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The Schmooze

Out and About: Bollywood in Israel; Iraq’s Jewish Book Trove

  • Bollywood filmmakers are visiting Israel to make connections and scout locations during the Jerusalem International Film Festival.

  • Prolific and influential graphic designer and Vanity Fair caricaturist Paolo Garretto was once a member of Mussolini’s bodyguards.

  • A collection of Jewish Iraqi books discovered in a basement used by Saddam Hussein’s secret police and recovered during the 2003 invasion of Iraq is now the subject of dispute between the Iraqi and American governments.

  • Is Richard Feynman a genuine scientific superstar?

  • JDub Records is closing. Here’s the official statement.

  • Marta Kauffman, creator of the sitcom “Friends,” and Roberta Grossman, a documentary filmmaker, are getting together to make a movie about the history of “Hava Nagilah.”

  • Kenneth Sherman calls attention to Yuri Suhl’s “One Foot in America,” a long-neglected, recently reissued novel of the immigrant experience.

  • Adam Kirsch reviews “Réne Blum and the Ballets Russes,” a new biography about the elusive French Jewish ballet impresario.

  • A new piece of software is shedding new light on the authorship of the Bible.

  • How both Bobby Fischer and Isaac Newton create difficulties for biographers.

  • Remembering Yavneh, a pioneering Modern Orthodox student organization.

  • Hundreds of once-lost photos of the Berlin Wall in the 1960s have been discovered and are on display.

  • Street art meets the spiritual at a Brooklyn art show.

  • How André Aciman’s writing on New York rivals that of E.B. White.

  • Theodore Roszak, author of “The Making of a Counter Culture,” has died at age 77.

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