If you\’re a young Jewish leader who would like to know more about Los Angeles civic life, or if you\’re a young civic leader who wants to be more in step with the Los Angeles Jewish community, the New Leaders Project might have a place for you. NLP, sponsored in Los Angeles by the Jewish Community Relations Committee of the Jewish Federation Council, is currently seeking applications for its fourth class.
It has taken me 49 years of Israel-watching to find the answer to a question that puzzles us all, and I am pleased to inform you that the search has ended.
Why is it that when Jews seek spiritual wisdom, they\’ll go almost anywhere except their own traditions? Look into any cult, any radical new therapy, any metaphysical society or meditating community, and you\’ll find Jews far beyond our proportion in the population. And should they come to Judaism, there is a thirst for the esoteric. \”I want to learn your spiritual secrets!\” an impassioned searcher says to me.\n
Josh Henkin will read from his new book, \”Swimming Across the Hudson,\” Mon., May 12, 7 p.m. at Dutton\’s on San Vivente. Josh Henkin\’s paternal grandfather was an Orthodox rabbi who lived in the United States for 50 years without ever learning to speak English. Still, the author was able to forge a strong connection with the old man, the kind of bond that transcended language and linked Henkin to a people and a past.\n
Israel is preparing a package of gestures designed to revive the Mideast peace negotiations that have been frozen since work began on a contentious Jewish housing project at Har Homa in East Jerusalem two months ago.
My friend Jane and I met for dinner last week andhad a good laugh about death.
As the son of Holocaust survivors, Adi Liberman grew up, as many second-generation children did, with a sense of profound loss. He knew that he had no grandparents, that his mother, a hidden child during the war, had lost her parents at age 5, and that his father\’s father died before the war and his father\’s mother in Auschwitz.
Remember that great scene in \”Inherit the Wind,\” when Clarence Darrow asks William Jennings Bryan if a book that details rape, incest, slaughter, nudity and sodomy should be banned? The fundamentalist Bryan answers, \”Of course!\” and Darrow, with a flourish, whips out a copy of the Bible and declares, \”Then you must ban this book!\”
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