Gwen Orel
By Gwen Orel
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The Schmooze Q&A: Siblings Evgenia and Jesse Peretz on ‘Our Idiot Brother’
“Our Idiot Brother,” out in theaters August 26, stars Paul Rudd as Ned, a lovable convict who is sent to jail for selling marijuana to a uniformed cop. Following his release he is booted off the farm by his hostile hippie girlfriend, and so he goes from sister to sister, innocently wreaking havoc. Rudd has…
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The Schmooze Q&A: Zach Braff on Acting, Writing, JDate and Manischewitz
The cliché is that every actor wants to direct. Sometimes they try their hand at writing too, and turn out predictable stories about a character played by the author. Zach Braff, star of the TV show “Scrubs,” seemed to do that with his 2004 film “Garden State” — except that the movie was actually rich,…
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The Schmooze Ladies’ Night at the O.K. Corral
From left: Carol Linnea Johnson, Stephanie Palumbo and Anastasia Barzee in ‘I Married Wyatt Earp.’ Photo by Gerry Goodstein. Wyatt Earp is buried in a Jewish cemetery outside of San Francisco. Who knew? The hero of the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral was married to a naughty-but-nice Jewish girl. Born in Brooklyn to German-Jewish émigrés…
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The Schmooze Compelled by Drama: Q & A With ‘Compulsion’ Playwright Rinne Groff
“The Diary of a Young Girl” by Anne Frank has inspired numerous dramatic works since its publication in English 1952. There was a Broadway play in 1955 by Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett which won the Pulitzer Prize; an adaptation of the play for film in 1959; a 1980 television movie also written by Goodrich…
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The Schmooze ‘Boardwalk Empire’ Exec Dishes on Character’s Anti-Semitism
If you drown a Jew while trying to baptize him against his will, are you anti-Semitic? That was the discussion brewing in the blogosphere after the penultimate episode of the HBO hit series “Boardwalk Empire” aired on November 28. The show, set in the 1920s in Atlantic City, follows the people who run the city…
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The Schmooze For New Theater Company, Shabbat Takes Center Stage
A group of Jewish artists digging deep into Jewish writing and turning it into theater is trying to bring something fresh and smart to the table. Billing itself as “New York’s first Jewish theater company dedicated to Sabbath-observant artists,” 24/6 launched on December 11 with an evening of short plays called “Sabbath Variations: The Splendor…
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Culture Drama and Global Politics, From Irish and Jews
You probably know that there are Jews in Ireland — Leopold Bloom, in James Joyce’s “Ulysses,” is Jewish, after all. But that’s Dublin. There isn’t a lot written about Northern Irish Jews, apart from a fairly well-known story about Jews ending up there, thinking they were already in America and staying on to work. Belfast’s…
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Culture A Trip to Our Motherwell, Ferber and Gottlieb
When church groups go on field trips, do they heckle the bus driver? “NO! WRONG WAY!” Kvetched the back of the Congregation B’nai Israel (CBI) bus, when the driver went towards I-78 not down Vauxhall but, inexplicably, down Valley. My brother, and many other ex-Millburn N.J. New Yorkers, met us at the museum. The Congregation…
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Holy Ground A Jewish farmer broke ground on a synagogue in an Illinois cornfield. His neighbors showed up to help.
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Opinion I discovered anti-Zionism at the University of Michigan. I’m glad it lives on there
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Opinion An alarming new battleground in campus fights over Israel
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Culture An Israeli genocide scholar looks to Israel’s history to understand ‘what went wrong’
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Fast Forward Long Island school district pays $125K to settle lawsuit over erased pro-Palestinian student art
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Culture Trump announced a national Shabbat — and a giant celebration of Christianity the very next day