s mostly fiction
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