Lawyers for two Baltimore Jewish brothers accused of beating a black teenager requested that the trial be moved out of the city because of perceived similarities between the case and the death of Trayvon Martin.
Josef Avesar is a soft-spoken lawyer with a wife and four children, but for the past six years he has spent most of his time and a considerable amount of his own money on an all-consuming project: to establish an Israeli-Palestinian Confederation (IPC) and break the interminable impasse between the two groups. Unlike another dreamer, Theodor Herzl, the father of modern Zionism who in 1897 foresaw, amid widespread derision, that in 50 years there would be a Jewish state, Avesar is more circumspect in his predictions. In 2006, speaking before a UCLA audience, Avesar asserted that his vision had a 5 percent chance of becoming reality in his lifetime, but he was more optimistic in a recent interview.
Founded in 1997, the Justice Ball has grown into one of the nation\’s most successful nonprofit fundraisers/parties targeting young professionals, Jews and non-Jews alike. Over the past nine years, more than 16,000 attorneys, financiers and others have attended the soirees, and scores of them have gone on to become Bet Tzedek contributors and volunteers.
Born into a strongly Democratic family but later a founder of the Republican Jewish Coalition, Berman, at 51, is a man of strong physique and opinions.\n\n\”I am fed up with intermarriage and with rabbis who reach out to gay and intermarried couples,\” he said during an interview in his spacious Sunset Boulevard office.
Despite winning a $5,900 grant in December 2001 from the Susan G. Komen Foundation to present the program free to 2,000 students, Hadassah\’s Long Beach-Orange County chapter has, so far, found few takers.
Since 1996, Jewish groups and their lawyers have gone to the mat with the likes of the Germans, the Swiss and the French, extracting $9 billion in restitution for the evil wrought in Europe by Nazi forces and their collaborators.
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