The Los Angeles City Council Redistricting Commission, created by the voter-approved reforms to the city charter, recently held its first public hearing to receive community input with regard to boundary changes.
In the Arabic world, education systems are riven with notions antithetical to the values of tolerance and understanding that are so intently promoted in the West. In recent years, the signal failures of those systems to reverse years of misguided teachings appear to be dooming the region to years of further conflict.
Last Saturday night, someone told me 85 people had been killed by a suicide bomber in Haifa. I ran to the computer to check cnn.com, and for an instant was relieved to discover the death toll was in fact 15.
The recent resurgence in anti-Israel terror brings the issue of international support for Yasser Arafat\’s Palestinian Authority to the fore.
The financial crisis facing Jewish Community Center (JCC) programs and locations this week will come as an awful shock to tens of thousands of area Jews, and it should (see story, page 14).\n\nJCC officials and Federation lay leaders and staff stress there is no cause for panic. They believe they can work out a way to save the majority of JCC programs and locations. (The Federation is the largest donor to the JCC system.) But there is no question that without immediate community response, the JCC system faces severe cutbacks.\n
Thanksgiving even manages to unite the disparate members of the Jewish tribe. Orthodox or secular, eating soy Tofurkey or kosher birds, we almost all mark the most spiritual of our American holidays.
While the words may not come naturally to his lips, the president of the United States is talking openly these days about the creation of a Palestinian state.
Are you prepared for Palestine?\n\nEarlier this week, President George W. Bush brought the world closer than ever to the reality of a Palestinian state side-by-side with Israel. In a speech to the UN General Assembly last Saturday, he said, \”We are working toward the day when two states — Israel and Palestine — live peacefully together within secure and recognized borders.\”\n\nThis coming Monday, U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell is expected to outline a plan toward ending violence in the region that will make clear the ultimate goal of a Palestinian state.\n\n
I had not intended to go to New York. Instead, after having helped launch Los Angeles\’s Threat Preparedness Task Force, my focus for the past several weeks had been on practical measures that our city can implement to be better prepared in the event of a catastrophe. My brother, who now lives in Brooklyn, had suggested that I travel to New York and visit Ground Zero to develop a firsthand understanding of the urgency of my work. Although I believed that the media had made me well aware of the scope of the devastation in the financial district, I followed his advice and flew to JFK.
At my college newspaper, new writers all received the same encouraging spiel. \”We want you to start writing for us immediately,\” the editor would say. \”We\’re not like the Harvard Crimson, where you have to scrub floors all semester before anyone even talks to you.\”
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