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The Schmooze Slideshow: Remembering Jewish Life in Poland
A decade ago, American journalist and photographer Edward Serotta decided to collect the life stories and family photographs of every elderly Jew living in Central Europe that he could find. “I wanted to document a whole world,” he said. It was a world that few Jews or Europeans knew about. Jews were unaware that a…
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The Schmooze Is It Immoral To Re-Steal Previously Looted Holocaust Memorabilia?
For a Jewish visitor to Poland, is it moral to steal souvenirs that may have themselves been looted from Jewish homes during the Holocaust? Not according to yesterday’s Ethicist column in the New York Times Magazine. “Traveling in Poland, I visited antique stores offering Jewish items — menorahs, mezuzas — that seemed more than 65…
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Books Everything We Need to Know
On Monday, Ruth Franklin wrote about sharing a stage with Yann Martel. She is the author of “A Thousand Darknesses: Lies and Truth in Holocaust Fiction.” Her blog posts are being featured this week on The Arty Semite courtesy of the Jewish Book Council and My Jewish Learning’s Author Blog series. For more information on…
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The Schmooze Friday Film: Sex and Subversion in Communist Poland
In the aftermath of Israel’s victory over Egypt and Syria — key Soviet allies — in the 1967 Six Day War, the Soviet Politburo, which had already barred Jews from positions in the Communist Party, seized on the war as a way to weaken Poland’s opposition movement and purge what they labeled the Jewish “fifth…
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The Schmooze Friday Film: ‘Rafting to Bombay’
When Israeli filmmaker Erez Laufer set off for Mumbai in November of 2008, he had a comparatively simple plan: make a documentary about his father’s return to his childhood home in India, where his family found refuge after escaping from Nazi-occupied Poland. Their flight, the basis for “Rafting to Bombay,” was a remarkable story of…
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The Schmooze Bringing Cantorial Music Back to Its Birthplace
“For me, this was not about a film. This was about our using our gifts as cantors to create dialogue,” said Cantor Nathan Lam of “100 Voices: A Journey Home,” which will be shown in a one-night event in over 75 theaters nationwide on November 11. The feature-length documentary chronicles the journey in June 2009…
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The Schmooze Making Home Movies in Interwar Poland
When the anti-immigration laws of the early 1920s effectively sealed the gates of the United States to would-be immigrants, the Jews of Eastern Europe who had arrived en masse between 1880 and 1920 could no longer hope to see their loved ones join them in America. Instead, those who could afford to traveled abroad, visiting…
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Food Ghosts of Knishes Past
I’m dressing as a knish for Halloween. And it’s not just for kitsch value. Not only is the yellow foam costume perfect for variable temperatures of autumn, it’s a link to those who came before and a symbol of a culinary tradition embedded in the Day of the Dead. In the Big Apple, the knish…
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