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Jewish Journal

Connect. Inform. Inspire.

May 13, 1999

Time With Zeffirelli

Leave a Comment / Entertainment, Film, Old Stories /

“There is something special about Jews,” the famed Italian director Franco Zeffirelli says, not disingenuously. “They have an instinctive compassion for their neighbor.”

The 76-year-old auteur illustrates the sentiment in his latest and most personal film, “Tea With Mussolini,” which may also be his personal best. Based in large part on his 1986 autobiography, the movie revisits Zeffirelli’s childhood before and during World War II, when he was an orphaned, illegitimate child adopted by a group of feisty expatriate Englishwomen and by a wealthy Jewish-American art collector in Florence.

The film stars theatrical grande dames Judi Dench, Joan Plowright and Maggie Smith as the eccentric Englishwomen, and the inimitable Cher as Elsa Morganthal, the flamboyant American Jew.

Who else but Zeffirelli, best known for his lush 1960s adaptations of “The Taming of the Shrew” and “Romeo and Juliet,” could have cast Cher as the flashy Jewish adventuress who is oblivious to danger until she is nearly deported to a concentration camp?

Time With Zeffirelli Read More »

Payback Time

Leave a Comment / Community, Education, Family, Old Stories, Womans Voice /

Hillary Rodham Clinton, on a swing through upstate New York last week while trying out a bid for the U.S. Senate, asked a crowd of women if they had trouble feeling good about the level of child care their children received. Jewish women could not in truth raise their hands at her request, for that’s one area they’ve long had nothing to worry about.

As most every parent or grandparent in our community knows, preschools are the single most important innovation in Jewish family life in the last 20 years. While the rest of America was holding back, spreading the canard that preschools breed alienation between mothers and children, not to mention disease, the Jewish community built playgrounds and began teaching the aleph-bet.

But if early childhood education has gone from being a luxury to a necessity, the reciprocal respect due preschool teachers and administrators has been slow in coming. Our communities too often regard early childhood educators like untrained help, with lower pay and fewer rights than offered gardeners or nannies. And that’s why the proposed early childhood code now under consideration in Los Angeles is so important, for it would establish the nation’s first standards and practices in this crucial field.

Four years in the making and already approved by the Los Angeles Bureau of Jewish Education, adoption of the code by one third of L.A.’s synagogues should be a no-brainer. It guarantees sick leave and time off for maternity and shiva, plus a grievance procedure and a minimum salary scale to L.A.’s 1,500 early childhood teachers. Yet with only three weeks to go before the June deadline, only 10 synagogues have given the OK, with another four said to be sending in the paper work. The code is in trouble.

The code grants these educators the same rights as teachers in Jewish day schools and afternoon Hebrew schools, rights that were negotiated in 1945, when most Hebrew school teachers were men. As an interesting footnote, that policy was negotiated by David Yaroslavsky, father of today’s L.A. County Supervisor, Zev Yaroslavsky. But there’s no David Yaroslavsky for today’s preschool teachers. The proposed code does not even mention such divisive demands as insurance and pension.

What’s the problem here? I spoke with early childhood educators and BJE authorities this week who were, as might be expected, devastated by the shortfall in obtaining minimal rights. Over the past decade, L.A. has become the nation’s think tank for Jewish early childhood education, including upgrading standards for classroom curriculum, and pioneering an accreditation process soon to be duplicated across the nation. It burns them that the hard-fought-for code may go down to defeat because of Jewish infighting: preschool staffs at larger, wealthier synagogues won’t rock their own boats for their sisters at smaller schools; middle-range synagogues fear guaranteed sick days will hurt their budgets.

But what really galls is that so-called liberal rabbis have left the preschool teachers to fight for the code one synagogue at a time. The rabbis can plead ignorance, or can insist that their own synagogues treat preschool teachers well. But the lack of concerted effort to protect the entire preschool educator community is troubling, especially among rabbis who sermonize about the rights of the homeless and the needs of undocumented workers in the secular world. (Two of L.A.’s largest Orthodox preschools signed onto the policy early.) What would Samuel Gompers say? The whispered one-day work stoppage is unlikely, but it would at least be a show of unity.

