The Jewish Federation of Greater Los Angeles is one of our city\’s most successful philanthropies. Yet, nationwide, it ranks behind New York, Chicago, Detroit, the Bay Area, Philadelphia and Baltimore in the Chronicle of Philanthropy\’s annual listing of the 400 not-for-profit organizations with the largest revenues from individual contributors.
On the surface, they may not seem to share much in common. Victoria Gendel is a charming, pixyish Russian woman. Elias Inbram is a tall, photogenic Ethiopian male. However, both are Jewish 20-something college students who grew up in small, isolated villages and are now living in Israel.
Rose Freedman has died.
Her death at 107 years of age has been widely noted, for Freedman was the last living survivor of the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Co. fire, a calamity that claimed 146 lives. Just months ago, she was featured in a PBS documentary, \”The Living Century,\” which told not only of her experience 90 years ago, but also of the remarkable life she led thereafter. That life — as The New York Times put it — was both \”colorful and courageous,\” right up until her last days in her home in Beverly Hills.
You might see us in the park, holding hands with Danny while walking him from the swings to the slides, and think, "He sure has a weird way of walking.
About 20 years ago the Israeli author A.B. Yehoshua wrote an essay called "Exile as a Neurotic Solution," in which he endeavored to explain why so many Diaspora Jews, for many centuries and in our own day, have avoided coming to live in the Land of Israel.
We couldn\’t help but notice that some of your most controversial last-minute pardons and commutations went to our fellow Jews.
The night George McGovern got trounced by Richard Nixon in the 1972 presidential race, Barry Goldwater, whom Lyndon Johnson had clobbered eight years earlier, called to commiserate. "George," said Goldwater, "if you have to lose, lose big."
Trying to figure out the results of the Israeli election? Here\’s something that might help: compare and contrast what happened this week in Israel with what happened last November in Florida.
One of the things that continues to astound me is the attention the world media pay to the intifada.
To facilitate pidyon shvuyim (redeeming captive Jews from secular prisons) we are commanded to go so far as to sell a community\’s Torah scroll. Yet it is hard to rejoice that Bill Clinton pardoned four chassidim from the village of New Square, N.Y., along with an alleged tax evader who donated megabucks to Israel. In contrast to the complex moral and ethical questions that grated pro-and-con during discussions over the possible pardons of Michael Milken and Jonathan Jay Pollard, there is something unequivocally outrageous in Clinton\’s decisions to pardon the four Squarer chassidim and the international oil merchant whose dealings prompted the Justice Department to allege, among other things, tax evasion and trading illegally with Iran.
