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FX’s Rescue Me and Sept. 11
Tomorrow, I will get up from the longest, funniest, dirtiest, least politically correct, and most meaningful shiva of my life, when the final episode of Rescue Me airs on FX. The series, which...
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Article 98
Tomorrow, Jewish News One, the network billed as the ‘Jewish al Jazeera’—owned by European Jewish Union president, Igor Kolomoisky, and vice president, Vadim Rabinovich—will join the airwaves,...
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'Mad About You' Is Soulless Dreck
The Arbiter is a weekly column dedicated to revisiting canonical works of art, high and low alike, in an attempt to reevaluate their merit. All media are considered; none are pitied. As an homage to...
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Millionaire Matchmaker Patti Stanger, an Icon for Our Times
Patti Stanger, host of the polarizing Bravo Television reality show Millionaire Matchmaker, the woman called the “Simon Cowell of dating,” is not just a TV host. She is a post-modern version of...
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Sarah Silverman Should Get Back to Her Funny Stuff
Dear Sarah, The letter thing works for me because, for some reason, I’ve always had strange feelings toward you, feelings I don’t usually reserve for entertainers, especially ones whose career highs...
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Where Did the Figure of the Nebbish Come From?
The Tattler is a new weekly column on contemporary culture. There’s a cartoon in this week’s New Yorker. A couple—shlumpy, but clearly urban—are seated at a coffee table, reading a newspaper that,...
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Like Judaism, 'The Simpsons' Knows How to Tell Stories—'Downton Abbey' Doesn't
Last Sunday night, with a mere flick of a finger on the remote control, viewers were able to catch a glimpse of television at its highest and lowest. Up above, in the thin air of Olympus, stood the...
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Mad Men and the 1960s, when Jewish culture and pop culture meld
By the time Mad Men, Matthew Weiner’s seminal dissertation on the quiet desperation of the 1960s-era White American Male, has its Season Five premiere on Sunday night, Don Draper and his discontents...
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Adel Imam, the Egyptian Comedian Convicted of Offending Islam, Was a Beloved...
This week, an Egyptian court convicted the country’s most renowned comic actor, Adel Imam, of offending Islam. A few of his movies, they argued—including The Terrorist, in which he plays a homicidal...
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In Praise of ABC’s ‘GCB,’ a TV Series Without Any Need for Talmudic Analysis
If the media near-blackout and blank stares I receive during my frequent evangelizing on its behalf are any indication, I am the only person in America who is watching GCB, ABC’s hourlong comedy soap...
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HBO's ‘Veep’ Scores Big By Paying Religious Attention to the Little Things
You know that HBO show everyone’s talking about? The one about the young woman who is a little bit lost, struggling to land her dream job, and swatting her way through a predatory big city that is...
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Bravo’s Andy Cohen Just Might Be the Greatest Yenta in the History of TV
Television, if you think about it, is really little more than a wilderness of yentas. The meddlers, the busybodies, the gossips—they are the engines that push plots forward and keep us entertained,...
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AMC’s ‘Breaking Bad,’ a Conniving Cancer Victim, and My Lifelong Distrust of...
Since I was 12 I’ve had an unappealing, didactic distrust of people with the extreme will to live. My father’s parents were Holocaust survivors, and in grade school I received the de rigueur exposure...
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Despite Anti-Semitic Elements, Egyptian TV Series Shows Modest Evolution in...
During the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, now winding down, the Arab world’s TV networks air a slew of dramas and comedies, typically serialized in nightly episodes and culminating at the end of the...
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Are Your Favorite Christmas Specials Secretly Jewish and Gay?
Rankin and Bass: If their names aren’t familiar, their work surely is. Turn on your TV set this time of year, and you’ll see it, playing in an endless loop: Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, Frosty the...
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The Neo-Hasid Tour Guide of Hulu and Richard Linklater's Travel Series 'Up to...
Up to Speed, an original show produced by the online video service Hulu, is a series of half-hour American travelogues directed by the indie superstar Richard Linklater and featuring Timothy “Speed”...
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Why 'Downton Abbey' Elides Period-Specific British Anti-Semitism
Happy New Year! Do you watch Downton Abbey? Of course you do; you’re an English-speaking human being with access to machinery. (Ask a stupid question, you get a stupid answer, especially if you have to...
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HBO's 'Game of Thrones' Reimagined as the Seven Kingdoms of Jewish Westerows
Game of Thrones has made its triumphant return across the Narrow Sea and is back on Sunday nights on HBO for Season 3. For fans of dragons, medieval warfare, and hilariously gratuitous nudity, this is...
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The Suffering and Ascendance of Jews in AMC's 'Mad Men' Season 6
O ye of little faith. I told you.Continue reading "The Suffering and Ascendance of Jews in AMC's 'Mad Men' Season 6" at...
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'Hello Muddah, Hello Faddah' Singer Allan Sherman Gets Last Laugh in New...
Is there any lower form of comedy than song parody? Dirty limericks and knock-knock jokes may be worthless, but at least they have the decency to be brief. A parody song almost always lasts a chorus or...
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