I’ve been saddened this week to hear the cynicism and misery of preschool educators as they register the lack of respect with which their field is held. They sense that they’ve missed the boat, and are concluding that our synagogue boards are now comprised of the nouveau riche who think of preschool teachers as service providers, and that quality education at low cost is something board members think they have coming to them.

“I can’t in good conscience encourage bright young teachers to make preschool a professional choice,” says Dede Solis, head of the Association for Early Jewish Education in L.A.

California public schools are facing a 30,000-plus teacher shortage and will have no trouble raiding our preschools for promising teacher material. Yonaton Schultz, head of the BJE director of school personnel told me that preschools is already more than 30 percent. This week, three preschools were advertising for administrators.

Preschool teachers, meanwhile, are acting on their rights. At least one L.A. preschool teacher has already won a lawsuit for wrongful termination against an L.A. synagogue, costing some $80,000 in legal fees alone.

The influence of preschools cannot be exaggerated: they permitted Jewish women to reap the rewards of the secular women’s movement, providing our children with a safe, nurturing place to be and learn while giving mom peace of mind at work. They create surrogate extended families at a time when Jewish grandparents are living half way across the country. They teach a religion and values-based core curriculum that entices otherwise assimilated families back into the spiritual fold. They love our children well.

What a shame that the Jewish community, so long associated with sensitivity to worker rights, is now so clueless when it comes to its own. The preschool teachers in L.A. are drawing attention to a problem that impacts Jewish (and non-Jewish) families everywhere. Uniform standards are needed for those who teach values to our young. It’s payback time.

Marlene Adler Marks, senior columnist of The Jewish Journal, is author of “A Woman’s Voice: Reflections on Love, Death, Faith, Food & Family Life” (On The Way Press). She will speak at Hadassah Education Day on May 23 at Stephen S. Wise Temple.

Her website is www.marleneadlermarks.com.

Her e-mail address is wmnsvoice@aol.com. Her book, “A Woman’s Voice” is available through Amazon.com.

Payback Time Read More »

Israel On Broadway

Leave a Comment / Books, Community, Entertainment, Judaism, Old Stories /

Here are a few choice opinions about Reform Judaism in America:

Generally speaking, American Reform Jews are lazy about religion and unwilling to disrupt their comfortable lives for the sake of keeping Judaism alive. Their rabbis, who learned from their teachers to legitimize assimilation, have undermined the authority of Torah and tradition; made Judaism into a hunt-and-peck method for vague ethnic identification; and given sanction to mixed marriages and assimilation by embracing the concept of “patrilineal descent.”

American Jewry is in a crisis of self-destruction, in short, and only two things might guarantee its survival — either a real Jewish religion to which individuals make serious and inconvenient commitment, or a real Jewish community, where daily life, both personal and societal, moves according to Jewish rhythms and expresses (or challenges) Jewish values. If American Reform and Conservative Jewry are going to survive without becoming Orthodox, they will have to engage fully with Israel, because only in Israel does such an organic Jewish community exist.

Who is speaking here? It’s not one of those intolerant Orthodox rabbis you hear so much about, but the not-so-dulcet tones of a card-carrying Reform rabbi, David J. Forman, the director of the Reform movement’s Israel programming. Forman, who has lived in Jerusalem for more than 25 years, goes on to claim that his message, while it may seem an all-out attack on liberal Judaism, represents the views of “a vast number” of Reform professionals in America. “They want me to say what they can’t,” he says.

Forman is a happy warrior who clearly enjoys being the Peck’s bad boy of Israeli Reform, but his intention is earnest. As someone deeply committed to both Judaism and Zionism, he wants American Jews to take seriously the option of aliyah, which he believes is their “only alternative to assimilation.” With the Diaspora in steep decline as American Jews slough off history, tradition and communal solidarity, Israel is, now and for the future, the central stage of Jewish life.

That’s why he calls his recent book, “Israel On Broadway, America: Off-Broadway.” From a strictly Jewish point of view, the Diaspora is the sticks.

