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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David Broza Brews Up a Concert at Le Poisson Rouge
For over 30 years, the star Israeli singer-songwriter David Broza, who performs at New York’s Le Poisson Rouge on June 14, has been entertaining audiences with real talent and just a dollop of chutzpah. The grandson of Wellesley (Pinchas) Aron, Chaim Weizmann’s political secretary and co-founder of the Habonim movement as well as the Arab-Israeli…
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Who Was Modern Earliest, Ashkenazim or Sephardim?
Behind the ever-abiding divisions between Ashkenazic and Sephardic Jews is the widely-held belief that Ashkenazim, as leaders of the Haskalah, or Enlightenment movement of the 18th and 19th centuries, were pioneers of modernity. Now David Ruderman, a Professor of Modern Jewish History at the University of Pennsylvania, hurls a well-researched grenade into such presuppositions. Ruderman,…
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California Students Caught Playing ‘Beat the Jew’ Game
If playground politics weren’t brutal enough, seven Southern California high school seniors added a little antisemitic flair through a game brazenly titled “Beat the Jew,” played on and around the campus of La Quinta High School on May 20. The game, promoted through a 40-member Facebook page, never happened again and the participating students all…
The Latest
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Italian Jews and ‘Fascist Imbecility’
Especially while it is still a matter of living memory, the recent revelations about the wartime experience of Italy’s Jews are of urgent importance. The Nobel Prize-winning scientist Rita Levi-Montalcini, who turned 101 on April 22, describes what she calls the “imbecility” of antisemitic edicts promulgated by Italian Fascists during the Second World War. Barred…
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A Wikipedia for Jews
There’s a new craze among religious students in Israel. As regular folk get in on the act of shaping the world’s knowledge by writing, editing and improving articles on Wikipedia, religious students are busily working on their own Jewish Wikipedia-like project. The Responsa Project, run by Bar Ilan University, is digitizing tens of thousands of…
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Charles Bronfman Prize Names Two Recipients
The Charles Bronfman Prize has named its 2010 recipients, and there are two of them. The prizes, along with two $100,000 awards, will be given to Sasha Chanoff, founder and executive director of Mapendo International, for his efforts rescuing and resettling at-risk and forgotten African refugees, and Jared Genser, founder and president of Freedom Now,…
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The Pioneering Film Theory of Béla Balázs
The Hungarian poet Béla Balázs (1884–1949), born Herbert Bauer to a German Jewish family in Szeged, is best remembered for his libretto to Béla Bartók’s opera Bluebeard’s Castle and the scenario for Bartók’s ballet The Wooden Prince. Yet he was also a pioneering film theorist, as a compelling new publication from Berghahn Books, “Béla Balázs:…
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How Yves Klein Was Inspired by Moshe Dayan
A compelling new exhibit of the French artist Yves Klein at Washington, D. C.’s Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, which opened May 20 and runs until September 12, is a good occasion for reevaluating this artist’s unexpected link to the Israeli military leader Moshe Dayan. Despite claims on many websites, Klein was not himself Jewish,…
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Beth Grossman: The Woman With the Golden Rule
Jewish women artists are not, thank goodness, an apologetic breed. But that does not mean that they are all aggressive didacts. Beth Grossman’s latest small show, “All the Rest is Commentary,” is a firm but gentle reminder of what’s most important in life: taking it’s name from Rabbi Hillel’s legendary dictum “Love thy neighbor as…
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Marijuana Kingpin Lived With His Orthodox Parents
Looks like we’ve got true-life sequel material for “Holy Rollers,” the just-released film in which a young Orthodox Jew gets lured into drug running. Bail was denied Thursday for Jonathan Braun, the 27-year-old Staten Island boychik accused of smuggling more than 100,000 kilos of marijuana from Canada into the U.S. — all while living with…
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Jews Share Genetic Roots
A new genetic study, the largest of its kind, has found a genetic link between seven distinct groups of Jews, confirming a communal origin in the Middle East. The study, which was led by Harry Ostrer, a geneticist at New York University School of Medicine, and published yesterday in The American Journal of Human Genetics,…
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