Josh Tapper
By Josh Tapper
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The Schmooze Dance, Drink and Mayhem at Moscow’s Purim Bacchanale
For all of its charitable mishloach manot-giving and passive-aggressive gragger-shaking, Purim is hardly the tamest Jewish holiday. At its best (worst?) the celebration follows a sort of Bakhtinian carnivalesque disorder, with masks, public denunciations of the villain Haman and booze — lots of booze. With that in mind, one would expect Moscow, surely a world…
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The Schmooze You Can Now Insert Your Own Name in Duck Sauce’s Streisand Song
Babs fans, how lucky can you get? (Funny Lady pun!) Not only has the Duck Sauce song, “Barbra Streisand,” crept over 44 million YouTube views, far outnumbering any video of Streisand herself, a customizable version of the song is now going viral at GoBarbra. The website allows viewers to type in their own names or…
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The Schmooze Sony Apologized for Japanese Pop Band Nazi Costumes
Shortly after a Japanese department store came under fire late last year for stocking a Nazi costume, The Guardian published a response suggesting the Land of the Rising Sun might be suffering from cultural amnesia. In other words, new generations of Japanese have somehow forgotten their ancestors fought alongside Hitler. Reinforcing the notion, another blunder…
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The Schmooze Canada Remembers Holocaust Role With Daniel Libeskind Monument
Daniel Libeskind’s ‘Wheel of Conscience’ in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Courtesy Canadian Jewish Congress. The ill-fated voyage of the MS St. Louis, the Hamburg-based ocean liner intended to transport 907 mostly German Jewish refugees to Cuba in May 1939, has always played a central role in early Holocaust history, and not only because it unraveled, tragically,…
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The Schmooze Too Many Steven Cohens
How many prominent Steven (or Stephen) Cohens must exist to warrant an article in the New York Times? Try eight, and that’s not including the additional Steven Cohens – the magician, the wrestler, the soccer player – found on Wikipedia. There’s Steven Cohen, secretary to New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo. Steve Cohen, a Memphis congressman….
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The Schmooze An Unlikely Duo Demands Justice for the Roma
A joint Hindu-Jewish crusade against the abuse of European Roma issued a statement Monday calling on European leaders to stop treating the ethnic group as “pariahs.” Rabbi Jonathan Freirich, a California- and Nevada-based rabbi, and Rajan Zed, president of the Universal Society of Hinduism, argue that European governments repeatedly scapegoat Roma, also known as Gypsies;…
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The Schmooze The Question of E-Reading on Shabbat
The idea that household appliances and electronic gadgetry should be adapted to fit the increasingly techno-centric lifestyles of Sabbath-observant Jews has always seemed a tad counter-intuitive. Shabbat, of course, means abstinence from light switching, button pressing, knob turning and any other action that initiates electricity from sundown Friday until Saturday night. But we live in…
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The Schmooze Shark Espionage or a Nasty Case of Alcohol Poisoning?
For those who view the world of international espionage with professionalism and gravity, the insinuation by Egyptian authorities a few weeks ago that the Mossad had employed a shark to terrorize tourists at Sharm el-Sheikh, a Red Sea coastal resort, was nothing short of ludicrous. And if those same espionage-watchers are convinced spies are brought…
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