Todd Gindy, a certified financial planner, likes to tell a story about Johnny Carson to illustrate how nonprofits miss a big opportunity when they don’t suggest donors use life insurance policies as a vehicle for charitable giving. For years, the longtime host of “The Tonight Show” gave $1 million every year to Children of the Night, an organization founded by Dr. Lois Lee to rescue child victims of sex trafficking.
Orit Arfa, executive director of the Zionist Organization of America’s (ZOA) Western Region, was fired from her job on Nov. 19, one day after she addressed a crowd at a pro-Israel rally in Los Angeles that she helped organize, telling the crowd she was “proud” to work for the ZOA.
In 2006, after leading the search for a new dean for the Los Angeles campus of the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion (HUC-JIR), Steven Windmueller was himself awarded the position, becoming the first non-rabbi dean of an HUC-JIR campus.
Rep. Brad Sherman (D-Sherman Oaks), after winning re-election in a bitter fight against Rep. Howard Berman (D-Van Nuys), has abandoned his pursuit of his rival’s old position as ranking Democrat on the House Committee on Foreign Affairs.
Since Election Day, when Richard Bloom closed out the night with a slim lead of 218 votes over his opponent, incumbent Assemblywoman Betsy Butler, in the race for the 50th Assembly District, the mayor of Santa Monica has found himself in an unusual position.
Four Angelenos are among the 50 American Jews selected by the Forward newspaper for its annual list of newsmakers, which was published on the New York-based newspaper’s Web site on Nov. 12.
Citing budgetary pressures, the Zionist Organization of American (ZOA) will vacate the small office it has rented in The Jewish Federation of Greater Los Angeles headquarters on Wilshire Boulevard later this month. The pro-Israel nonprofit exercised an opt-out clause in October, passing up the chance to renew its one-year lease on a small office space on the building’s fifth floor, for which it has paid somewhere between $800 and $1,000 each month, according to officials from ZOA and Federation.
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