Michael Kaminer
By Michael Kaminer
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The Schmooze My Year of Not Shopping
All images courtesy Sarah Lazarovic Equal parts autobiography, treatise, art project, and social commentary, Sarah Lazarovic’s “A Bunch of Pretty Things I Did Not Buy” (Penguin Books) chronicles a year in which the author sublimated consumer urges by drawing things instead of purchasing them. But the book’s much more than a visual diary. Lazarovic’s elegant,…
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Food Exploring the Pickle’s Storied Past
Flickr November 14 is Aaron Copland’s birthday. It’s the day that Chicago Bears’ quarterback Sid Luckman passed for seven touchdowns to help defeat the New York Giants 56 to 7 in 1943. And it’s the day Ivan Boesky confessed to illegal market activity in 1986. But for readers of The Jew and the Carrot, November…
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Food 7 Jewish Things About Pickles
In honor of National Pickle Day, we’ve been marinating some fun facts about our favorite fermented food. Photo: Thinkstock. 1) Cucumbers are mentioned twice in the Bible (Numbers 11:5 and Isaiah 1:8) and history sets their first usage over 3,000 years ago in western Asia, Egypt and Greece. (Source: NY Food Museum) 2) Americans consume…
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The Schmooze Bernice Eisenstein Plumbs Memory in ‘Genizot’
The concept behind genizot is simple. These spaces, usually housed in synagogues, would store disused documents that contained the written name of God — and thus couldn’t be discarded. But genizot also symbolize remembering. And that’s what Canadian artist Bernice Eisenstein so brilliantly explores in “Genizot: Repositories of Memory,” her new exhibition at the Royal…
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Opinion Fear and (Jew) Loathing in Venezuela
A “Hello, Hitler” shirt for sale in Venezuela It started with the Hello, Hitler t-shirt. Just after arriving for a month in Caracas, I saw a teenage girl on the subway wearing a snug red tee whose logo warped the familiar “Hello, Kitty” character into a cute parody of… Der Fuhrer. A giant swastika dominated…
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The Schmooze Top 4 Christian Works By Jewish Composers
Everyone knows that the most popular American Christmas songs were written by Jews. But like Leonard Bernstein’s “MASS,” (see my piece on the recent Queens performance here) there’s a long tradition of Jewish musicians involved in Christian-inspired music — and even a few non-Jewish composers who’ve written for the Hebrews. Here are four of the…
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The Schmooze Bernstein’s ‘MASS’ Gets Rare Performance at Queens College
Getty Images In 1971, the first time Maurice Peress conducted Leonard Bernstein’s “MASS,” the monumental piece echoed the life and death of John F. Kennedy, the social upheaval of the 1960s, and the morass of Vietnam. Spectators today might see “MASS” in a very different light — as a tragic commentary on U.S. involvement in…
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The Schmooze 6 Jewish Crime Novels With Female Protagonists Everyone Should Read
Nora Goodman, the troubled heroine of Diane Lawson’s thriller “A Tightly Raveled Mind,” (read our interview with the author here) might call herself a disciple of Freud. But she follows a long line of Jewish women in crime fiction, from Orthodox mothers to Miami Beach beauticians to wisecracking lawyers. Here are six of our favorite…
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