Joshua Furst
By Joshua Furst
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The Schmooze A Very French Rhinoceros
Rhinoceros By Eugene Ionesco Directed by Emanuel Demarcy-Mota Theatre de la Ville The sleek new production of “Rhinoceros,” by Eugene Ionesco (who may or may not have been partially Jewish), currently running at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, is, well, very French. It comes via the Theatre de la Villa, Paris’s contribution to what I’d…
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Culture Bringing Ibsen Up to Date
Contemporary productions of classical theater can sometimes — or, let’s face it, almost always — feel waxy and dead inside the glass casings of their own pageantry. Watching them can be a tedious ritual, one you submit to with dread. You know the play’s good for you because it’s so boring. That musty thing you…
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Culture Cultural Critic or Complainer-in-Chief?
Farther Away By Jonathan Franzen Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 336 pages, $26 On the last page of the last essay in his new collection, “Farther Away,” Jonathan Franzen bombards the reader with a rapid-fire list of provocative and typically Franzenian questions: What is the point of meaning — especially literary meaning — in a rabid…
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Culture Etgar Keret Copes With Newfound Fame
Suddenly, a Knock on the Door By Etgar Keret Translated by Nathan Englander, Miriam Shlesinger and Sondra Silverston FSG Originals, 208 pages, $14 Once upon a time, Etgar Keret was a humble guy scribbling out weird and fantastical stories about Israel’s version of Generation X. With his first few books, he gained a reputation in…
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Culture Jumping From Nobel Page to American Stage
The current production in New York City’s legendary LaMama Experimental Theatre Club’s 50th anniversary season is a duo of one-acts from Tel Aviv’s Nephesh Theatre, each based on a short story by a Nobel Prize-winning Jewish writer — the first, “Gimpel the Fool,” based on the celebrated Isaac Bashevis Singer story; the second, based on…
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Culture ‘Relatively Speaking’ Boasts Big Names, Little Else
One can’t help but experience a certain amount of culture shock after wading through the throngs of Occupy Wall Street protesters in Times Square en route to a seat in a Broadway theater. The consumerist impulse is nowhere more ritualized than on Broadway, where for $65 to $250 a seat, you can watch movie stars…
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The Schmooze George Orwell Would Be Crying Tears of Joy
Cross-posted with Occupy Writers I’m addicted to Zuccotti Park. The rumble of the drumsticks as they pound the paint cans, the food lines wrapping around the center island, the humming of the generators that keep the computers charged so the word can be sent out 24/7, even the goofballs encamped in the south-west corner rolling…
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The Schmooze Bad Politics Meets Bad Art in ‘Pro-Israel’ Exhibit
According to its publicity materials, “Response Art: An Experiment in Politics, Power, and Pop-Culture,” the exhibit currently running at the Dershowitz Center for Pro-Israel Art, deep in Brooklyn’s South Slope neighborhood, promises to show what happens when artists and intellectuals “struggle together towards a new understanding of Israel and the Middle East — aided by…
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