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Rob Eshman

What’s the Status of Jerusalem Under International Law?

One Man’s Passover

In our house, a man’s place is in the kitchen. That’s the way it’s been for all 18 years of our marriage. I do the cooking, not because I have to, but because I like to. I actually worked as a chef and caterer for years before we met. My wife picks up the domestic slack doing those household chores I don’t enjoy, like everything else. This is an arrangement that has worked out well from the start of our marriage.

American Jewry behaving like teenagers

First, let’s establish that what Israel did by announcing the construction of 1,600 new housing units in East Jerusalem during the visit of Vice President Joseph Biden was dumb. Dumb, dumb, dumb. It was dumb because it shifted the focus of the United States and Israel from the most immediate existential threat Israel and the entire Middle East face — Iran — to one of lesser importance, the settlements.

Howard Zinn: Israel was a “Mistake.”

The Seismic Jew

The last time I saw Christopher Hitchens speak publicly in Los Angeles, he argued against God and religion. This time, delivering the eighth annual Daniel
Pearl Memorial Lecture at UCLA on March 3, he sounded a warning against a resurgence of anti-Semitism.

Harman Declines Jewish Journal Debate Invite

Houses of Mourning

In one month, four young lives are gone, each one of them taken in an automobile accident. One after another — it feels less like a coincidence than an attack. For
such loss, grief goes beyond words. You can’t write about it, you can’t not write about it.

Tragedies

The year started tragically. When the 7.0-magnitude earthquake hit Haiti on Jan. 12, it looked as if fate finally had humanity on the ropes. The scale of devastation scoured our hearts. Children crushed by their own classrooms, bodies heaped onto the backs of trucks and ferried out to mass graves. When the president of Haiti said it would take three years just to clear the debris, I wondered how, in an age when attention is measured in nano-spans, the people of Haiti would ever get the help they need.

Love Train [SLIDESHOW]

I first met Ed and Bernie Massey 12 years ago when they organized a citywide art project to paint the oil derrick towers at Beverly Hills High School. The brothers, who got hundreds of children in schools and hospitals around Los Angeles to paint brightly colored panels of flowers, then affixed them to the drab green towers. I hadn’t seen the Masseys since, but I thought of them every time I drove down Olympic.

Peer-less

The Tabouli Lesson [RECIPE]

They say we are all children of the same God, but it’s clear we don’t act like it. For centuries we’ve slaughtered one another in the name of God. We’ve enslaved, oppressed, reviled and ridiculed our fellow men and women because their god just looked at us funny. I belong to a people who, because we chose not to believe in somebody else’s idea of God, suffered 2,000 years of mayhem at the hands of true believers. I’m over it — sort of — but a quick glance in any history book makes me wary of those who say the path of human unity is through the Divine.

Michael Oren

This week, Michael Oren kept up a very busy schedule in Los Angeles.

Mayor Jan?

Goldstone Versus Haiti

If you eat Jewish food you’re likely to get heart disease. If you read Jewish news you’re likely to get whiplash.

The big tent

In the early 1990s, when I started work as a Jewish journalist, there was a great fear in the land. Its name was intermarriage.
The 1990 National Jewish Population Survey had just been released, and its central finding — that 52 percent of U.S. Jews who had married in the previous five years had married non-Jews — greatly upset American Jewish leaders.

Clinton: I don’t know what we’d have done without Israel in Haiti

Hollywood Zion

In Philadelphia over winter vacation, I popped over to see the Philadelphia Museum of Art, one of the nation’s best. I got to stand alone before Picassos and Van Goghs. In fact, the only place I had to wait in a line of jostling, snap-happy tourists was to see — Rocky.

Disaster

Disasters teach us more about religion than religion teaches us about disasters.

Gribenes: The Joy of Skin [VIDEO]

Whatever happened to gribenes?

I still make them every time I roast a chicken or make chicken soup; couldn’t be more simple.

Israel in Haiti

Helping Haiti

Harman v. Winograd

One Shabbat morning several years ago, Dan Shevitz, one of my two favorite Venice rabbis, was walking down Abbot Kinney Boulevard toward his synagogue, Mishkon Tephilo. He came to a narrow stretch of sidewalk in front of Abbot’s Habit, and stopped, not wanting to walk over a large dog standing guard beside its owner.

David Brooks: Israel’s “Astonishing Success”

Greeks Condemn Crete Synagogue Arson Attack

Too Many Jewish Organizations?

LAX TLV

The year almost ended with a bang. If not for some brave, smart passengers on that Detroit-bound flight from Amsterdam, a Muslim underwear bomber would have succeeded in blowing a hole through 2010.

New Year in Natanz

2010 could be the year Iran gets the bomb.

