Film
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The Schmooze The SoCalled Movie at SXSW
It’s hard to articulate what makes Canadian artist SoCalled special. To say, as I did in a recent article, that he blends klezmer with hip hop, hardly does him justice. To add that he plays the accordion and performs magic tricks makes him sound like something of a sideshow. None of this conveys the way…
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The Schmooze The Cool Vehemence of Daniel Emilfork
Even in France, where screen performers like Fernandel and Michel Simon exulted in their ugliness, the Jewish actor Daniel Emilfork (born Daniel Emilfork Berenstein in Chile; 1924-2006) remains unique. Emilfork’s startlingly bizarre appearance is best known to American film-goers from 1995’s “The City of Lost Children.” In that dystopian fantasy film, Emilfork gave an uncharacteristically…
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The Schmooze Eli Wallach: Great Jewish Actor, Now and Forever
On February 22, this year’s annual benefit for Theater For The New City’s Emerging Playwrights Program at the National Arts Club honors acting couple Eli Wallach and Anne Jackson, which seems only natural. In 2005, Wallach released his delightful autobiography “The Good, the Bad and Me: In My Anecdotage,” but at 94, Brooklyn-born Wallach is…
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Culture In a Closet With No Light
Homosexuality is one of the most profound and least tractable problems confronting Orthodox Judaism today. The party line — that attraction to members of one’s own sex is simply another illicit desire that must be overcome — is not a sufficient response to the painful experiences of gay and lesbian Orthodox Jews. “Eyes Wide Open,”…
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The Schmooze Animating Brodsky In a Room and a Half of His Own
When the Russian-born American poet Joseph Brodsky won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1987, he was asked whether he thought of himself as an American or a Russian writer. “I am Jewish — a Russian poet and an English essayist,” he replied. Born into a Jewish family in Leningrad in 1940, he was exiled…
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The Schmooze Koch vs. Cohen
Septuagenarian singer-songwriter Leonard Cohen recently wrapped up a triumphant world tour (though he’ll be back on the road in March,) including a much-praised show in Tel Aviv in September. But apparently not everyone is a fan. In a recent review of “Leonard Cohen: Live at the Isle of Wight” for The Atlantic, former New York…
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Books Too Gross for the 21st Century? Jewish American Cartoonist Milt Gross
On February 7, at New York’s Museum of Jewish Heritage, a new publication from New York University Press, “Is Diss A System? A Milt Gross Comic Reader” edited by Ari Y. Kelman, will be presented. Gross (born in 1895) of Russian Jewish ancestry, drew comic strips of wild slapstick energy, following in the violence-for-laughs tradition…
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The Schmooze Fred Melamed, The Most Serious Man of All
Larry Gopnik, the main character in the Coen brothers most recent and most Jewish film, “A Serious Man,” has been widely understood as Job-like figure. But what would Job be without Satan to test him? (Besides having more children and fewer boils, that is.) Enter Sy Ableman, Larry’s beardy nemesis, whose role as self-righteous cuckolder…
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