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.
Although he graduated from YULA Boys High School five years ago, Ethan Youssefzadeh is a familiar face to current students on campus — and to teens at several other schools and synagogues on the Westside.
For our 12th annual mensch list, we once again invited your nominations of extraordinary volunteers in our community, and the outpouring of suggestions of amazing people was overwhelming.
On a recent weekday morning, Michael Ullman, 66, was busy packing bags of assorted produce at JFS SOVA Community Food and Resource Program in Van Nuys — carrots, potatoes, lettuce, onions, apples.
On a recent morning, Lexie Dreyfuss, an 18-year-old senior at La Cañada High School, was sitting at the La Cañada Flintridge Country Club with Palani, her 20-month-old black Labrador obediently in tow.
Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day,” Maimonides wrote. “Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.”
In the 1990s, Todd Bird was a Hollywood nightlife mover and shaker and promoter.
Rachel Sumekh remembers the moment when every expectation she had for herself as a “typical Persian girl,” as she put it, changed.
Steven Sunshine, 55, has had his share of hardships, including undergoing a bone marrow transplant in 2006. When Sunshine’s sister was found to be a donor match, providing him with the needed marrow, he was acutely aware that not everybody is so fortunate.
