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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Chaim Grade at 100
A version of this post appeared in Yiddish here. One hundred years after his birth, the late, great Yiddish novelist and poet Chaim Grade can still draw a crowd. This was evident at an October 4 commemorative evening at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, which featured fascinating literary analyses of Grade’s work as well…
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A Tel Aviv State of Mind
Each Thursday, The Arty Semite will be featuring excerpts and reviews of the best contemporary Jewish poetry. This week, Jake Marmer writes about Maya Pindyck, whose collection “Friend Among Stones” was published last year by New Rivers Press. To some, Tel Aviv is a party town with sandy beaches. To others, it is a vortex…
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From Drabby Yeshiva Uniforms To Savvy Business Suits: An Interview With Designers of Ovadia & Sons
Twin peacocks leaning over an “O & S” monogram form the logo of newly launched men’s clothing line Ovadia & Sons. The birds also make apt stand-ins for Ariel and Shimon Ovadia, the 27-year-old, yeshiva-educated twins who founded the label in July. Riding a wave of fawning press from heavy-hitters like Esquire and GQ magazines,…
The Latest
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Jewish CEO Named No. 2 Most Powerful Woman in the World
Crossposted from Haaretz Irene Rosenfeld, CEO and Chairman of Kraft Foods Inc., was named by Forbes magazine the second most powerful woman in the world for 2010, one place after First Lady of the United States Michelle Obama and one place ahead of media mogul Oprah Winfrey. Rosenfeld, 57, was born to a Jewish family…
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Botched Circumcisions Lead To Second Procedure
No one really likes to think about getting circumcised, but undergoing the procedure twice? No thank you. Yet some parents in the Haifa area are doing just that after news broke that a mohel botched hundreds of circumcisions and failed to comply with Jewish Law. When a group of senior rabbis from Haifa attended a…
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Books ‘I Remember Papa,’ Fottorino Says of his Moroccan Jewish Father
At the tender age of 50 Éric Fottorino is not just CEO of the company which owns the French daily “Le Monde,” but also a prize-winning novelist. And now Nice-born Fottorino has just produced an intensely personal memoir addressing his Jewish ancestry, “Questions for my Father,” recently published by Les éditions Gallimard. Fottorino belatedly reconnected…
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From Stanford to Be’er Sheva, Musicians Honor Daniel Pearl
Just a few months after his son Daniel Pearl was kidnapped and murdered by terrorists in Karachi, Pakistan, Judea Pearl approached Rabbi Patricia Karlin-Neumann, Senior Associate Dean for Religious Life at Stanford University, about the possibility of organizing a concert in his son’s memory to take place around his birthday, October 10. “He wanted there…
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Israel’s Desert Music Festival
Crossposted from Haaretz Mitzpeh Gvulot started off as a pioneering Jewish settlement in the Negev. Set up in 1943 as an experimental station to examine the prospects for agriculture in the desert, today the site is home to a different kind of experiment: indie music. The In-D-Negev festival was created as an attempt to get…
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A (Belated) Little Sukkah
On the Yiddish Song of the Week blog, Forverts associate editor Itzik Gottesman writes about “A Sikele, a Kleyne,” as sung by his mother, Beyle Schaechter-Gottesman: “A sikele, a kleyne ” is based on a popular poem by Avrom Reisen called “In suke.‟ I know of at least three recordings: Louis Danto’s “Masters of the…
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Palestinian Oktoberfest Entices Israeli Jews
The West Bank village of Taybeh is a hub of Christian Palestinian life. It is believed locally that Jesus dwelt there for a time. Today it is thought to be the last all-Christian locale in the West Bank. Which means it has a corner on a market — beer. This past weekend thousands of Palestinians,…
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Rambam Beats Hip-Hop!
It might seem as though the stand off between medieval Jewish philosophy and contemporary hip hop culture had been decisively decided in favor of the latter. But not so says young African-American author Thomas Chatterton Williams. Published this past spring by The Penguin Press, Williams’s “Losing My Cool: How a Father’s Love and 15,000 Books…
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