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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Rashida Jones On Befriending Your Ex
Rashida Jones, best known for television roles in “Parks and Recreation” and “The Office,” has taken the leap from acting to screenwriting with her new film, “Celeste and Jesse Forever.” Jones, daughter of legendary musician Quincy Jones and Jewish actress Peggy Lipton, told reporters she is usually cast as the “dependable, affable, loving, friend-wife-girlfriend.” But…
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Feuding Tycoons Attend Same Synagogue
Don’t expect Ron Perelman and Ira Rennert to exchange gut yontif greetings anytime soon at Fifth Avenue Synagogue, where they’re both members. The billionaires are embroiled in nasty tit-for-tat lawsuits “alleging the other man siphoned tens of millions from a business they co-own — AM General, the maker of Humvee military vehicles,” Crain’s NY Business…
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Bad News for Israeli Sailing Team
Israel’s women’s sailing team is down to 10th place after being disqualified from the second race in the 470 event. Gil Cohen and Vered Buskila finished sixth in the second race, only to be disqualified after the Danish team filed an appeal against them. Their results would have brought them up to third place among…
The Latest
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Books How Anti-Semitic Comics Got Replaced
Jewish Images in the Comics: A Visual History By Fredrik Strömberg Fantagraphics, 304 pages, $26.99 In the epigraph to his second volume of “Maus,” the seminal graphic novel about the Shoah, Art Spiegelman quotes an anti-Semitic text: “Mickey Mouse is the most miserable ideal ever revealed… Healthy emotions tell every independent young man and every…
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Verdi in Terezín
The 2013 bicentennial of Giuseppe Verdi’s birth is fast approaching. The great Italian opera composer first won fame with “Nabucco” (1842), based at several removes on the biblical book of Jeremiah. The stateless Italians of the day saw themselves in the opera’s enslaved Israelites, and the chorus “Va, pensiero” (drawn from Psalm 137) threaded itself…
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Hitler’s Nephew Begged To Fight for the U.S.
Just because your last name’s Hitler, doesn’t mean you’re a bad guy. That’s the message in a 1942 letter sent by Adolf Hitler’s nephew to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, asking for permission to enlist in the U.S. military to fight his uncle’s “devilish and pagan regime.” Yahoo! reported on the letter’s publication this week on…
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Yiddishkeit on the Pampas
Although long considered a target for comedy, the concept of a Jewish cowboy has been taken more seriously after translations of “The Jewish Gauchos of the Pampas,”, a 1910 story collection by the Argentine Jewish author Alberto Gerchunoff (1883-1950), became available. Gerchunoff’s Russian family moved to a settlement in Argentina, founded by philanthropist Baron Maurice…
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Aly’s Grandparents ‘Just Thrilled’
Watching your granddaughter perform intricate somersaults and jumps, swinging in the air like a rubber band, landing on the floor from a balance beam after a back jump where her head was only inches away from being hit is not for the faint of heart. But 71-year-old Susan Faber is simply ecstatic to be Aly…
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Builder of Operatic Bridges in Germany
Ulrike Hessler, the first woman to be appointed intendant of the historic, four-century old Saxon State Opera in Dresden, popularly known as the Semper Opera, died July 30 in Munich, after a 19-month battle with cancer. She was 57. I first met Hessler eight years ago, when she was the director of the press office…
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Justin Bieber Makes Jewish Teen a Star
The new Etta James is… 13 years old? Well, according to Justin Bieber she is. With a few flicks of his fingers last week, the teen heartthrob changed the life of Madison Beer — a 13 year old Jewish singer-songwriter. The twitter correspondence went a little something like this: Justin: “wow. 13 years old! She…
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Bob Dylan Previews New Album With ‘Early Roman Kings’
Strip away the over-the-top visuals and the dialogue in the new trailer for the Cinemax “Strike Back” series and you can hear the first single off Bob Dylan’s forthcoming “Tempest” album. To our ears, the song, “Early Roman Kings,” sounds like a bluesy cross between Muddy Waters’s “Mannish Boy” and “My Wife’s Home Town,” which…
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