On March 2, as Shabbat drew near, Rabbi Stephen Cohen, Hillel chaplain at University of California at Santa Barbara (UCSB), waited for the parents of Ruth and Albert Levy so he could say \”Kaddish\” and pray with them, as he has done for much of the past week.
Purim, sometimes called the Feast of Esther, is one of the happiest of all Jewish holidays. It marks the liberation of the Jews from the cruel prime minister, Haman, through the heroism of the beautiful and good Queen Esther. The story states that she was a vegetarian while in the king\’s court in ancient Persia. Yes, before it was the fashion, Queen Esther was a connoisseur of fruits, vegetables, nuts and grains, but poppy seeds were said to be her favorite. It is in her honor that on Purim, poppy seeds find their way into salads, kugels and pastries.
Skylar Lenox, 14, hasn\’t recently visited the cemetery where her father, John, is buried. "It\’s just a plot," said Lenox, an award-winning platform diver and president of Adat Ari El\’s United Synagogue Youth chapter.
Joseph Jonah Cummins was a complex man. A prominent Hollywood attorney, the powerful, opinionated Cummins represented Errol Flynn and Bette Davis and lived next door to Milton Berle and Jack Benny.
Noon at the Newsroom just outside Beverly Hills. Amid the lunchtime din, CNN blares on an overhead TV, but only one diner is riveted: Lindsay Conner. The politician is transfixed, waiting for the crucial announcement regarding the then-never-ending Florida recount saga.\n
He says he\’s 61, but you wouldn\’t know it either to look at him or the paper-shrouded desk in his downtown office. After half a life crusading, his batteries retain their charge even as his office space threatens to succumb to the ever-encroaching mudslide of municipal files. I am told that City Councilman Joel Wachs prefers holding forth from his offices in Studio City. But today is a day for meetings and interviews — it is past 3 p.m. and I am his third griller of the afternoon. He is always this busy, even more so now that he is running for mayor, and his desk is always on the verge of collapse. \”I haven\’t taken a day off in 20 months,\” he confides.
Maybe you\’ve heard of \”Haven,\” the epic two-part CBS mini-series starring Natasha Richardson that, in recent weeks, was only plastered on every bus, bus bench and bus passenger in the city?
\nYMCA leaders in Los Angeles strongly denounced a report by an international YMCA affiliate in Geneva, which accuses Israel of using \”massive force against unarmed protesters and completely innocent people\” and urges that \”the YMCA take the side of the oppressed Palestinian people.\”
Since she fled the former Soviet Union more than a decade ago, Anya Verkhovskaya has come more than full circle.
The more time I spend trailing the Los Angeles mayoral candidates, the more I find myself musing about rehabilitating the commissariat as a form of government. Or, failing such \”Red Dawn\”/\”Red Alert\” scenarios, perhaps we might seek something akin to the national unity administration now under contemplation in Israel. I say this not just to be provocative — well not only. It just strikes me as a huge waste of precious talent, integrity and commitment to be forced by a winner-takes-all electoral system to have to pick just one of these outstanding people for mayor while jettisoning the others.
