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
-
Out and About: A Bar Mitzvah at Auschwitz; Sholem Asch’s Family Photos
Branko Lustig, producer of “Schindler’s List” and “Gladiator,” plans to hold his (belated) bar mitzvah at Auschwitz. The Yiddish Book Center has put the family photos of Yiddish writer Scholem Asch online. Joshua Cohen interviews Israeli novelist Yoram Kaniuk for The Paris Review. Jeffrey Goldberg on the trials and tribulations of Sister Mary Schmuck of…
-
This Week in Forward Arts and Culture
In honor of Yom HaShoah, the Forward presents “The Thinking Person’s Guide to the Holocaust,” a selection of the most important literary, historical and artistic works about the Shoah. Rokhl Kafrissen explores the new generation of klezmer music and musicians, including Benjy Fox-Rosen and his new album, “Tick Tock.” Joshua Furst takes a hard look…
-
National Poetry Month: Shabbat and Palm-Sized Watermelons
We’re at the end of the National Poetry Month celebration at the Forward. Aside from the flurry of posts on The Arty Semite, we’ve also featured an interview with seven poets. One of the interviewees, Maya Pindyck, who has already made an appearance on the blog last year, is here again, with two poems,”Shabbat” and…
The Latest
-
Madoff Family Member Shopping Around Tell-All Book
Perhaps it was inevitable that someone in the Madoff clan would eventually write a tell-all. If she gets her way, that family member will be Stephanie Morgan, the former daughter-in-law of Bernie and Ruth Madoff. New York magazine reports that Morgan is currently shopping a memoir to publishers, promising a story that portrays her as…
-
Friday Film: Alan Zweig and the Cinema of Emotional Crudity
In 2000, filmmaker Alan Zweig gained modest success on the festival circuit with “Vinyl,” a documentary probing the quirks and eccentricities of compulsive record collectors. (“Compulsive” referring not to some guy with a few hundred LPs, but to some guy who rents a U-Haul locker on the edge of town to serve as a supplementary…
-
Israel Celebrates the Royal Wedding
Welcome to Modi’in, the Israeli city that is so British that people drink tea at four o’clock, stand in orderly lines at the bus stop (unheard of in this part of the world) and play cricket. Well today, it became even more so. One street in the city is today covered in red white and…
-
The New Ars Judaica Has Arrived
Crossposted from Samuel Gruber’s Jewish Art & Monuments The seventh volume of the excellent art journal Ars Judaica has been published by Bar-Ilan University. Editors Bracha Yaniv, Mirjam Rajner and Ilia Rodov have done it again, producing a rich selection of well-research articles, beautifully illustrated and presented. Older readers will remember that from the 1970s…
-
Books Hannah Arendt and the Eichmann Trial
On Wednesday, Deborah Lipstadt wrote about eerie anniversaries. She is the author of the new book “The Eichmann Trial.” Her blog 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: I have spent…
-
A Mélange of Musical May Days
As May rolls around for Manhattan music lovers, ‘tis the season for appreciating the works of George Kleinsinger, whose much-loved orchestral work “Tubby the Tuba” will be performed on April 30 in the Peter Jay Sharp Theater by The Lesbian & Gay Big Apple Corps Symphonic Band. Kleinsinger wrote “Tubby” in 1941, about the possibly…
-
Books Terrorist Noire
It is often forgotten that before the existence of film noir, there was literary noir. The genre came to prominence in novels by James Cain, Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett, who wrote “The Maltese Falcon” in 1930. Its origins can be found even further back, in Joseph Conrad’s “The Secret Agent,” from 1907. It is…
-
National Poetry Month: An Ancient and Modern Job
As it’s title indicates, Freddy Frankel’s “Job,” featured today on The Arty Semite in honor of National Poetry Month, is about the biblical figure tested by Satan to see whether his piety was sincere. In Frankel’s rendering, Job is at once the ancient figure of the Bible (“Desolate on the dung-hill”), as well as a…
Explore
Most Popular
In Case You Missed It
-
Yiddish World VIDEO: What Rabbi Soloveitchik said about Jewish concern for Israel
-
Fast Forward Stanford suspends student co-op that it said asked Jewish students to leave
-
Fast Forward Josh Shapiro accuses Zohran Mamdani of condoning ‘blatantly antisemitic’ supporters
-
Opinion The left is turning on AOC over Israel — and imperiling its own agenda
-
Shop the Forward Store
100% of profits support our journalism
