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Letters to the editor: Prager receives some criticism, readers criticize Journal characterizations

[additional-authors]
March 22, 2017

Health Equipment Option

Your recent article about Yad Sarah, an Israeli organization that provides services such as low-cost rentals of wheelchairs and other medical equipment, suggests that the United States could learn from this Israeli group (“Israel’s Yad Sarah Has Prescription for U.S. Health Care System,” March 10).

I think your readers would like to know that we have similar nonprofit organizations in Southern California. What American organizations seem to lack is publicity. 

For more than 90 years, the Convalescent Aid Society has served Pasadena and other cities in the San Gabriel Valley. There is no means test and no time limit on the free delivery, setup, loan and servicing of used medical equipment, including special beds, wheelchairs and canes.

In Los Angeles, we also have the Durable Medical Equipment Society, headquartered in, but not limited to, the San Fernando Valley.

Both groups are operated by volunteers, who maintain the equipment and staff the offices.

Both groups accept donations of re-usable medical supplies and give donors a note for a tax deduction. As American Jews age, I think we need to know of and donate to local charities that support our health care. They help us heal the world (tikkun olam)! 

Joel Peck, Culver City

Grammar Police to the Rescue

Beryl Arbit needs to vacate that glass house (Letters to the Editor, March 17). Whatever Nicholas Melvoin’s linguistic shortcomings, she should be declaring that hers will be one fewer, not one less, vote for him. 

Geoff Neigher, Los Angeles

Dennis Prager’s Logic Is Faulty

Dennis Prager is at it again (“There Is No Wave of Trump-Induced Crime in America,” March 10). He cherry-picks a few incidents of, what appear to be, Trump-induced hate crimes. Upon further investigation, these crimes were committed by people who dislike Trump. Prager, in order to fill the role of loyal lapdog for him, extrapolates these few incidents into a general conclusion that the left is committing these crimes to falsely accuse Trump’s election of unleashing a wave of hate crimes.

Clearly, there are those on the left who engage in such tactics. These people should be condemned. However, the right is equally guilty of engaging in such tactics. 

Bottom line, while the numbers are still being deciphered, anecdotally I would argue that there has been an increase in hate crimes because of Trump. I don’t recall the same number of such crimes when George W. Bush or Barack Obama were elected president.

Andrew C. Sigal, Valley Village

Columnists are supposed to be swizzle sticks, stirring the political waters and the sediment that lies below. The Jewish Journal has its share of such columnists, and they can be divided along the following continuum: Gina Nahai occupies the center, while to the left are Rob Eshman and Marty Kaplan, and to the right, David Suissa and Shmuel Rosner. The only outlier, the Pluto in a universe by himself, is Dennis Prager.

Prager is a one-themed writer, viewing the left as the scourge and plague that separates and decimates humankind from its senses, and if not eliminated, from its very existence.

Those of us who embrace a progressive stance will fight, in both print and in the street, for the 4,000-year-old Jewish mission of truth, justice, morality and community that Dennis and his acolytes seem so intent on distorting (and in many ways destroying) for their own self-aggrandizing ends.

Marc Rogers, North Hollywood

Don’t Misrepresent Orthodox Judaism

Given that all halachic authorities agree that Open Orthodoxy is not an expression of Orthodox Judaism, please defer from slurring Modern Orthodoxy by accusing it of harboring Uri L’Tzedek and its ilk (“Orthodox Rabbis Urge ‘Spiritual Resistance’ Against Trump Policies,” March 10). They are members of a different branch of Judaism.

S.Z. Newman, Los Angeles

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