Leaving Gaza also made sense morally, said Daniel Sokatch, executive director of the Progressive Jewish Alliance.
\”For Israel to remain a democratic and Jewish state, it cannot occupy and control millions of Palestinians indefinitely,\” he said.
When I joined The Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles in late 2002 after 3 1/2 tumultuous years at the Los Angeles Times, I expected to stay at the paper a maximum of six months. My plan was to use The Journal as a safe haven while I hunted for a prestige magazine gig. But a funny thing happened on my way out the door. I fell in love with The Jewish Journal and nearly everything about it, including the myriad opinionated readers who never hesitate to let me know when they think I\’ve blown it.
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.
The South Central Farmers group and supporters have emphatically denied engaging in anti-Jewish posturing, noting that many in their ranks are Jewish, including rabbis. They accuse Horowitz of playing the anti-Semitism card to divert criticism from him and to splinter an alliance of Westside Jews, environmentalists and South L.A. farmers that coalesced around saving the farm.
\”He\’s the James Brown of the Jewish community, the hardest-working man in L.A. Jewry,\” Los Angeles City Councilman Jack Weiss said. \”I see him everywhere.\”
Although in some ways, Fishel is everywhere but nowhere. A bearded, slender man with a direct gaze, the shy Fishel seems to prefer keeping his own counsel. He sometimes materializes at events in his well-tailored suits and then slips away after talking to but a handful of folks.
\”John has given real leadership to the issue of Ethiopian Jewry,\” said Barry Shrage, president of the Combined Jewish Philanthropies of Greater Boston, who earlier this year went to Ethiopia with Fishel and 100 American Jewish federation members. \”He\’s always been the first one to speak up and stir the conscience of the federation movement.\”
Critics say that starting in the mid-1990s, the JCRC slowly began losing its voice and shirked a core mission: to be as visible and forthrightly active as possible.
The local Jewish community, unlike those in other cities, neither supported most existing centers nor clamored for the types of state-of-the-art facilities that have proven so successful elsewhere, he added.
A new exhibit at the Zimmer Children\’s Museum shows that when sliced, diced and deconstructed by artists and humanitarians, timepieces can edify, entertain and even inveigh against social injustice.
More news and opinions than at a Shabbat dinner, right in your inbox.