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The Schmooze The Talmud of ‘Arrested Development’
Calling something “talmudic” is a bad habit among Jewish critics. It’s a way of saying that a work has complexity and Jewish relevance, but it’s not usually clear what resemblance, specifically, a given text has to the Talmud. “Arrested Development,” on the other hand — the cult sitcom that returns on Netflix May 26 after…
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News Joyce Brothers, Brought Jewish Sensibility to Suburbia Through TV, Dies at 85
The Jewish psychologist Joyce Brothers, who died May 13 of respiratory failure at age 85, was a peacemaker in the emotionally fraught field of pop media therapeutic counseling. Born in Brooklyn as Joyce Bauer to a married couple of attorneys, Brothers became a primary authority on how to live in the mid-century suburban age. Although…
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Life The Jewish Mother of Soap Operas
One of my clearest memories from childhood is peeking around the doorway from the kitchen to the den as my mother ironed and watched “Days of Our Lives.” A couple lay in bed, the woman in a negligee, the man bare-chested, a patch covering one eye. I was a little scared — what if he…
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The Schmooze Show and Tell With Marc Maron
Marc Maron is a great talker. That’s true of most comics, but Maron doesn’t even have to be funny to be good. He’s got a sharp baritone voice with just a touch of a slur, and a talk radio delivery that grabs and holds your attention. It hardly matters whether he’s describing a fight with…
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The Schmooze ‘Mad Men’ Is Best When It’s Angry
Sometimes it seems as if only Daniel Mendelsohn and the New York Review of Books can criticize AMC’s “Mad Men.” Only someone like Mendelsohn, whose work is devoted to mythic themes and to the eternal, can look past the crisp elegance of Don Draper’s pocket square and the show’s captivating visual style. Only someone like…
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Culture What ‘Girls’ Could Learn From the ‘Good Wife’s’ Wife
Two of my favorite television shows ran on Sunday nights this past winter — “The Good Wife” on CBS and “Girls” on HBO — and because I didn’t have time on Sundays, I tended to catch them on demand on Monday nights, back to back. On the surface, these shows don’t have much in common;…
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The Schmooze Matthew Weiner: ‘Mad Men’ Are Us
The Mad Men are us. That was the message “Mad Men” creator Matthew Weiner offered from the stage at a 92d Street Y talk last night, sitting in between Don Draper’s wives — January Jones who plays Betty Draper, now Betty Francis, and Jessica Paré who plays Megan Draper. Caryn James moderated a discussion and…
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The Schmooze David Goyer Talks ‘Da Vinci’s Demons’
David Goyer has become a go-to guy for the superhero set. It started with the Blade movies. He wrote all three and directed the last. Then he went on to write the story and/or screenplay for the three Christopher Nolan Batman films. And now there is his script for the upcoming “Man of Steel.” Ironically,…
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Culture He works at a Holocaust museum by day. How’d he end up in ‘Marty Supreme’?
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News The ADL’s turn away from civil rights was years in the making — Oct. 7 accelerated it
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News The Holocaust Torah that survived a Mississippi synagogue fire was brought there by the state’s only survivor
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Culture The mysterious case of Barbra Streisand and the missing half-pound of Zabar’s sturgeon
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