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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Books
Patricide, Photography, and Audrey Hepburn
On Monday, Austin Ratner wrote about Hillel sandwiches. His first book, “The Jump Artist,” is the winner of the 2011 Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature. His 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…
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Did Israel’s Foreign Minister Make a Toilet Faux Pas?
The media in Israel expects the country’s controversial Foreign Minister, Avigdor Lieberman, to be indicted by the end of the week on charges including fraud, breach of trust, money-laundering and obstruction of justice. But there’s a more immediate accusation facing Lieberman – transgression of telephone etiquette. Yesterday, the radio station Reshet Bet was interviewing him,…
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The Secret History of Women’s Klezmer
A new radio drama titled “The Witches of Lublin” is being offered to public radio stations as a Passover special. Written by Ellen Kushner, Elizabeth Schwartz and Yale Strom, the hour-long production features original klezmer music by Strom and the handiwork of Long Island-based audio drama producer Sue Zizza. The cast includes the prolific audiobook…
The Latest
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Much Ado at the Cameri
Crossposed from Haaretz For years now the Cameri Theater has been the country’s busiest cultural project. On an ordinary day one can choose to see any one of five productions in the building in Tel Aviv (Cameri 1, Cameri 2, Cameri 3, Cameri 4 and also a cafe-theater, where the performances are not part of…
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National Poetry Month: Two Passover Poems
Charles Bernstein has effectively argued that National Poetry Month celebrations tend to focus on establishment-endorsed, “blockbuster poets,” and he has reminded us just how much great poetry exists outside of well-known publishing houses and literary journals. Bernstein’s dictum came to mind when I came across Bracha Meschaninov’s poetry collection “Tender Skin,” published over a decade…
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Pink Triangles: Gays, Jews and Gay Jews
Despite such pioneering exhibits as 2003’s “Nazi Persecution of Homosexuals: 1933-1945” at the Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust, official commemorations of the Nazi mistreatment of gay men and women pose still-evolving problems, as a brilliantly researched study, “Pink Triangle: Nazi Persecution of Homosexuals and its Remembrance,” (Triangle rose. La persécution nazie des homosexuels et…
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Is Haredi Music Video Activism Misplaced?
The new single and music video titled “The Japan Song,” released March 29 and featuring prominent Hasidic singers Avraham Fried and Shloimy Daskal, is not what you might expect. Although its purpose is fundraising for relief efforts, and the video includes some footage of the tsunami, it is not a fundraiser for Japan at all….
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Justin Bieber Will Meet With Bibi in Israel
The Bieber has landed. After months of hysterical anticipation among Israel’s tween girls, the Canadian pop star has arrived in Israel, where he will perform Thursday in Tel Aviv – and, it turns out, meet with Benjamin Netanyahu. The prime minister’s office, sounding somewhat defensive, has let it be known that the singer and his…
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Books Back in the Old Courtyard
Between 1929 and 1935, Yiddish writer Moyshe Kulbak (1896-1937) published a comic novel called “The Zelmenyaners” serially in the Minsk-based Yiddish language monthly Shtern.The novel told the story of a family courtyard in Minsk, in Soviet Belorussia, which was being progressively transformed through aggressive Soviet modernization. As I will explain in an April 13 lecture…
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Travelling to Toledo
Crossposted From Under the Fig Tree When people talk of travel as broadening, they usually have Paris in mind, not Toledo, Ohio. But as I discovered recently, travelling to the heartland of America can be just as eye-opening. I had come to the University of Toledo to deliver an illustrated lecture about the Ten Commandments…
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Books Hebrew for the Internet Age
Crossposted from Haaretz “Writing on the Internet is like breathing or walking,” says Dr. Carmel Vaisman, who earned a Ph.D. from Hebrew University for her research on language, gender and play. “Hebrew Online” (Keter, in Hebrew), which Vaisman wrote with her colleague, Ilan Gonen, who is completing a thesis on the Aramaic of Kurdistan’s Jews,…
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