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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‘Everybody Loves Raymond’ Headed to Israeli TV
Hollywood has been borrowing from the Israeli TV industry for a while now, but today’s entertainment news is about a show heading in the opposite direction. Deadline Hollywood and Israel’s YNet news Web site are reporting that a deal is being inked to adapt “Everybody Loves Raymond” for Israel’s small screen. Depending on which source…
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Slideshow: New Moon as Meaning and Metaphor
“Rosh Hodesh: Beginning and Renewal,” a community art exhibition on view at the San Francisco Bureau of Jewish Education’s Jewish Community Library until July 31, begins and ends with an egg. Curator Elayne Grossbard selected Amy Kassiola’s colorful mixed media “One Cycle of the Moon,” which depicts the egg of a woman’s menstrual cycle, as…
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Moses on Facebook and Other TechnoJew Doodles
The new JewTube doodle to head for virality is not a song but a light-hearted video by Aish HaTorah. Starting with “Go Down Moses” and using the different computer tools that we are all increasingly familiar with, Moses exits from Egypt. For once the blinkered and earnest and, frankly fairly culturally limited, outreach program has…
The Latest
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National Poetry Month: Old Men, Scattered
Alicia Ostriker is a major American poet, critic and teacher. Recently a participant in the Forward’s “3 Alicias 3” event (part of our Jewish Art for the New Millennium series) and a judge for our Triangle Fire Poetry competition, Ostriker has twice been nominated for a National Book Award. An emeritus professor of Rutgers Ostriker…
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Monday Music: Let’s Talk About Love
Is there a grouch in the world who can maintain a proper scowl while listening to French swing? There is something about the sound of this music (is it the sweet, kaleidoscopic chord changes, or the bouncy, peripatetic bass lines?) that seems to rob even the devout pessimist of any meaningful sense of gloom. Wistfulness…
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A Tour To Be Paid for in Psalms
Sometimes when green ideals and zealous Orthodoxy meet, the results are a little bizarre. The Haredi media is reporting that Eliezer Zahavi, a green-inclined resident from the coastal Israeli city of Bat Yam, has been salvaging reusable items from people’s trash for months — wooden boards, scraps of plastic, bits of metal. He has constructed…
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Campaign To Free Pollard Just Gets Odder
The campaign to free Jonathan Pollard just gets odder, and more disturbing. Pollard started serving a life sentence in a U.S. prison in 1987 for passing military secrets to Israel while working as an intelligence analyst for the U.S. Navy. The Shmooze reported back in December that his wife Esther Pollard claimed that the enormous…
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Friday Film: In ‘The Calling,’ the Mysteries of Faith Stay Mysterious
“The Calling,” a four-hour documentary that aired on PBS in December and screens this month in San Francisco and at Knesseth Israel Congregation in Birmingham, Al., profiles seven young Americans who have chosen to become leaders of their faiths. While the film’s intentions are good and it has interesting moments, seven lives are too many…
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Will Sean Penn Play a Jewish Gangster?
Sean Penn may play Jewish again. But this time, the role couldn’t be further from his Oscar-winning performance as the late civil-rights pioneer Harvey Milk. The 51-year-old thesp, reports Deadline.com, has been offered the role of notorious L.A. mobster Mickey Cohen in “Gangster Squad,” a crime drama to be directed by Jewish “Zombieland” helmer Ruben…
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‘Photograph 51’ Puts Science Onstage
Elizabeth Rich as Rosalind Franklin in ‘Photograph 51.’ Photo by Stan Barouh. Watching the current production at Washington D.C.’s Theater J of Anna Ziegler’s “Photograph 51,” which tells the tragic tale of Jewish scientist and almost Nobel laureate Rosalind Franklin (1920-1958), I was reminded of Walt Whitman’s poem “When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer” (1900)….
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Things That Look Like Hitler: Feline Edition
This week’s unofficial theme is turning out to be Things That Look Like Hitler. Following Tuesday’s frenzy over a house in Wales that (supposedly) resembles the dictator, today brings a cat that bears his likeness. Once again, the doppelganger comes from the UK: The Guardian has posted a photo of a feline bearing a suspicious-looking…
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