Forman’s book, published by Gefen, comes adorned with tributes from such luminaries as Alan Dershowitz, A.B. Yehoshua, Israeli President Ezer Weizman and writer Anne Roiphe — which means, if nothing else, that Forman is formidably well-connected. That’s no surprise, for he has been extremely active in Israeli public life. An early Soviet Jewry activist, for a long while, he wrote a regular column in the Jerusalem Post (death threats against him made him give it up) and was also a founder and leading spokesman of Rabbis for Human Rights, an organization that, starting during the infidada, brought together Israeli rabbis of all denominations to protest unfair treatment of Palestinian and Israeli Arabs.

Politically, however, Forman, though a liberal, is hard to predict. He has also been a spokesman on behalf of Israel’s MIAs, reprimanded Yasser Arafat for human-rights violations, defended the right of haredim not to serve in the Israeli army, and opposed using “administrative detention” as a tool against right-wing extremists.

As a book, “Israel On Broadway, America: Off-Broadway” is fun, thought-provoking — and uneven. By its second half, which deals a lot with current events, it becomes repetitive — one already understands Forman’s argument and his remedy. The book also has occasional surprising errors of fact (it does not take 100,000 votes to win a Knesset seat, for example, but only about half that). In several places, Forman allows his own rhetoric to replace actual documentation of data (approximately 25 percent of American Jews have visited Israel, he says, supplying no source for this figure, which I have seen given elsewhere as 15 percent). “American Jewish tourism seems to be decreasing from year to year,” he writes. Seems to be? Is it or isn’t it?

But Forman’s basic argument is a strong one, and non-Orthodox American Jews would do well to reckon with how their communities look, from center stage, to one of their own. Forman certainly thinks that he should be able to perform conversions and marriages in Israel, but he has a healthy sense of why there is so much resistance to legitimizing Reform Judaism even among the non-Orthodox in Israel. I’ll let him speak for himself:

“While Israeli Jews are fighting to maintain Jewish survival, American Jews — and their spiritual leadership — are doing their best to combat Jewish survival. Many Israelis would rather hand over the religious reins to Orthodoxy, with all that is objectionable in that, than entrust themselves to a brand of Judaism that seems to them self-destructive.”

He wrote his book, Forman says, to arouse controversy and to “put Israel and aliyah back on the American Jewish agenda.” He may be pushing a rock up a hill, but it’s a rock that American Jews ought to measure themselves against.

David Margolis writes from Israel. His can be reached by e-mail at djmargol@netvision.net.il.

Israel On Broadway Read More »

Soy Vey! A Shavuot Without Milk

Leave a Comment / Food, Old Stories, Rob Eshman /

The Jewish holiday of Shavuot, on May 21, is about the last time of year you would want to talk to Beth Ginsberg or her boss, Michael Milken. Ginsberg is Milken’s chef, and together they co-authored the best-selling “The Taste of Living Cookbook: Mike Milken’s Favorite Recipes for Fighting Cancer” (CapCURE, $27.50). Shavuot, which celebrates the giving of the Torah on Mount Sinai, is like many Jewish festivals rooted in seasonal agricultural cycles. Late Spring is not, coincidentally, the time when pasture lands are richest and milk production the heaviest. So the holiday is traditionally marked by serving dairy dishes — blintzes, cheesecakes, cheese strudels and other good stuff.

Milk fat is nowhere to be found in “Taste of Living.” After surviving a serious bout of prostate cancer, Milken avoids fats of all kinds like a bad investment. The San Fernando Valley native who grew up on pancakes and cheeseburgers — he boasts of winning fraternity breakfast-eating contests in which lard was considered “one of the essential food groups” — now preaches the gospel of low fat, high exercise and soy. Japanese men have one-fifth the rate of prostate cancer mortality as their American counterparts, and research points to a high intake of soy and soy products as a likely reason. Soy protein lowers bad cholesterol in the body without affecting the good cholesterol.

Three years ago, Milken hired Ginsberg as his personal chef to come up with vegetarian and soy dishes that didn’t taste like they were good for you. Many of the ingredients in “Taste for Living” will sound familiar to the bean sprout and Birkenstock crowd: tempeh, silken tofu, brewers yeast. But Ginsberg, who owned the well-regarded gourmet health-food restaurant 442, has managed to both simplify standard health-food recipes and bring them into the 1990s. Fresh herbs abound, as do more Milken-friendly takes on current menu favorites such as Chinese Roasted Tofu Salad and Chiles Rellenos in Tomato Jalapeño Broth. Ginsberg, a single mother in her mid-30s, has streamlined the recipes so that cooking healthy doesn’t necessarily mean cooking all day.

