I had only to hear Nettie Becker\’s voice this past Tuesday to know how bad things look for Matt Fong. For Jewish Republicans such as Becker, who had traveled in June with Fong to Israel on behalf of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), her party\’s U.S. senatorial candidate had been a dream come true.
Maybe Stanley Mosk isn\’t worried, but I am. Amid one of the most chaotic elections in recent history, when scandals in Washington and daily meetings at the Wye Plantation seem to influence how Californians might respond to local issues like the gubernatorial race and Indian gaming rights, I was summoned last weekend for coffee and blintzes at the Beverly Hills Tennis Club with the state\’s Senior Associate Supreme Court Justice Stanley Mosk.
The canonization of Edith Stein, a Jewish intellectual who became a Carmelite nun and died in Auschwitz, hits a raw nerve. A Jew, a nun, a martyr, a saint: How to respond to each of these links in the chain?
Tom Bradley was buried Monday, hailed as Los Angeles\’ longtime mayor, statesman, leader and friend. His is a grand biography; a son of Texas sharecroppers and the grandson of slaves, Bradley broke down ethnic and class barriers and forged a new multiracial political base that re-created this capital city of the Pacific Rim.
One day we may look back at the 1998 High Holidays as a bizarre version of \”Rosencranz and Gildenstern are Dead\”; American history seen through the perspective of minor Jewish characters helping to determine the national fate. Monica Lewinsky! Sen. Joseph Lieberman! As the Clinton/Lewinsky scandal is causing Americans to question matters of private and public morality, Jews are caught up in the tide. Here are two observations from our perilous time:
Each Yom Kippur, a vestigial loneliness creeps over me. I achingly feel that my parents and family are back East; that my cousins live in Japan; that some of my dearest are dead. On this day, dispersion and alienation seeps in, and I cling to my community like fog to the shore. And this is the way it should be.
Perhaps now the American public will finally break its serious addiction to selecting charisma as the most desirable quality for elected officials.
When my mother discovered that she had left her hearing aid back in her apartment, on the 28th floor of the Northshore Towers in Queens, N.Y., I thought for sure that meant we would miss the bus into Manhattan and, as a result, could forget about seeing \”The Lion King.\”
I see that it\’s time for the media to replay the perennial horror story known as The Dying Jew. \”The Vanishing Jew,\” by Alan Dershowitz, is a mea culpa over his son\’s intermarriage.
Teen-age girls always have a strange relationship with food. When I was her age, I ate only peanut butter or salami.
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