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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Robot Seder: How Is This Night Different?
For those of you expecting guests, it’s not too late to link this video to your Seder evite so they know how to behave. Hat tip, Gordon’s mom.
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Chocolate Matzo, Making Liberation Bearable One Slice at a Time
Unlike the ancient Israelites we have 11 months every year to get ready for our annual Passover “liberation.” Perhaps Jewish neurosis is overcompensation for that lateness and underpreparation of food in our defining national (religious?) event. To commemorate the Exodus we eat matzo which, Leah Koenig has pointed out, is more than just a symbol…
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Bullock’s Torment: Husband’s Alleged Mistress in Nazi Photo Shoot
Michelle “Bombshell” McGee, the stripper and tattoo model who allegedly carried on an affair with Sandra Bullock’s biker husband, Jesse James, posed for a photo shoot about a year ago in which she sported a bikini, Nazi cap and swastika armband while licking a dagger. The celebrity news Web site TMZ, which originally obtained the…
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Music and Philosophy at a Private Concert Hosted by George Soros
Philosophy is what matters most to George Soros, I learned the other day after an elegant party at Soros’s duplex Manhattan apartment (I was invited by a mutual friend) celebrating the latest recording of Bartók by Angela & Jennifer Chun, a Korean-born sister team of violinists. I shared a cab on the way home with…
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Palin’s Apocalypse Hastened by Jewish Settlements
The Discovery channel is poised to scoop up a reality series starring Sarah Palin at home in Alaska, to be based on the 1970 fundamentalist text “The Late, Great Planet Earth,” which foretells the end of time. (Before the world ends, Palin will reportedly receive $1 million per episode.) More horrifying than the prospect of…
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A Serious Party With the Coen Brothers
On March 22, I went to a “Serious Night” party at B’nai Emet synagogue, in St. Louis Park, MN where the bar mitzvah scenes as well as some others in the Coen brothers film “A Serious Man” were filmed. One of the audience members recounted his query to one of the Coen brothers asking why…
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Books Chabon and Alter: Is it Esprit d’escalier or Trepverter?
Robert Alter discussed “tough Jews” with Michael Chabon on March 18 as part of the Berkeley Seminars in Modern Jewish Culture Lecture, but there seemed to be a gap in the Jewishness. Alter, the Berkeley professor and great critic of Jewish writing, interviewed the Pulitzer Prize-winning Chabon and asked about the author’s exuberant style, the…
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AIPAC Gets Punked
It happens even to a powerful media-savvy organization. The American Israel Public Affairs Committee got punked. Reporters covering the pro-Israel lobby’s Washington policy conference and many other news outlets received an e-mail early Monday morning listed as coming from AIPAC spokesman Josh Block. The surprising news in the emailed press release, with AIPAC’s authoritative letterhead…
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Borat Gets Hitched
Sacha Baron Cohen is officially off the market. He and longtime girlfriend, Australian actress Isla Fisher, tied the knot in a traditional Jewish ceremony in Paris last week, following an eight-year courtship. “We did it — we’re married!” Fisher reportedly told friends via email, according to the Australian edition of Woman’s Day magazine. “It was…
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Books Yiddish on the Psychoanalyst’s Couch: USA vs. France
In the English-speaking world, psychoanalyzing Yiddish, and the way it is spoken, is often done with a dollop of humor, as in “Born To Kvetch: Yiddish Language and Culture in All Its Moods” by Michael Wex, appreciatively reviewed by the Forward. French Jews, on the other hand tend to approach the subject comparatively soberly, as…
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Of Women, Jews and iPads: Foxes and Hedgehogs
The iPad is a fox. In his book about Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, Sir Isaiah Berlin famously quoted a fragment of Archilochus who distinguishes between fox and hedgehog: “The fox knows many little things. The hedgehog knows one big thing.” The former (like Tolstoy) were cunning whereas the latter (Dostoevsky) were utterly effective. Both had their…
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