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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Israeli Scientists Develop Date-Rape Drug Detector
Israeli researchers look poised to make nightclubs safer. They have developed a sensor that detects date rape drugs in drinks. Fernando Patolsky and Michael Ioffe of the School of Chemistry at Tel Aviv University have developed a sensor that detects changes to optical signals caused by drugs such as GHB. In a summary of the…
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Books Moroccan Murder Mystery
The Honored Dead: A Story of Friendship, Murder, and the Search for Truth in the Arab World By Joseph Braude Spiegel & Grau, 318 pages, $26.00 You can take the Jew out of the Arab world, but you can’t take the Arab world out of the Jew. That basically sums up Joseph Braude, a young…
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‘Bibi — Shake Shake’: Noy Alooshe’s Latest Remix
With the crowds in the streets of Israel chanting “Mubarak, Assad, Bibi Netanyahu!,” the Shmooze knew it couldn’t be far behind: a July 14 Revolution-themed Noy Alooshe remix. What Alooshe did to Muammar Gaddafi (who can forget “Zenga Zenga?”), Israeli Kadima party politicians like Tzipi Livni and Dalia Itzik, and a variety of Israeli and…
The Latest
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Boyhood Days in Brownsville
Photo by Carol Rosegg There is something to be said for knowing one’s audience. The people sitting in the cushioned, expensive seats all have expectations, wants and needs. Perhaps they want to forget; to laugh; to be touched, or to hear a really good story. Or maybe they want to remember. Jake Ehrenreich’s one-man comedy…
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American Jews Not Prejudiced Against Muslims, New Poll Finds
For all the distrust that supposedly separates them, American Jews feel a lot of solidarity with their Muslim counterparts. That’s the stereotype-defying implication of a new poll by the Abu Dhabi Gallup Center, which shows that American Jews express more understanding for American Muslims than any other U.S. religious group. Eighty percent of American Jews…
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Books Different Jokes for Different Folks
On Monday, Melissa Fay Greene shared the story behind the adoption of her daughter, Helen, from Ethiopia. Her posts are being featured this week 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 visit: Twenty years ago, as I set…
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Rabbis To Cheese Company: ‘Worker Exploitation Ain’t Kosher’
The cheese may be kosher. But treatment of workers hasn’t been. That’s the message a group of rabbis took Tuesday to the Midtown headquarters of a hedge fund that owns a kosher-cheese processor accused of retaliatory firings against employees who fought for overtime pay. Crain’s New York Business reports a delegation of rabbis was turned…
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Superficial Characters and Their Sex Lives
Crossposted from Haaretz This shouldn’t have happened. A spectator coming to the theater is supposed to take an interest in many things: the plot, the characters, the style, the acting, the directing. When the play is really good, he is supposed to take all of these in, perhaps reflect on them later in greater detail,…
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Q&A: Actor Danny Aiello on 9/11, Jewish Characters and Chopped Liver
Danny Aiello grew up in New York City, first in Manhattan and then at various addresses in the Bronx. The actor, 78 (“please put that in a smaller font,” he said), has appeared in films such as “The Godfather: Part II,” Woody Allen’s “The Purple Rose of Cairo,” and he was nominated for an Oscar…
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Important-to-Know Nose News
You’d think a Jewish scientist would avoid making racial generalizations about noses, but that hasn’t stopped an Israeli professor from doing just that. Abraham Tamir, a chemical engineering professor at Ben-Gurion University, has published the results of his study of nearly 1,800 noses, based on both photos of living people and works of art. (Although…
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The Lions of Zion, Chapter Two
What would have happened had there been a Jewish team in the Major Leagues? In an original novel serialized on The Arty Semite, Ross Ufberg imagines the trials and triumphs of The Lions of Zion, an all-Jewish team competing in the National League in 1933. Read the first chapter here. A Gangster Brings Baseball I…
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