This invocation was delivered by Rabbi Bradley S. Artson, the new executive vice president of the Board of Rabbis of Southern California, at the Los Angeles City Council on August 4.
We live in what writer Michael Ventura describes as \”the age of interruption.\” There is a mismatch between \”inner time\” — our personal sense of the rhythms of time — and \”outer time\” — the regimented time society imposes upon us.
Gil Wiener, the husky soldier who dragged out the first survivor of the Nairobi bombing to be saved by the Israeli dog squad last weekend, is a 29-year-old architecture student working his way through college as a lifeguard at the Hebrew University swimming pool in Jerusalem.
During his bizarre, self-incriminating appearance on the witness stand at the close of his terrorism trial in Brooklyn federal court last month, 24-year-old Gazi Ibrahim Abu Mezer freely admitted nearly every accusation thrown at him by prosecutors. But not the knife.
The essence of the debate is over the future nature of the national Jewish collectivity, the priorities of that collectivity and, most challenging, the binding impact of the decisions made by the new national organization on local communities — our community.
To many American Jews in their 20s, 30s and 40s, Zionism, the ancient dream of a Jewish homeland that spawned a political movement and the birth of Israel almost 50 years ago, is little more than a footnote in a Sunday-school textbook.
If you were alive in 1918 and bumped into an undistinguished German army corporal named Adolf Hitler, wouldn\’t you have been duty-bound to murder him? Just more than 10 years ago, a Jewish militant stopped journalist Ron Rosenbaum short with that question.
Binyamin Netanyahu\’s crises never come singly. One, of prime interest to American Jewry, was put on hold this week. Another, which hogged the headlines for Israelis, ended with blood on the saddle.
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