Featured Stories
By Ryan Torok
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 p.m. $18-$100. Alex Theatre, 216 N. Brand Blvd., Glendale. (818) 243-2539. laco.org.
Seth Farber
Only in Israel. On the day that the U.S. vice president arrived in Israel, reportedly to thwart Israel’s bombing of Iran, and following two days of intensive talks
between Israel’s prime minister and President Obama’s special envoy to the Middle East, the Israeli government almost fell ... because of a proposed bill about conversion to Judaism.
By Steve Greenberg
New Housing Units
Heritage Listings Necessary
Avi Davis is correct to argue that Israel’s heritage listing of the Tomb of the Patriarchs in Hebron and Rachel’s Tomb near Bethlehem is rendered necessary by continuous Palestinian violation of Jewish sacred sites and denial and negation of any Jewish right or even connection to them (“The Palestinian Graveyard Spin,” jewishjournal.com, Mar. 2).
By Jeff Smith
A friend came over to dinner the other night with a bottle of wine that he described as “interesting.”
“Interesting” is one of those loaded words that can mean different things depending on the context. It can be an affirmation that someone is on the right track, as in, “He’s doing interesting things with pinot noir up in Sonoma.” Or “interesting” can mean the equivalent of a movie that you don’t really understand. On this night, the wine was a white from Italy, made by nuns in the Montefalco region, an area known for its idiosyncratic indigenous grapes. After swirling, sniffing and slurping this “interesting” little wine, I told my friend that, while I appreciated what Our Ladies of the Vineyard had concocted, I’ve recently come to appreciate a different kind of wine.
Obituaries March 19-25
Tori Avey
Kosher food is wrongly stigmatized as being boring and bland because of the limitations the laws of kashrut impose on chefs. The prohibitions against eating certain animals and mixing milk and meat mean no cream sauce or butter for the meat dishes, no shellfish and — horror of horrors — no bacon. It all seems like a monumental challenge, kind of like
“Project Runway” for food, only instead of making a couture dress out of a flour sack, cooks have to create an interesting, appetizing meat menu without butter or cream. Julia Child would be horrified.
By Julie Gruenbaum Fax
It’s been about a decade since quinoa first broke into the Passover market, and while the Andean nongrain grain still meets with some culinary and rabbinic skepticism, it is making inroads on both fronts, securing its spot both at the Passover table and in fine restaurants.
By Ryan Torok
Three events last week celebrated the inauguration of John Pérez as the California Assembly’s new speaker while also emphasizing his connection to Judaism. Although he is not Jewish, Pérez, the first openly LGBT person to be elected to one of the state’s most powerful leadership positions, enjoys ties to the Jewish world.
by Leonard A. Cole, JTA
The news out of Dubai has been rife with speculation about who assassinated Hamas terrorist commander Mahmoud al-Mabhouh in a local hotel. Israeli
agents and al-Mabhouh’s Palestinian rivals are high on the guess list.
By Danielle Berrin
Gloria Steinem, founder of Ms. Magazine, is a social and political activist and among the foremost leaders of the women’s rights movement in America. In town recently to honor the retirement of Rabbi Sheryl Lewart from Kehillat Israel, Steinem spoke about the feminist myth of Superwoman, why men should take on equal parenting responsibilities and why reproductive freedom should be a fundamental human right.
by Lisa Armony, Contributing Writer
Faculty at the University of California, Riverside (UCR), joined voices at UC campuses statewide in support of 11 students arrested for heckling Israeli Ambassador Michael Oren during his Feb. 8 speech at the University of California, Irvine (UCI).
by Iris Mann, Contributing Writer
Dancers simulating the behavior of horses gallop across the stage, stepping, prancing, tossing their heads as though shaking their manes. Their performance is mixed with spoken text, music and vocals in “Tov,” a dramatic dance work by choreographer-director Rosanna Gamson linking her Jewish heritage with the attempted reviving of the extinct Tarpan horses by the Germans in the 1930s. The work has its world premiere at Walt Disney Concert Hall’s REDCAT through March 27.
