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The Schmooze

Out and About

  • An HBO film directed by Oliver Stone and about New York City “master builder” Robert Moses is in the works.

  • David P. Goldman explains what makes Don Giovanni a Jewish opera.

  • The National Association for the Advancement of Psychoanalysis gave its 2011 award for best stage production to Mark St. Germain’s “Freud’s Last Session.” Read The Arty Semite’s review here.

  • Benjamin Millepied, dancer and husband to Natalie Portman, is retiring from the New York City Ballet.

  • The Public Theater celebrated its late artistic director, Joseph Papp, with an evening of reminiscing and a new documentary, “ Joe Papp in Five Acts.”

  • Steven Spielberg’s new blockbuster, “The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn,” has been released in the United Kingdom, where it is raising the ire of some Tintinologists.

  • Midrash Manicures gets the Times treatment.

  • Allan Nadler ponders how synagogues become ghost towns after the High Holy Days.

  • Edward Rothstein visits the Dead Sea Scrolls in Times Square.

  • Eli D. Clark finds out what Jewish texts have to say about vampires and witches.

  • Paul McCartney may convert to Judaism, the National Enquirer and HEEB say.

  • Eric Banks revisits the question of Gertrude Stein’s fascism in “The Chronicle of Higher Education.” Read The Arty Semite’s post on the subject here.

  • The latest edition of The Journal of Religion and Film features two new essays on the Coen brothers’ “A Serious Man.”

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