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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Kashrut 911
SOS. Kashrut emergency. You’ve got a dozen people waiting for dinner, you have just used a milky spoon in a pot of chicken soup, and you want to know if the soup is still kosher. Oh, and you’re Haredi, so you can’t draw on the expertise of Rabbi Google (Haredi leaders have banned the Web)….
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Boxing Returns to Yankee Stadium
It’s not quite 40 years in the desert, but after a three decade hiatus boxing will return to Yankee Stadium this June. Brooklyn-based Israeli boxer Yuri Foreman, the reigning super welterweight champion, will take on three-time champion Miguel Cotto in what’s being billed as “Stadium Slugfest.” The fighters will weigh in tomorrow morning at Yankee…
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Véra Belmont: A Jewish Piaf Who Grew Up to be a Filmmaker
On April 27, at New York’s French Institute/Alliance Française, the noted French Jewish film director and producer Véra Belmont will introduce one of her films as the culmination of a three-week festival in her honor, running from April 6 to 27. At 77, Belmont has just published with Les Éditions Stock in Paris a touching…
The Latest
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Tweeting Anne Frank
‘Tis the season to tweet, pray and memorialize Jewish thoughts online. In the past year, we’ve seen the Western Wall get a twitter account and Auschwitz develop its own Facebook page. This past week, the Anne Frank Center USA along with the U.N. Holocaust Program launched a twitter account for Anne Frank, asking students who…
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Luise Rainer: Can an Actress’s Yellowface Be Forgiven?
At the Turner Classic Movies Classic Film Festival in Hollywood, which runs from April 22 to 25, the German Jewish actress Luise Rainer will embody a still-controversial paradox. Rainer, who turned 100 in January, will introduce a screening of one of her two Oscar-winning roles, as a tragic Chinese farmer’s wife in 1937’s “The Good…
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Bringing Back Yiddish…One Email at a Time
Last summer brother and sister Yiddish enthusiasts Shaul and Shulie Seidler- Feller decided they wanted to spread their love of the mameloshn, so they started the Yiddish Word-of-the-Week project. Mainly a listserv, but also a Web site in development, the project includes weekly mailings that feature a word of the week with an English translation,…
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A Jew Among Circumcision Protestors, Capitol Hill Edition
On Capitol Hill recently, amid preposterously high kites and blooming cherry blossoms, a peaceful anti-circumcision protest took place. It was small. The protest that is. Men wore sandwich boards and a mother-daughter team jiggered signs that read: “Circumcision Is Torture” and “Circumcision Decreases Sensitivity.” Pony-tailed joggers posed for a photo with their thumbs up in…
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How Do You Keep, and Break, Passover?
In the past few years, I’ve struggled to reconcile being a non-believer with my love of Jewish culture and traditions. So I’ve wavered back and forth on keeping Passover and fasting on Yom Kippur, the two most intrinsic rituals of self-deprivation for the sake of enlightenment on the Jewish calendar. This year, after a few…
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Hours of Catherine of Cleves: for 15th century Jews, First the Good News…
A few weeks ago, at an absorbing lecture offered as part of the Morgan Library’s “Demons and Devotion: The Hours of Catherine of Cleves” exhibit which opened January 22 and runs through May 2, the art historian James Marrow explained the exquisite imagery found in the 15th-century Dutch illuminated manuscript on view. Included are such…
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Hating on Glenn Beck, in Meter
Really don’t like Glenn Beck? Write a poem about it. Such is the conceit of Haik U Glenn Beck, a crowd-sourced collection of hundreds of haikus dedicated to the conspiracy-minded Fox News host. Ticked off by a recent exhortation by Beck to listeners of his syndicated radio show to “run” from churches that employ the…
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Have you Jew-Googled Today?
Who’s Jewish? According to Google (and Gawker ) nearly everyone in Hollywood, from Meryl Streep to Morgan Freeman, and even Mel Gibson. Well, sort of. A post late Tuesday on media news and gossip Web site Gawker revealed that the top search suggestions on Google for various celebrity names (when preceded by the word is)…
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