What’s Happening

Last week, I met a guy named John who moved out to Los Angeles many years ago, dreaming of Hollywood.

Bad Behavior

Elliott Broidy seems like a nice guy. I know he’s a charitable one: As I travel through Jewish L.A., I see his name on synagogue and museum plaques. The last time I saw him was last summer, when we exchanged “Shabbat Shaloms” in a sushi line at a bat mitzvah. Like I said, seems like a nice guy.

Why TRIBE?

Why would anyone launch a new publication at a time when every indication is that print is dead and the economy is on life support?

Wind-Down Nation?

Ask my wife — every week I come up with one sure-fire, world-changing, patent-worthy invention. My latest is an iPhone app that will tell me a person’s name when I hold the phone up to his or her face. Of course none of these inventions make it past the I-tell-her-and-she-rolls-her-eyes stage. The difference between me, a wannabe inventor, and a real high-tech entrepreneur is I don’t know the first thing about technology. The difference, in a word, is education.

The Prophet

Last Friday evening, I arrived early for a Shabbat event at American Jewish University, where I was supposed to interview Israeli writer Amos Oz in front of some 300 guests.

Bibi Then and Now

If you heard Benjamin Netanyahu speak at the General Assembly in Los Angeles three years ago, you would have thought, except for the perfect diction, it was a different man.

The Goldstone Follies: Live debate with Judge Goldstone

Last year, the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem released a video showing an Israeli soldier shooting a rubber bullet into the left foot of a bound and blindfolded.
Palestinian demonstrator at close range while a lieutenant colonel and other soldiers watched. After an army investigation of the incident, a military court charged the battalion commander with conduct unbecoming an officer.

Tough Guys

I arrived in Israel in 1984. I didn’t speak or understand Hebrew, didn’t have a job and didn’t have a friend. In my pocket I had the name of the one person I knew in the entire country: a middle-aged Israeli American woman I had heard lecture on contemporary Hebrew literature at an Orthodox synagogue in Berkeley. After her talk, I mentioned to her that I would soon be moving to Jerusalem. She scribbled down her address and told me to come by for Shabbat.

Claude Levi-Strauss,  Raw, Cooked, Kosher, Treyf

The Wall Project: Good Cause, Bad Comparison

Chillax

Every day, more like every hour of every day, I get e-mails, letters and phone calls crying out that Israel faces dire threat, if not certain doom.

Col. Richard Kemp Testified at U.N. on Gaza [VIDEO]

LA Unity Mission

Mel Levine: Obama “Well Understands”

Obama’s Big Jewish Speech

Neda Square

Everybody with a cause, everybody angry at a country eventually ends up in front of the Federal Building on Wilshire Boulevard at Veteran Avenue, waving a poster at passing cars, hoping for a honk. It may not be the most effective form of activism, but at least it tries to reach Angelenos where we live: in our cars.

The Heretic: Q & A With David Sax

Rob Eshman interviews David Sax, author of the book, "Save the Deli."

Top Jewish Non Profit

Thanks, Chief

The way I see it, after a sheriff rides into town, cleans the place up, then rides off into the sunset — those townspeople better be out in the center of Main Street, waving goodbye and choking back tears.

Was Christopher Columbus a Jew?

Higher Learning

My friend Norma came up to me at the celebration following my daughter’s bat mitzvah and said, “Do you know how special this is?”

Who Killed the Biodiesel Car? [VIDEO]

This past summer, the last two Westside gas stations offering 99 percent pure biodiesel closed down their pumps. You can still buy regular gasoline at those stations, but the Great Green Hope of the Millenium, a powerful fuel made from sustainable organic matter, is nowhere to be found. Well, not quite.

Windmueller’s Wise Take

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New Housing Units

Film
Politics Elbows Its Way Into Film’s Oscar Party

At the official Oscar party March 7 for the Israeli foreign film nominee “Ajami,” the tension between art and politics threatened to overwhelm the night. And rather than celebrate a win for the third consecutive Israeli film to be nominated for an Oscar, private sighs of

Calendar
Picks and Clicks: March 20-26

SAT | MARCH 20

(MUSIC)

Erwin Schulhoff and Kurt Weill had their careers silenced under the Nazis. Tonight, art rises above injustice as violinist Daniel Hope and pianist Jeffrey Kahane perform select pieces by the composers in a Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra concert. Sat. 8

50 Plus
New Old Friends

I've recently become close with Abe and Frank, two older guys in my neighborhood. At 90 and 88 respectively, they’re not the typical age of my other friends. At first I wasn’t sure if it was friendship. Maybe they were just humoring me or passing the time. Why would old people want to be friends with me, a 35-year-old?