Renee Ghert-Zand
By Renee Ghert-Zand
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The Schmooze Elijah Wood’s Mysterious Ring (No, Not That One)
It’s been quite a while since you’ve been able to assume that someone wearing jewelry or other adornments with Jewish symbols or Hebrew writing is Jewish. Just think about all those Kabbalah red-string bracelets around the wrists of celebs like Madonna, Demi Moore and Ashton Kutcher. And what about Justin Bieber’s new Hebrew tattoo he…
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The Schmooze LGBT Synagogue Finds New Home, Complete With Assyrian Art
Every Tisha B’Av, rabbis around the world try to come up with new and creative ways to remind their congregations of the history of the two Holy Temples that once stood in Jerusalem. Students of Jewish history readily recall 586 B.C.E. as the year that the Babylonians destroyed the First Temple, and 70 C.E. as…
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The Schmooze Israeli Court Allows Egg Extraction From Dead Teen
For the first time in Israel, a court has ruled that the eggs of a deceased woman may be extracted and saved. The decision by the Kfar Sava Family Court this past Sunday was in relation to the case of the late Chen Aida Ayish, a 17-year-old from the Sharon region, who died of severe…
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The Schmooze Haredi vs. Secular in Filmmaker’s ‘Battle for Jerusalem’
“Meeting Jerusalem through people who were so passionate about it, who were really saw something beautiful and special here despite all the challenges — I fell in love. I have to admit,” said Liz Nord of her decision to make her documentary film, “Battle for Jerusalem.” In the city this summer to continue work on…
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Food Faced With Allergy Related Death, Israel Looks To Reform Food Labels
Headlines about a 26-year-old woman with a nut allergy recently dying from eating Nutella at a Tel Aviv restaurant have been a popular topic of conversation over the past couple of weeks in Israel. Chen Efrat’s death has been a stark reminder to Israelis of the gravity — and sometimes, fatal nature — of food…
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Books Moroccan Murder Mystery
The Honored Dead: A Story of Friendship, Murder, and the Search for Truth in the Arab World By Joseph Braude Spiegel & Grau, 318 pages, $26.00 You can take the Jew out of the Arab world, but you can’t take the Arab world out of the Jew. That basically sums up Joseph Braude, a young…
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The Schmooze ‘Bibi — Shake Shake’: Noy Alooshe’s Latest Remix
With the crowds in the streets of Israel chanting “Mubarak, Assad, Bibi Netanyahu!,” the Shmooze knew it couldn’t be far behind: a July 14 Revolution-themed Noy Alooshe remix. What Alooshe did to Muammar Gaddafi (who can forget “Zenga Zenga?”), Israeli Kadima party politicians like Tzipi Livni and Dalia Itzik, and a variety of Israeli and…
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Life Will Israeli Court Decision on Surrogacy Bring Changes for Gay Couples?
I’m in Israel for a month reporting on a number of different stories, including a magazine piece about the growing number of Israeli gay couples who are having children with the help of gestational surrogates and egg donors in foreign countries. Although there is no law explicitly banning the use of surrogacy in Israel by…
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