Louis Keene is a writer in Los Angeles. He's on Twitter at @thislouis.
Even for the brightest high school students in East L.A.’s low-income areas, Barbara Dobkin says, the idea of attending an Ivy League college may be akin to traveling to Mars.
V’zot haTorah — the scroll was hoisted into the air, pinky fingers stretched toward the split-column poetry of Parshat Ha’azinu, and one of the Los Angeles Jewish community’s original sifrei Torah testified to the words of God and Moses for the first time in more than a decade.
When I was 10, my family got frum, and I started playing baseball. Oddly, the overlap wasn’t a coincidence: Our new rabbi added me to his Little League team and taught me how to throw; I broke in my first mitt — and a new peer group — playing catch with his son.
More news and opinions than at a Shabbat dinner, right in your inbox.