\”Ouch,\” cried a perfectly coiffed, white-haired lady. \”It hurts.\”
\”My fingers won\’t listen to me,\” a tall brunette complained.
But Susanne Haymaker, their exercise teacher at the Jewish Home for the Aging, wouldn\’t listen. \”Lift your fingers up if they\’re hurting, \” Haymaker encouraged. \”That will signal the brain. People with severe arthritis have to help their fingers along.\”
Why are Jews and non-Jews alike – to the tune of 3.9 million – gravitating to the Kabbalah Centers around the world?
Here I was, literally, in the middle of nowhere, between nothing and nothing, feeling as if I had landed on the moon. Only I was the alien among a company of natives.
Last December, when Global Exchange garnered international attention after its WTO protests in Seattle, Medea Benjamin was approached by the Green Party and asked to run against Dianne Feinstein on the Green Party ticket.
Ralph Fertig, a retired judge and current community activist and novelist, has what a lot of progressive Californians are looking for: a solution to voting on Nov. 7.
There are a thousand stories in the naked city of Los Angeles, but when it comes to nannies, there are at least a million – nannies who have a free reign of the household, nannies who make good salaries, nannies who get help from their employers to buy cars or put a down payment on a house. But there are the other stories as well – the nanny who works long hours for little pay, with no holidays, no sick days, no breaks. \”I knew when I was here without papers, I didn\’t deserve to be here,\” says nanny Carmen Davis, \”but still, that didn\’t mean I deserved to be treated without respect.\”
I arrived in Miami Beach one morning last week on a mission: to find the last kosher hotel in South Beach, an ultra-hip area of restaurants, clubs and shops that used to be the hub of Florida Jewish life.Today you can drive along Ocean Drive (inch along is more like it) and see scores of suburban teenagers and sophisticated European tourists sitting at Art Deco restaurants and hotels, sipping their lattes and looking to be seen, but you won\’t find many Jews. South Beach is where Gianni Versace was murdered on the steps of his mansion and where Gloria Estefan, Madonna and Sylvester Stallone all have had multimillion-dollar homes at one time or another.
\”The goal of the Center is to have unity,\” Shahla Farivar says in her warm Iranian accent. \”The main point is to get the Iranian young people, who were born and raised here, integrated back into the Jewish community.\”
When Ofra Haza, the 41-year-old Israeli Yemenite singer, succumbed to complications of AIDS in February, she died under a heavy cloud of silence.
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