Polka gets dotty at the Getty this evening with the last installment of the center’s Summer Sessions series. “21st Century Roots” offers “roots music for the new millennium,” in the form of three groups: Brave Combo, a polka ensemble that mixes music from Mexico, Germany and Japan; Golem, an edgy klezmer rock band; and moira smiley & VOCO, a band that mixes the dance songs of Eastern Europe with Appalachian tunes. International folk dance lessons are also offered.
5:45 p.m. and 7:15 p.m. (dance lessons). 6:30 p.m. (first music set). Free. Getty Center South Courtyard, Courtyard Stage and Garden Terrace, 1200 Getty Center Drive, Los Angeles. (310) 440-7300.
Judi Lee Brandwein can’t get no satisfaction, but discusses it this one last night, for your amusement. “Fornicationally Challenged” is the 40-something divorc’e’s one-woman mature-audiences-only comic show. It returns tonight only for a local send-off before its opening at the New York International Fringe Festival.
8 p.m. $20. Santa Monica Playhouse Main Stage, 1211 Fourth St., Santa Monica. R.S.V.P., (310) 394-9779, ext. 1.
What a gangbuster quarter millennium of a résumé America has assembled. Much to be proud of, and, yet… far too few Americans are lining up to blow out the candles.
Brooks has spent his career making large targets look small: Nazis, tyrants, bigots, Hollywood annoyances, studio logic, bad taste, good taste and, now, age.
America’s housing crisis demands more than incremental turns. By doubling capital gains relief and launching the T.E.A.C.H. Homes Program, policymakers can inject immediate momentum into a market desperately needing it.
As always, we each have the power to choose to listen, to learn, and to grow, or we can shut our ears to that still, small voice. Are you listening? Are you willing? Are you here?
If Israel can help ensure that the enriched uranium leaves Iran, and if it can use this moment to push Iran and its money out of Lebanon, then a damaging agreement can still be turned into a strategic opening.
The work, the ancient, urgent, irreplaceable work of Jewish community, is the answer. Not as retreat. Not as consolation. But as the most powerful response available to us.
I was born Jewish, but I chose Judaism in the sense that I came to understand what Judaism represents, how it gives meaning and purpose to my life and how important it is for the world.
For 75 years, Israeli prime ministers, left and right, kept American politics out of their statecraft. Netanyahu ended that tradition. The bill is coming due.
Lincoln’s covenantally-minded republic, what he called God’s “almost chosen people,” would emerge from the conflict victorious, just as Moses’ would eventually return to the Promised Land after their fracture and resulting exile.
I am grieving the loss of an illusion, that we had finally outgrown this ancient poison, that education and progress had cured a sickness older than our temples’ ruins.
Like George Bailey, Moses felt he could not carry this burden alone and did not want to live. Even Moses could not see all the good that he had done in this life. Little did he know that thousands of years later, we would still be thankful for his leadership.
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