Before David Rouda became a stage director and writer, he was an internationally ranked rower who placed 17th in the 1999 World Rowing Championships. Rouda, who started training as a sculler at 13, won six Gold Medals at the Maccabee Games and just missed qualifying for the 2000 Olympics.
Roughly 20 years ago, Sudan, whose western Darfur region has been engulfed in genocide for four years, watched another other tragedy unfold — the deaths of thousands of Ethiopian Jews trying to escape to Israel via Operation Moses.
The International Court of Justice recently handed down two rulings refusing to characterize the atrocities in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Darfur as genocide. While The Hague is reluctant to use the G-word, filmmakers around the world are not.
In the mid-1990s, following the Oslo peace accords and with the prospect of a thriving Israeli economy, the debate raged in Jewish philanthropic circles about what might change if Israel \”was going to grow up and not be a poor cousin,\” said Lois Weinsaft, senior vice president at The Jewish Federation of Greater Los Angeles, who oversees Israeli and other overseas programs.
The \”goal is to use the entire event, not just a seder\” to raise awareness and funds for Darfur, Jewish World Watch Executive Director Tzivia Schwartz-Getzug said.
The upcoming Israel Film Festival represents the culmination of the consulate\’s developing ties with Hollywood.
In a showbiz career that has spanned nearly six decades, Israeli American actor Mike Burstyn has played everyone from Al Jolson and Tevye to Nathan Detroit and P.T. Barnum.
\”It\’s terrible being far away,\” said Israeli-born photographer Elinor Milchan, about watching the news of last summer\’s Israel-Hezbollah war on CNN or Fox. \”They only show you brief moments of terror. They don\’t show you in-between moments that give you strength.\”
Through Project Magic, Copperfield has changed the outlook and brought out the talent of patients who feel disempowered and, in some cases, stigmatized.
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