By Rick Schultz
If you ask 35-year-old violinist Daniel Hope about his Jewish heritage, make sure you have time. It’s a complicated question.
“On my mother’s side was an incredibly Orthodox Jewish family that goes back to the first rabbi of Potsdam,” he said during a recent late-night cell phone call while in transit to Hamburg, Germany, for a concert the next day.
By Melanie Reynard
Los Angeles residents Alexis Alagem, 25, and Jackie Winnick, 27, pulled together the support of their social networks at a private back lounge of Bar 210/Plush in Beverly Hills the night of March 12, as a fundraiser for the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee’s (JDC) relief program in Haiti.
by Jessica Pauline Ogilvie, Contributing Writer
Jeff Tohl endured testing, five months of chemotherapy and a stem cell transplant during the three years that followed his cancer diagnosis — a rare form of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. With a clean bill of health and regained strength, he thought he was out of the woods.
But when his white blood cell count dropped again in November 2009, Tohl, who was treated for mantle cell lymphoma, discovered he was part of an unlucky minority: Following a stem cell transplant, 7 percent of patients are at risk for developing leukemia. To keep the leukemia at bay, he’d need another stem cell transplant, this time from a donor. But as a Jew, he soon discovered that finding a donor would prove nearly impossible.
By Merissa Nathan Gerson
Surgery is wrong. This was what I convinced myself over a two-year stint of excessive holistic health care. Thanks to an imbalanced reliance on acupuncture, I neglected a herniated disc until it ruptured somewhere between Washington, D.C., and Salvador, Brazil. When I found out I needed surgery, I was forced to evaluate what, exactly, I saw wrong with cutting a human open and realigning her interior.
by Nancy Sokoler Steiner, Contributing Writer
In the 1940s, young Gerald Levey looked with awe at his family physician. Over the years, Dr. Samuel Rosenstein made regular house calls to Levey’s Jersey City home, including trips to sew Levey’s severed finger and set his broken nose.
“He had a presence and a sensitivity,” said Levey, who decided as a child to become a physician.
By David Suissa
I’ve never understood why the world goes absolutely bonkers when Jews try to build homes in Jewish neighborhoods of Jerusalem. Take the latest brouhaha about the announcement by Israel’s Interior Ministry that it had approved a planning stage — the fourth out of seven required — for the eventual construction of 1,600 units in the Jerusalem neighborhood of Ramat Shlomo.
By Rabbi Laura Geller
This week’s portion begins a new book of the Bible, Leviticus. It is fascinating to look at the first and last words of each of the books of the Torah:
Genesis: When God began to create the heavens and the earth ... in a coffin in Egypt.
Exodus: These are the names of the children of Israel who came to Egypt ... throughout their journeys.
Leviticus: The Lord called out to Moses ... on Mount Sinai.
Numbers: In the wilderness of Sinai ... on the Jordan opposite Jericho.
Deuteronomy: These are the words which Moses spoke ... in the sight of all Israel.
By Julie Gruenbaum Fax
By Marty Kaplan
Local TV news is the number one source of news for Americans. Seventy-eight percent of the country turns to it to find out what’s going on. The Internet may be growing as a news source, and some people still read the paper, but for most people, what’s on local TV news is pretty much what they know about where they live. If you care about the quality of democracy, you have to care about the quality of local TV news – even if you don’t watch it.
By Ron Kampeas, JTA
Last summer, when the relationship between the Obama and Netanyahu administrations was getting off to what appeared to be a rocky start, Israeli Ambassador Michael Oren was at pains -- twice -- to deny that he had been "summoned" to the State Department for a dressing down.
One such "meeting" was actually a friendly phone call, he said, and the other was a routine getting-to-know-you meeting. The distinction was key, he told journalists: When the State Department actually "summons" an envoy, "That's serious."
