The recent revelations about the South OrangeCounty Community College District\’s desire to offer a course that, inpart, blames the Mossad and the Anti-Defamation League for theassassination of President John F. Kennedy read something like a badclipping from the area\’s far-right past.
In the aftermath of thedeaths of Princess Diana and Mother Teresa, every woman I know hasparticipated in some version of \”The Goddess or the Saint.\” We\’vetaken sides, debated our husbands and boyfriends, our mothers, ourfriends. At Torah study last Saturday, we weighed the two women interms of a moral dilemma: The princess or the nun, the glamour or thegrit. Our choice of icons defines our lives.\n\n
Since the beginning of this year, 103 Israeli soldiers have died in, or on their way to, war in Lebanon. Twelve lost their lives in a botched marine commando raid last week. The total death toll since the 1982 \”Peace for Galilee\” invasion nowstands at about 1,200, and since the pullback to the South Lebanese security zone in 1985, some 500 soldiers have died.
\”When\’s our luck going to run out?\” my wife asked after last week\’s triple suicide bombing on Jerusalem\’s Ben-Yehuda shopping street. \”They\’re getting nearer every time.\” It was one of those days when people phone around to count their friends.
Therman Statom, one of this country\’s pre-eminent experimental glass artists, was perched atop a ladder beside his precarious-looking installation at the Skirball Cultural Center.
I remember coming home from my first date witha boy.
A professor in seminary once asked us to find themost important section in all the Torah. We offered Creation, theShma, the Exodus, the revelation at Mount Sinai. No, he argued, it\’ski teze l\’milchama (Deuteronomy 21): \”When you go out to war against yourenemies, and the Lord God delivers them into your power and you takesome of them captive, and you see among the captives a beautifulwoman, and you desire her, and would have her. You shall first bringher into your house, and she shall cut her hair and her nails, anddiscard her captive\’s garb. She shall spend a month\’s time in yourhouse, mourning her father and mother…and then you may come to her,and marry her, and she shall be your wife. And if not, you mustrelease her.\”
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