Joy Horowitz\’s \”Parts Per Million: The Poisoning of Beverly Hills High School\” (Viking) is a dense 350-page book detailing a four-year fight between 1,000 litigants who claimed oil wells at the school caused diseases, such as cancer, and defendants — including the oil companies, the city of Beverly Hills and school officials — who said there had been no harmful effects from the (profitable) derricks.
When Ralph Salimpour was six years old in Esfahan, Iran, he had malaria — a blood disease spread by infected mosquitoes that kills millions of people in the developing world every year.
When I was 25, my Orthodox girlfriends and I discussed at what age, if we weren\’t married, we might sleep with someone. The question was deeper than its \”Sex and the City\” nature might sound (although those girls had made that decision a long time ago).
On Dec. 19, 2007, the U.S. Attorney General\’s Office filed an indictment in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California naming the Chasidic yeshiva and four other Spinka organizations, as well as eight people, in a multimillion dollar tax fraud and money-laundering ring that stretched from Brooklyn to Los Angeles to Israel and elsewhere.
It all started with powdered milk.
Last April, SOVA Community Food & Resource Program, which operates three food pantries and resource centers in Los Angeles, ran out of powdered milk, so the directors decided to solicit directly from their support network. They sent out a memo to local synagogues and schools asking for powdered milk donations.
Breathe.
Yes, take a breath.
\”One, long deliberate breath that you feel from the very beginning of it until the end of it. Try it, really. You can do it with your eyes open. You can do it while reading these instructions. Do you notice that you can feel your body, and especially your chest expanding and relaxing to accommodate the air flowing in and out, without stopping reading?\”
\”I\’m pretty much your classic disaffected Gen-X kind of gal. I have too many shoes, I work too hard, I\’m cynical, I\’m broke. So when it came time for me to immerse before my wedding, I figured I\’d bring some friends, we\’d hang out, I\’d get wet, we\’d go eat, and that would be the end of it.\”
Historically, rabbis have proclaimed that in order to study kabbalah, one has to be a learned Jewish man older than of 40. So imagine how surprised those rabbis would be today if they could peruse a modern bookstore: There are now a plethora of tomes on the subject, making kabbalah available to the layperson — male, female, Jew and non-Jew — the dummy and idiot alike (which is it better to be?).
So it should be no surprise that when the New York-based, albeit national, newspaper, The Forward, published its Forward 50 — naming its version of this year\’s most influential Jews — only six hail from Los Angeles. Does it matter where they\’re from?
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