Eitan Kensky
By Eitan Kensky
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The Schmooze Haunted by the Specter of Phil Spector
Just about any moment in Phil Spector’s life could be made into a captivating movie: the years when he invented the Wall of Sound, wrote some of the greatest, most successful songs of all time, and turned the anonymous record producer into an artist, even a visionary; the time he spent with George Harrison and…
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The Schmooze Billy Eichner Is the Funniest Man on the Internet
Billy Eichner is tall, gay, Jewish, from Queens, with a hairline somewhere between receding and disappearing. All of these qualities fuel his comedy. They also make the act of watching him run around the streets of New York, offering ordinary people $1 to answer questions like, “Who’s better, Meryl Streep or Glenn Close?” (and then…
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News Modern Day Manna
This year’s LABA fellowship is only tangentially about food, just as last year’s LABA fellowship was only tangentially about space and the previous year’s fellowship only tangentially about Eros. A program of Manhattan’s14th Street Y, LABA brings together artists, writers, dancers and — this food year — a baker, to study classical Jewish texts and…
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The Schmooze The Cantor Who Was Actually Jesus
It’s not giving anything away to say that Lifetime’s new movie “Twist of Faith” ends with its mismatched romantic leads back together, embracing on the threshold of her home. Nor does it reveal anything to note that Music and the Power of Song connect Toni Braxton’s Black Gospel singer with David Julian Hirsh’s doubting, erstwhile…
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Books New Yiddish Dictionary Explores Intracacies of Language
Comprehensive Yiddish-English Dictionary Edited by Solon Beinfeld and Harry Bochner Indiana University Press, 744 pages, $45 The binding of my copy of Uriel Weinreich’s “Modern English-Yiddish Yiddish-English Dictionary” broke sometime between my third and fourth semesters studying the language. The beginning Yiddish student can get by with only the glossary in the back of Weinreich’s…
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The Schmooze Why Philip Roth Will Keep Writing
We’ve reached a strange point in the ongoing saga, “Philip Roth: America’s Greatest Living Writer.” After releasing a new book every year from 2006 through 2010, he stopped without anyone noticing. In an interview with a French newspaper, partly translated by Salon on Friday, Roth announced that he was done writing novels. “Nemesis” would be…
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The Schmooze Art Spiegelman Struggles With Success
Art Spiegelman just wants to be left alone. Or, rather, he would really like it if parts of his career and biography were minimized, and others celebrated more. The central tension, both in the long conversations he had with University of Chicago professor Hillary Chute, the germ and base level of “MetaMaus” (2011), and now…
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The Schmooze Lunching With New Yorker Cartoonists
Every frame in Rachel Loube’s “Every Tuesday: A Portrait of the New Yorker Cartoonists,” now screening at the Boston Jewish Film Festival, together with “The Art of Spiegelman,” threatens to dissolve into cliché. There is the premise itself: Every Tuesday, New Yorker cartoonists, young and old, submit their work, and then go for lunch. It…
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