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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Israel Ballet Back On Its Toes
Crossposted from Haaretz Things are beginning to move at the Israel Ballet, just four months after new general manager Lea Lavie assumed her post. Lavie, whose management experience includes working for tycoon Lev Leviev and the Likud party, has replaced Hillel Markman, who directed the company since he and Berta Yampolsky founded it in 1967….
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Out and About
Isreali filmmaker Amos Gitai has been chosen to participate in the international film project, “Words With Gods.” Madame Tussauds has unveiled a wax statue of Anne Frank in Berlin. Edith Pearlman has won the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction for her short story collection, “Binocular Vision.” Zackary Sholem Berger shares his thoughts on…
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Peres Goes to ‘House That Shrek Built’
While pundits pondered the crisis brewing over Iran, Shimon Peres was visiting the house that Shrek built, but not exactly to pitch a sequel to Prince of Egypt, the biblical epic that in 1998 launched DreamWorks Animation. On the second day of his Hollywood sojourn, the Israeli president used his lunch-time tour Friday of Hollywood’s…
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Shimon Peres Does Tinseltown
When Jason Alexander, the veteran actor from the 1990’s hit TV series “Seinfeld,” met Shimon Peres at the Beverly Hilton Hotel Thursday night, it was, at first, as though he were channeling his old character, George Constanza. “Happy Purim!” he exclaimed, immediately launching into a comedy routine. Then, commenting on the heavy security on the…
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British Literary Doyenne’s Letters to Gay Poet
Admirers of the Brooklyn-born Jewish poet Edward Field, whose “After the Fall: Poems Old and New” appeared in 2007 from the University of Pittsburgh Press, will rejoice in the role he plays in an April 16 book from W. W. Norton & Company, “Letters to a Friend” by the venerable British literary editor Diana Athill….
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Bullock and Ratner: We’re NOT Dating
Some celebrities, knowing full well that tabloid reporters like to cook up sensationalist stories, just let the rumor mill churn. But when it comes to the suggestion that she is dating notorious womanizer, gay-basher and producer-director Brett Ratner, Sandra Bullock refuses to go with the flow. In Touch magazine’s cover this week featured a large…
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Israeli Pop Star Tries English Crossover
If there’s one Israeli music star who is original and inspirational, it’s Ninet Tayeb. With all the bland releases of formulaic rhythms on the Israeli scene, she manages to produce music that appeals to typical consumers of this stuff, but also has an interesting and funky twist. She comes from a family of Tunisian origin,…
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Friday Film: Mosque That Saved Jews
While making “Free Men” (“Les hommes libres”), a subtle examination of an Algerian émigré living in Paris at the outset of the Nazi Occupation, it must have been tempting to pump up the emotional volume. Had the movie been made by Hollywood, Younes, a young man selling goods on the black market, would have been…
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Art-Collecting Memoirs of Isaiah Berlin’s Stepson
The poet W. H. Auden once remarked that hearing gourmets describe favorite meals made him wish he could live on pills, and reading the memoirs of some art collectors describing their acquisitions can make one want to live sans art. An exception to this trend is the art connoisseur Michel Strauss, born in France in…
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Books Meyers Dishes on Writing and Murder
Today, Alicia Oltuski interviews Randy Susan Meyers, who wrote “The Murderer’s Daughters,” about her experience touring the nation’s synagogues and JCCs with Jewish Book Council… and talking about domestic violence in Jewish communities. Oltuski’s blog posts are being featured this week on The Arty Semite courtesy of the Jewish Book Council and My Jewish Learning’s…
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Art in the Internet Age
Crossposted from Haaretz The name of a new art exhibition opening tonight in Tel Aviv — “Search Engine” — reflects a behavior pattern that has been prevalent since the birth of the Internet. But the works chosen for the “Search Engine” exhibition at the Center for Contemporary Art were actually created in more classical art…
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