Jake Marmer
By Jake Marmer
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The Schmooze It’s A Cappella Time!
Up there in the top five least favorite Jewish traditions is the custom of avoiding live instrumental music between the end of Passover and Lag B’aomer. Being a people of hairsplitting legalists, this custom has engendered a whole new genre, called “s’fira music” — albums upon albums of permissible a cappella tunes (from all male…
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Culture Passover Performance Poetry
Pesach literally means “skipping” — as in skipping the Jewish homes. But also, as in skipping a beat, breathless, syncopated, throat parched from so much yelling. That’s right, yelling. Passover is all about that. Family members who have not seen each other in much too long, with their serious opinions on serious matters. The rabbis…
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The Schmooze The Great Matzo Ball-Eating Contest
The question is not: How is this night is different from all other nights? Rather: How many matzo balls can you eat? Those who are in need of inspiration in this department may greatly benefit from watching Faye Lederman’s documentary “Hold the Soup,” which is now being featured at the Seattle’s Jewish Film Festival. As…
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The Schmooze Rothko Red on Broadway
James Logan’s new play “Red” about abstract painter Mark Rothko, which has just opened on Broadway, begins with an unobstructed view of Alfred Molina’s back. Molina as Rothko, staring at his own painting, begins to pontificate — and this, in essence, is the central image of the play: a self-absorbed artist/genius who turns away from…
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Culture Fussing on the Cliff
All the Whiskey in Heaven: Selected Poems By Charles Bernstein Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 320 pages, $26 A few years ago, following a John Zorn concert, I was standing outside, chatting with an acquaintance about the phenomenon of the Jewish avant-garde. Suddenly, a man of a certain age, with a strong Brooklyn accent, barged in:…
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The Schmooze Fuggin’ Addendum: More Kupferberg
Tuli Kupferberg — 86 year old beat poet, musician and activist, and famed leader of the avant-folk band The Fugs — has been on the news lately. An article on him appeared in the New York Times in late January , another piece was published here, in the Forward just last week, and Tablet carried…
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The Schmooze Smoked Salmon No Longer Kosher
It’s Karp vs. Salmon in the strange story of the Israeli rabbi who declared salmon non-kosher. If you thought Rabbinic ruling which pronounced New York water treyf was not odd enough, in recent weeks Rabbi Moshe Karp of Modi’in Illit (Israel) damned salmon, halibut and flounder as no longer kosher due to Anisakis, a tiny…
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The Schmooze Robert Pinsky, Live!
Rock stars go on wild tours around the world and poets sit holed up in their dusty bookish apartments. Right? The former United States Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky is on the road to prove you wrong. On the road around the country that is — alongside Ben Allison’s jazz collective. You can see them perform…
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