Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
The Schmooze

Out and About: Iran beats Israeli Chess Record; Thorstein Veblen on Jewish Intellectualism

  • The finalists for the 2011 Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature have been announced.

  • Philadelphia’s Rosenbach Museum and Library has become home to Maurice Sendak’s only mural.

  • Jonah Lehrer retrieves Thorstein Veblen’s forgotten essay on why Jews become intellectuals.

  • An Iranian grandmaster claims to have beaten an Israeli chess record after playing 614 people simultaneously in Tehran.

  • In The New Republic, Cynthia Ozick writes about the Saul Bellow letters, while David A. Bell looks back on “Cultural Life in Nazi-Occupied Paris.”

  • In the New York Times, Michiko Kakutani welcomes, with reservations, “J.D. Salinger: A Life.”

  • According to Forward contributor John Semley, William Shatner isn’t just Shatner — he’s Shatnerian.

  • New hip-hop songs inspired by the Egyptian and Tunisian uprisings include “#Jan25,” named after a Twitter hashtag.

  • Roger Ebert calls the characters in “Just Go With It,” the new Adam Sandler and Jennifer Aniston-starring romantic comedy, “dumber than a box of Tinkertoys.”

  • Dave Nuttycombe remembers comedian Albert Brooks (born — yes — Albert Einstein), pioneer of the “freak mentality.”

  • A current exhibit in London shows the work of legendary photographer and rabbi’s daughter Eve Arnold.

  • New Voices magazine goes to the Safed Klezmer Festival.

  • Bob Dylan will play at the Grammy Awards together with fellow folkies Mumford & Sons and the Avett Brothers.

  • Dylan is also among the figures whose journals are currently on display at New York’s Morgan Library, along with those of Albert Einstein, Charlotte Bronte and John Steinbeck.

A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning, nonprofit journalism during this critical time.

At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and polarized discourse..

Readers like you make it all possible. Support our work by becoming a Forward Member and connect with our journalism and your community.

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

Join our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.