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I have seen the Jewish future — it’s loud, and hypnotic, and it reeks of pot.
Some of the most moving and fearless reporting out of Iran this past week has flowed from the pen of New York Times columnist Roger Cohen. Cohen was with anti-Ahmadinejad protesters as riot police chased them with electric batons and tear gas into a small hiding place.
OK, let’s tally up the historic Middle East speeches this month. First, there was President Barack Obama’s June 4 address at Cairo University, where he charted a new course for U.S. policy in the Middle East.
That’s the key phrase to remember in thinking about the attack on the U.S. Holocaust Memorial June 10 that left a security guard dead and another man wounded.
The shooter, an 88 year old white supremiscist named James W. von Brunn, entered the museum, leveled a shotgun at the two closest victims, and pulled the trigger.
Von Brunn decided to cap a long life devoted to the senseless hatred of Jews with a senseless act of violence.
This is the week to honor a Jew whose influence extends from your neighborhood council, to the field where your grapes are picked, to city halls from Los Angeles to Newark, to 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. This week, say a little Kaddish for Saul Alinsky.
I’ve had six different conversations over the past two weeks with the leaders of six different pro-Israel groups, few of whom get along particularly well and none of whom work closely together.
All great literature, and most good Disney movies, begin with a missing parent. And so “The Happy Life of Martin Manrique” begins with these words:
I love Los Angeles, but I hate the homeless problem, the school system, the traffic and, especially, Lincoln Boulevard. But after thinking about it seriously for two or three minutes, I went back to my day job.
I first heard about Dr. Izzeldin Abuelaish when everyone else did. As he was being interviewed live, in Hebrew, on Israeli television describing the conditions inside Gaza in the midst of the last war, the news came in that an Israeli tank shell had landed on his home and killed his three daughters. It happened at 3:05 p.m. on Jan. 16, 2009.
So I woke up Saturday morning to discover I was brilliant. That’s what the Los Angeles Times reported, right there on the front page of the paper, Column One, Section A.
When I finally spoke with Joseph Neustadt by phone, I told him how nice it had been to see him a few weeks ago in person.
“We’ve never met,” he said.
People who advocate on behalf of Israel are all telling me the same thing: Their job just got much, much harder. The reason can be explained in two words: Avigdor Lieberman.
Last Saturday night, I was at the Honda Center in Anaheim watching Billy Joel in concert. He was banging about the piano, singing his heart out, doing all those great songs about being young and horny and streetwise back in the old Italian neighborhood.
Up until this week, if you had asked me how I rated President Obama on a scale of 1 to 10, I’d have said I give him a 2. That’s 2, as in Bush 2.
It astounded me that this president seemed to be making the same fundamental mistake the last one made: thinking he could handle this mess without us.
Shortly after she received her Best Supporting Actress Oscar for her work in the 2007 movie, “Michael Clayton,” Tilda Swinton spoke to reporters at the Governor’s Ball.
If you really want to see tumbleweeds blow through an auditorium, ask an audience of L.A. Jews who their leader is.
On Tuesday came word that Bernard Madoff, accused of running the largest Ponzi scheme in history, would plead guilty to charges that would result in a life sentence.
The anger in a significant portion of the Los Angeles Jewish community this week is not about the economy, Hamas or Bernie Madoff — it’s about Roger Cohen.
At this time last year, Matt Accarrino was gearing up to throw the most talked-about Oscar party in town.
Whether as an individual or a group, you only get a handful of chances to stand up for something in this life. It’s easy to say or write what you believe, a lot harder to stick by it in the crunch.
Two thousand people showed up at Temple Beth Am this past Shabbat, and not just to see Shifrah Harris become a bat mitzvah.
Last week, a couple of days after President Barack Obama took the oath of office and set about trying to straighten out the country, I was in a meeting room at the elegant Brandeis House on Manhattan’s Upper East Side with a small group trying to do the same for the Jews.
The swearing in of the 44th president of the United States will be a moment freighted with enormous expectation, trepidation, relief and significance.
Hollywood and the movies still cling to the image of the Jew-as-victim, while in the world beyond Blu-ray the reality is much more ... complicated.
I deeply believe Israel has the right, the obligation,to stop Hamas from its capricious acts of terror.
If you scroll through the list of Madoff's philanthropic victims, you'll find plenty of evidence that even Jews who have shed every vestige of their ancient practice short of circumcision still resonate to the prophetic call to heal the wider world.
I wish Jews believed in hell, because then I could take comfort that Bernard Madoff will go there.
"It's all just one big lie."
With those words Bernard Madoff confessed to senior executives of Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities that the $17 billion hedge fund he founded was nothing more than a Ponzi scheme. Madoff is at the center of "the largest investor swindle ever blamed on a single individual."
The news that broke today on the front pages of the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal reverberated in Jewish communities across the world. "A lot of Jewish charities had investments with him," one prominent investor told The Jewish Journal. "So did a lot of Jews."
UPDATE: Among the victims was the Jewish Community Foundation of Los Angeles.
The image of oil sheiks lighting campfires to keep warm beside their indoor ski slopes comforted me for only an instant. The truth is, their pain and our pain are interconnected, as it is with the fate of those striking Chicago factory workers, the college grads unable to find decent jobs and, of course, our own Jewish community.
Whether in Thailand or San Francisco, when I wanted a place to spend a holiday, to pray on Shabbat or just to connect, there was always one of those perennially cheerful Chabad rabbis, a motley collection of tossed-about Jews and some schnapps. And I was home.
There are good things we can only achieve together -- if we can first come together. It's not clear how we do this when 10 friends, some cash and a Web site are enough to create a Jewish world unto themselves.
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