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The Schmooze

This Week in Forward Arts and Culture

  • It’s Sukkos! And though the Sukkah City architecture contest may no longer be on display in Union Square, we’ve got plenty of coverage for your vicarious enjoyment. Maia Efrem walks us through the finalists; Nate Lavey treats us to a video on location, and Gabrielle Birkner talks to rabbinic consultant Dani Passow in an audio slideshow.

  • At the Toronto International Film Festival, Ron Dicker praises “The Matchmaker,” a new film by Israeli director Avi Nesher. See more TIFF coverage on The Arty Semite here, here and here.

  • Eddy Portony uncovers the shtetl childhood of MAD Magazine cartoonist Al Jaffee.

  • Adam Rovner takes a look at HBO’s new prohibition-era period drama, “Boardwalk Empire.”

  • Philologos argues that “Judea and Samaria” are just as legitimate names as “the West Bank.”

  • Elissa Strauss visits “Shifting the Gaze: Painting and Feminism,” a new exhibit at New York’s Jewish Museum.

  • Forward staff writer Gal Beckerman’s book “When They Come For Us We’ll Be Gone: The Epic Struggle To Save Soviet Jewry,” is out this week. In the first of a series of three excerpts, Gal writes about Meir Kahane and the Jewish Defense League.

  • In this week’s Yid Lit podcast, Allison Gaudet Yarrow talks to Rebecca Traister about her new book, “Big Girls Don’t Cry: The Election that Changed Everything for American Women.”

  • On The Sisterhood, Michael Kaminer writes about “Graphic Details: Confessional Comics by Jewish Women,” a Forward-sponsored exhibit at San Francisco’s Cartoon Art Museum starting October 1.

  • And this week on the Forverts Video Channel, Shmuel Perlin, a “New York Jew in China,” tells the story of Shanghai’s Jewish community:

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