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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Mark Margolis on How To Win an Emmy
You may not recognize Mark Margolis’s name, but you’ll certainly know his face. Margolis was recently nominated for an Emmy Award for his guest performance in the hit AMC series “Breaking Bad.” He has had roles in “Scarface,” “Pi,” “Black Swan” and “Defiance,” often playing Jews, priests and Latinos. He was nominated for an Emmy…
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Salmon Maimon: 18th Century Thinker
In George Eliot’s “Daniel Deronda” the eponymous hero purchases “that wonderful bit of autobiography, the life of the Polish Jew, Salomon Maimon.” The British author Israel Zangwill concurred, paraphrasing passages from Maimon’s life story in chapters of his 1898 “Dreamers of the Ghetto.” Maimon’s 1793 classic also impressed Franz Kafka, who described it in one…
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Shimon Peres Meets Zuckerberg’s Little Sister
Arielle Zuckerberg (that’s Mark’s little sister) was all smiles today when she met with Israeli President Shimon Peres for a photo op. The younger Zuckerberg sister (big sis Randi is a reality TV show producer) was on a break from her job with a social media marketing firm for a trip with Taglit-Birthright. Peres, for…
The Latest
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Israel-Inspired Reality Show Cancelled
The CBS reality show “3” did not set any records — with its ratings or the speed with which it was cancelled. Based on an Israeli series, “3” is about three women brought together in a search for love. It debuted July 26 in a special Thursday preview before a paltry 2.4 million viewers. It…
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Crime Comics That Shocked a Nation
Crime Does Not Pay, Volumes 1 and 2 Dark Horse Archives, $49.99 per volume Someone once quipped that a history of American theater minus Jews would be far more difficult than a history of Jewish Americans without theater. The same goes for comic books in their glory era, from the late 1930s to the early…
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Maeve Binchy’s Career Started on a Kibbutz
Maeve Binchy, the mega-selling Irish author who died this week, set most of her stories in her native land. But the author, who sold more than 40 million books worldwide, may have owed her career to a stay on a kibbutz. Acording to an obituary in the Los Angeles Times, Dalkey-born Binchy graduated from University…
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Books A Catalan Jew’s Concise Wisdom
“Tell a blind man his house is on fire and he will reply, ‘I wish I could see that!’” “I don’t like having white hair but I like even less when it falls out. Isn’t it sad to worry about the loss of something one dislikes?” “My son, I prefer to see you hunting lions…
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Musical Migrations From Spain to Norway
In a thoughtful article published last year, memoirist and novelist André Aciman explored the “pathless Odyssey” around the Mediterranean taken by the song “Naci en Alamo.” Musicians of many different languages and ethnicities, including Yasmin Levy, have taken up this so-called “Song of the Gypsies,” whose origins are disputed and elusive. For Aciman, the ballad…
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Video: Spot-On ‘Girls’ Parody
The “Girls” of New York are seeing some competition — from a pair of equally jobless and sex-obsessed “Boys” in L.A. The latest humor video to hit the net — a trailer for a “Girls” spoof called “Boys” — satirically follows the lives of 20-something-boys trying to make it in L.A. The joke trailer is…
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Don’t Feel Bad, Jonah Lehrer. Dylan Lied Too.
Well, the verdict is already in on Jonah Lehrer, the New Yorker writer who has admitted to making up Bob Dylan quotes for his book Imagine. The sentence has been meted out too, actually by Lehrer himself in the form of his resignation from the magazine. But inventing Dylan quotes seems to be far from…
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Willie Howard, More Than Just a Sunshine Boy
Although London’s hit revival of Neil Simon’s “The Sunshine Boys” starring Danny DeVito and Richard Griffiths closed on July 28, a possible fall transfer to Broadway has been announced. That’s a good excuse to shine light on a neglected Jewish vaudeville great who inspired Simon’s play. In his 1996 “Rewrites: a Memoir” Simon describes how…
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