The Schmooze lies at the intersection of high and low culture. Here, the latest developments and trends in Jewish art, books, dance, film, music, media, television and theater are all assimilated into one handy pop culture blog.
The Schmooze
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Can Charles Krafft Be Defended?
After reading Frederic Spotts’s “Hitler and the Power of Aesthetics” as a Yeshiva University undergraduate, I conducted an experiment. I approached passersby on Amsterdam Avenue and showed them Hitler’s paintings, covering up the information below each work. My classmates praised the “Impressionistic” palette and the “realism” of the landscapes. When I exposed the artist credits,…
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Bonnie Franklin, Missed and Mourned
Bonnie Franklin, who died on Friday of pancreatic cancer, is missed and mourned by her “One Day At A Time” co-stars and “daughters” Valerie Bertinelli and Mackenzie Phillips. Tori Spelling says that rumors of an impending divorce from her husband and the father of her four children, Dean McDermott, are exactly that — rumors. “It’s…
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Rolling Stones Israel Show a Purim Hoax
Rolling Stones fans learned that you can’t always get what you want, when a story in the Jewish Press about the band’s planned tour to Israel was revealed to be a Purim hoax. For a while there, Holy Land Stones fans were excited about the prospect of Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Charlie Watts and Ronnie…
The Latest
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Books Author Blog: Whose Story Is It?
Nancy Richler’s previous novel, “Your Mouth Is Lovely” won the 2003 Canadian Jewish Book Award for fiction. Her newest novel, “The Imposter Bride,” is now available. Her blog posts are featured on The Arty Semite courtesy of the Jewish Book Council and My Jewish Learning’s Author Blog Series. For more information on the series, please…
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David Brenner on Rabbis and Crooks
Ask David Brenner what’s funny, and his answer is simple: “If people laugh, it’s funny. That’s the only way you can tell.” Take one of Brenner’s classic jokes. He first told it as he was setting up his microphone at a show one evening. He thought it was weird, not necessarily funny. Yet many people…
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Comics Great and Sexual Fiend
Al Capp: A Life to the Contrary By Michael Schumacher and Denis Kitchen Bloomsbury, 305pages, $30 No vernacular artist, and possibly no American humorist, had a bigger following during the 1940s and ‘50s than Al Capp did. That Capp had to be banned from campuses in the late 1960s after repeated sexual assault charges —…
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How Evan Handler Became a Sex Symbol
Evan Handler is best known for his two “lighter” roles: Jewish divorce lawyer Harry Goldenblatt on “Sex and the City,” and Charlie Runkle, agent and friend to novelist Hank Moody (David Duchovny) on “Californication.” These are highlights of a remarkable career that almost never was. At age 24, Handler was diagnosed with cancer, which he…
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Actress Bonnie Franklin Dies at 69
Actress Bonnie Franklin, best known as a single working mother in the hit CBS comedy “One Day at a Time” in an era when U.S. television was redefining families in pop culture, died March 1 at age 69. She died at her Los Angeles home of complications from pancreatic cancer, surrounded by relatives and friends,…
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Books Shalom Auslander Wins JQ-Wingate Prize
Shalom Auslander was awarded the Jewish Quarterly-Wingate Prize — the United Kingdom’s top prize for Jewish literature — for his debut novel, “Hope: a Tragedy”, at a February 27 event at London’s Jewish Book Week. Diana Reich, chair of the JQ-Wingate Prize judging panel, praised Auslander’s work as “bursting with raw talent, shockingly irreverent, [and]…
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Books Why Marshall Was Never on the Supreme Court
Earlier this week, M. M. Silver wrote about the riches in Louis Marshall’s archive and explored why it took so long for someone to write a full-length biography of this important figure in American Jewish history. His blog posts are featured on The Arty Semite courtesy of the Jewish Book Council and My Jewish Learning’s…
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Filmmakers Expose Hunger in America
Collbran, Colo., is the kind of all-American town conservatives point to when they talk about how great America is. The town doesn’t even have a policeman, for goodness sakes. It has a marshal. How much more all-American, Wyatt Earp can you get? But as Bob Wilson, pastor of the local Plateau Valley Assembly of God,…
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