After months of anticipation over whether the University of California’s Board of Regents would adopt a definition of anti-Semitism in the wake of several anti-Israel and anti-Jewish incidents across its campuses, the UC’s governing arm rejected a “Statement of Principles Against Intolerance” drafted by the office of UC President Janet Napolitano at its Sept. 17 meeting in Irvine.
Last February, I joined a club. It wasn’t my choice. It’s one of the worst clubs around, and if you’re not already in it, I hope you don’t become a member.
As we sit in synagogue or at home on Yom Kippur afternoon, trying — but often failing — not to look at the clock every five minutes, our stomachs grumbling, our mouths parched, our heads hurting, what may be most painful is that many of us don’t know why we’re “afflicting” ourselves, as the Torah commands.
When he was working at Los Angeles County + USC Medical Center as a resident in orthopedic surgery, Dr. Eli Ziv, now a 42-year-old hand specialist, didn’t see many — or any — injuries caused by rocket-propelled grenades.
For most of his life, Matthew Michel has walked through the doors of a synagogue on only two occasions every year — the two weightiest holidays in the Jewish calendar and the two that involve the most self-reflection and introspection: Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur.
Rabbi Avi Weiss, the man who coined the phrase “Open Orthodoxy” — referring to a more inclusive and liberal version of Orthodox Judaism — is no stranger to controversy.
When journalist Jon Birger worked in the newsrooms at Fortune and Money, he noticed that most of the guys either had wives or long-term girlfriends, whereas most of the women were single and “had dating histories that made so little sense to me,” as he put it in a recent interview in Los Angeles.
Just as Charedi Jews in the United States are likely to enroll their kids in a yeshiva, attend synagogue every week and vote Republican, so too are Modern Orthodox Jews.
When jazz saxophonist Dave Koz’s “dream” car was stolen in 1997 after he stopped for five minutes to pick up a sandwich at a restaurant in the San Fernando Valley, it was perhaps the lowest point of his life.
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