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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A Disappointing Dybbuk
It’s a pretty familiar theme — the Jew as a perpetual wanderer, forever a foreigner, friendless and reviled by all. Is there anyone else so existentially homeless, utterly without place on the planet as the Jew? Who, besides the Jew, is so intolerable to his host that he becomes the target of violent threats, which…
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Three Dead in Mississippi
In 1964, two young Jewish New Yorkers, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwermer, along with black native Mississippian James Chaney, were brutally murdered by members of the Ku Klux Klan. The men were on their way to investigate the arson of a church in the tiny town of Philadelphia, close to the Alabama border, when they…
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Canada Halts Mail to Gaza
First it was building materials, now it’s the mail. In the latest international Gaza blockade spat, Israel’s national mail carrier, Israel Post, told the Canada Post last week it would not deliver Canadian mail to the Strip, citing circumstances “beyond their control.” It’s not known what caused the mail stoppage. Just days after the embargo…
The Latest
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DNA Solves Bobby Fischer Paternity Case
Well that settles it. It turns out that Jewish chess-champ-turned-rambling anti-Semite Bobby Fischer is not the father of a 9-year-old Filipino girl, Jinky Young, whose mother claimed to have been impregnated by Fischer. As we reported in June, four parties, including young Jinky, were caught in a legal battle over Fischer’s $2 million estate following…
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If Sigmund Freud Put C.S. Lewis on the Couch…
Both Sigmund Freud and C.S. Lewis devoted their lives to studying the nature of life, death and God, yet the two thinkers came to opposite conclusions. Whereas Freud believed that God is a fantasy we create to fulfill our longing for a perfect father, Lewis argued that this longing itself proves the existence of God,…
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‘To Be a Matchmaker Is a Good Thing…And You Don’t Have to Work Too Hard’
Over on the Yiddish Song of the Week blog, Ethel Raim discusses “Der shadkhn” (“The Matchmaker”) “a humorous song describing the special skills that a shadkhn needs for his trade”: The performer, Clara Crasner, was a truly marvelous singer who possessed a vast repertoire of Yiddish songs. I only regret never having met her or…
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I.L. Peretz Comes to the Fringe Festival
In attending “A Gilgl Fun A Nigun” (“The Metamorphosis of a Melody”), which opened its five-performance run at the New York International Fringe Festival on August 14, I was charged with answering a single massive question: Can Yiddish theater appeal to a mainstream audience? As a lifelong theater lover and gentile, I had never been…
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Hiking Little Hitler
A little crag near Stockholm is causing a minor uproar in the Jewish world, thanks to the inconveniently named Cordelia Hess, a historian who, on a recent hike, took issue with several Nazi-inspired trail names. “I thought it rather unpleasant to climb through the ‘Crematorium’ or say that ‘now I am going to do Kristallnacht,’”…
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Dead Sea Naked Photo Shoot in the Works
Are the people of Israel truly modern and progressive Israelis are about to undergo the ultimate test: Will thousands of them willingly gather at one of the country’s best-known sites, remove all their clothing and smile for the camera? Spencer Tunick, an internationally renowned Jewish photographer, has made a name for himself by rounding up…
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Israeli Wins Gold Medal by Default
It would have been a “Kumbaya” moment in Singapore on the first day of the inaugural Youth Olympic Games: a 17-year old Israeli locked in fierce but friendly battle with his Iranian counterpart in the under-106-pound tae kwon do competition. The scene of international sportsmanship was scuttled, however, when the Iranian contestant, Mohammad Soleimani, pulled…
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‘White Power’-Wear Grows in Popularity
Unless you follow the violent competitions known as mixed martial arts, you may not have noticed the frequent appearances of iron crosses and Nazi imagery on athletes’ T-shirts or on official merchandise. But the Southern Poverty Law Center reported in its fall 2010 newsletter that despite a ban by some “extreme sports” leagues, like the…
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