By Marty Kaplan
Entertainment executives are fond of saying that no matter what happens with technology, what will always matter most is good storytelling. What they don’t say — but what they’ve begun to wonder — is whether those stories may be on the way to becoming loss leaders and if the content business is quietly being transformed into the data mining business.
Opinion: Elizabeth Taylor was my aunt
It’s true. Really. The Elizabeth Taylor. She of the many husbands and the showpiece jewels, the on-screen splendor and off-screen grit was, indeed, related to me by marriage. This isn’t a recent discovery; I’m not like my mother, who tends to unearth a long-lost or previously unknown cousin every time she steps out of the house. I’ve known about my relationship to Elizabeth Taylor since I was a young child in Iran, and I was reminded of it again recently during a book launch at USC.
by Rabbi Dan Moskovitz
Much has already been written about the horrifying scenes of violence, extremism and chilul Hashem (desecration of God’s name) taking place in Israel these past weeks — indeed these past years; but something more needs to be said.
by Erin Brown
“For not as a human sees [does the Lord see]; humans see only what is visible, but the Lord sees into the heart.” — I Samuel 16:7
Reading Jonah Lowenfeld’s “Can We Afford Kosher Lettuce?” (Jan. 27) was a déjà vu moment for my wife and me. We, too, bought the special worry-free, super-kosher romaine lettuce with the rabbinical seal of approval for our Pesach seder — and immediately came face to face with an enormous slug.
By Steve Greenberg
Editorial Cartoon
by Ken Mandel / JointMedia News Service
With less than a minute to play in the biggest football game of his life, Jewish punter Josh Miller wanted a ham sandwich.
by Jonathan Maseng
Rabbi Jonathan Kupetz and his wife, Karen, are stumped. They’re trying to explain just how many varieties of lettuce they’ve been able to grow since an urban farming company called Farmscape installed an organic garden in their yard last year. It’s a Wednesday, and rather than roving the aisles at Ralphs or Trader Joe’s, they’re standing in their driveway, pulling a veritable cornucopia of vegetables from a narrow strip of land that once was grass.
By Ryan Torok
Over Presidents Day weekend last year, nearly 500 Jews of all affiliations holed up at the Hilton hotel in Costa Mesa to attend virtually round-the-clock lectures, workshops, musical performances and more. Volunteers serving as speakers covered the growth of European Jewry, alternative Jewish travel in the West Bank and whether morality can be achieved without God, among other topics. They were all participants of LimmudLA, the annual Jewish conference for study and community.
By Ryan E. Smith
Jews and people with autism have a lot in common, if you ask Ezra Fields-Meyer. As an autistic young man, he knows he has a good memory and likes to repeat things. As a Jew, he’s noticed similar qualities, which he pointed out during his bar mitzvah speech a few years ago.
By Julie Gruenbaum Fax
Jay Sanderson visited Vista Del Mar’s Ness Gadol Shabbat services last week, and it was a personal as well as communal inspiration for him to see kids and young adults with autism and other disabilities lead prayers for the wider community.
By Susan Freudenheim
“I learned a lot from WikiLeaks,” David Remnick, editor of the New Yorker magazine, told a full auditorium at UCLA’s Anderson School of Management when he spoke on Jan. 30 at the 10th annual Daniel Pearl Memorial Lecture, sponsored by the Pearl Foundation, in partnership with Hillel at UCLA and UCLA Burkle Center for International Relations. “One thing I learned,” he said, “is that our diplomats are not bad.”
by Seth Menachem
Candace was raised in the Valley, a typical middle-class Jewish upbringing, where her family raised her with the hope that she’d do better financially than their generation. But she was never typical.
By Tom Teicholz
Cubes of color intersected by bands, which the viewer can manipulate into arrangements within a grid framing the work; watercolors of narrow striations, punctuated by colors and shapes, transform abstraction from cool cerebral to emotional landscapes. Clothing made in Los Angeles but destined for the world, an ongoing narrative about fabric and color draped over the human form.
by Sam Blum
David Filmore is a mild-mannered filmmaker. A Shabbat-observant Jew from Australia who moved to West Hollywood 10 years ago, he spends his days focused on his production company, Plutonian Films.
by Iris Mann
What defines “Jewish” theater? David Chack, a playwright and president of the Association for Jewish Theatre, promises that question will be among the subjects examined at the association’s upcoming conference, Feb. 5-8 at the Dortort Center for Creativity in the Arts at Hillel at UCLA.
By Jonathan Kirsch
No matter how much is written about Nazi Germany, there is always some new horror to behold and some new paradox to ponder. That’s how I felt when I opened a remarkable and wholly fascinating new book by Peter Longerich, a German historian who is among the world’s leading scholars of the Holocaust and the Third Reich.
by Jessica Pauline Ogilvie
Martine Ehrenclou, 51, first noticed her lower abdomen pain in January 2010. She experienced severe discomfort if she sat at her desk for even 15 minutes, when she drove her car or any time that she pitched forward. Ehrenclou, who lives in Brentwood, describes the pain as “brutal.”
By Jane Ulman
Ernest Braunstein was walking back to his barracks at the Bor labor camp, in Yugoslavia, when he spotted a man suspended from a post by his wrists, which had been tied tightly behind the man’s back. He had passed out, and Ernest brought him water. A guard, witnessing the interaction, gave Ernest the same punishment. When Ernest blacked out from the pain, the guard lowered him, revived him and hung him again, repeatedly. After three hours, Ernest estimates, he was sent back to his barracks, where his friends surreptitiously fed him until he recovered. To this day, he can lift his right arm only to his shoulder.
by Rabbi Scott Perlo
Parashat Beshallah is a symphony beautifully played, until the orchestra flubs the finale. It is a prima donna nailing the high note of the aria, just to blow out her voice three bars before the close.
The 85-year-old comedy icon signs DVD copies of “The Jazz Singer,” the 1959 television remake that features Lewis as Joey Rabinowitz, a nightclub singer torn between show business and his faith. Wristbands will be distributed at 9 a.m., and Lewis will only sign copies of “The Jazz Singer.”
By Tom Tugend
Hershel Walfish, a leading Orthodox cantor and survivor of several Nazi concentration camps, died Jan. 24 at 89, following a lengthy illness.
A story of bugs, business and kosher salad
