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Robert David Jaffee

Robert David Jaffee

Dodgers hit grand slam in history of Jewish players

When the Dodgers celebrated their 50th anniversary in Los Angeles on March 29 with an exhibition game at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, it seemed almost fitting that a Jewish ballplayer, Red Sox first baseman Kevin Youkilis, would hit a pivotal home run that helped Boston win the game. During the Dodgers\’ final home game against the Chicago Cubs at the Coliseum in 1961, a young left-handed pitcher named Sandy Koufax won the ballgame for Los Angeles.

Films: Director examines healing from surgery, grief

Seated at his office in Beverly Hills, Ben Mittleman, 57, doesn\’t have a trace of gray in his sandy-brown hair. He says his mother used to kid him that he must have had a \”facelift or something,\” but despite the fact that this veteran TV actor turned director-producer looks 10 years younger than his age, he underwent heart surgery in 2001. That experience is the subject of \”Dying to Live,\” along with his response to the cancers that later took the lives of both his mother and his wife, Valerie. The film premieres Thursday, March 13, at Laemmle\’s Music Hall, where it will screen for two weeks.

The living dream

I signed up for Sar-El, an international program affiliated with the U.S.-based group, Volunteers for Israel, through which participants from all over the world travel to Israel to help out the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) for up to three weeks.

Theater: ‘The Kid from Brooklyn’ showcases Danny Kaye’s comic cavorting

\”The Kid From Brooklyn,\” a musical based on the life of Danny Kaye, now playing at the El Portal Theater in North Hollywood, takes us back to the heyday of Kaye (born David Daniel Kaminsky), a versatile performer whose tongue-twisting verbal artistry and physical high jinks have influenced such modern-day performers as Robin Williams and Jim Carrey.

A ‘Victory Garden’ grows (in Brooklyn) from writer’s fertile mind

In the living room of novelist Merrill Joan Gerber\’s home in Sierra Madre is a harpsichord that is most often played by her husband, a retired Pasadena City College history professor. The presence of this musical instrument is fitting, because music plays a major role in Gerber\’s latest book, \”The Victory Gardens of Brooklyn.\” At one point in \”Victory Gardens,\” Gerber\’s 27th book, the central character, Musetta, a pianist and stand-in for Gerber\’s own mother, ponders the magic of music. It \”made her feel she was flying outside over the treetops, over the river, away past Brooklyn, past the cemeteries and the houses and the endless stores of dead chickens and glassy-eyed fish.\”

Six activists illuminate ‘Darfur Now’ documentary

While the Darfur crisis enters its fifth year, the American Jewish Committee and Warner Independent Pictures have taken a lead in raising awareness of and combating the genocide in the Western Sudan region, where an estimated 200,000 people have been killed and 2.5 million displaced. For some time now, the AJC has had a national task force dedicated to Darfur, but in the past year and a half, members of the AJC\’s Los Angeles branch developed a film proposal that ultimately led to \”Darfur Now,\” a documentary from Warner Independent that follows the efforts of six people to resolve the humanitarian disaster. The film will be released in theaters on Nov. 2.

Actor-writer pens memoir of life marred by murder

For the past 10 years, Dinah Lenney, author of the memoir, \”Bigger Than Life,\” has lived with the memory of the murder of her father, a prominent New Jersey businessman and onetime senatorial candidate who was knifed to death by three teens in Manhattan.

Ritual, worship and love: A rabbi/comic and a cantor/actress

A one-story structure nestled beneath the mountains 25 miles north of Los Angeles, Congregation Beth Shalom looks a bit like those temporary schools on blacktop that dot the Southland. But it is in fact spiritual home to 220 families, 150 of whom were involved in the focus groups to choose the new rabbi and cantor: Rabbi Ira Rosenfeld and his wife, Beth Wasserman Rosenfeld, the latter a former stage actress and singer. The pair began their tenure on July 1, though they were not officially \”installed\” until Aug. 24.

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