Milken adheres to his diet during Jewish holidays as well, Ginsberg said in a recent phone interview. On Chanukah, she makes latkes with zucchini and egg whites, sautés them lightly in nonstick spray and finishes them in the oven. This Passover, she made matzo balls with egg whites. Milken liked them.

Ginsberg herself likes a good, eggy challah each Friday, and has a weakness for low-fat potato chips. But using her cookbook, you could prepare a dairy-less Shavuot and barely miss a blintz. “Kids love my Devil’s Fool Cake with Cocoa Frosting,” she said. “And they go crazy for the chocolate pudding.” Both use soy milk, cocoa and egg whites, and they certainly look dairy-ish. Total fat in one serving of chocolate pudding: 1 gram.

Bring on the holidays.

“Taste of Living” is available in bookstores or by calling (877) 884-LIFE. All proceeds of the book go to CapCURE, a nonprofit association for the cure of cancer of the prostate.

Old Fashioned Chocolate Pudding

2 cups 1% cocoa soy milk

1/4 cup natural cane sugar or fructose

3 tablespoons cornstarch

2 tablespoons low-fat cocoa powder

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

1 vanilla bean, optional

1) Place all ingredients in saucepan. If using vanilla bean, split it lengthwise and scrape out the seeds. Place seeds and pod in saucepan with other ingredients.

2) Cook the mixture, stirring, over medium heat until it thickens to pudding-like consistency — about 15 minutes.

3) Remove from heat and extract the vanilla bean pod.

4) Pour into six individual cups or one large mold and chill at least 30 minutes before serving.

Soy Vey! A Shavuot Without Milk Read More »

Norman Lear on Comedy, TV and His Mother

Leave a Comment / Entertainment, Old Stories, Television /

Norman Lear, who changed the face of American TV with landmark shows such as “All in the Family” and “The Jeffersons,” just wanted to talk about his mother.

The legendary writer-director-producer was speaking at a program that was part of the Skirball Cultural Center’s “Spotlight” series — which is devoted this season to television. And Lear, who has proved that politics and sitcoms do mix, was recounting his mother’s response to the news that her son had made the TV Hall of Fame.

“She said, ‘Listen, if that’s what they want to do, who am I to say,'” he said, with a laugh. “You learn to live with a little humility if you grow up with a mother like that.”

Lear, of course, doesn’t have to be humble. He’s been called the Philosopher King of American TV and has won four Emmys as the creator of several popular shows, including “Sanford & Son,” “Maude” and “Good Times.” But mom remained nonplused.

Once, when she was 89, he arranged to fly with her from the East Coast for a visit to his home in California. About 20 minutes into the flight, she asked a stranger to help her apply some eye drops.

Lear, incredulous, asked why she had requested help from a perfect stranger rather than from her own son.

“You have to be patient,” she said of the eye drops.

“What do you mean?” Lear demanded, with exasperation.

“Look, some patience,” she said, with disgust.

If Lear’s mother did not inspire the character of Edith on “All in the Family,” his father definitely informed the character of Archie Bunker, the arch-conservative, racist father-in-law to progressive son-in-law “Meathead” (Rob Reiner). Pere Lear was a blue-collar construction laborer who worked with an ethnically diverse crew but remained fearful of non-whites.

“To him, black people were shvartzes,” said Lear, founder of the liberal social-action group People for the American Way. “And he used to call me the laziest white kid he’d ever met. I’d shout back, ‘How can you put down a whole race of people to call me lazy?'” Lear’s father would respond that his son was also the stupidest white kid alive.

Lear’s big break in comedy occurred decades ago, when he telephoned the office of Danny Thomas’ agent and pretended to be a New York Times reporter. He told the secretary that he was on deadline and that he just needed to ask Thomas three questions. Could he have the comedian’s home telephone number?

The secretary complied, and Thomas was so impressed with the stunt that he asked Lear and his writing partner to provide material he desperately needed for a Friar’s Club gig.

Twenty years later, it took Lear, by then a veteran TV and film writer-producer, three years to get “All in the Family” on the air. The networks were frightened of the controversial sitcom that tackled racism and intolerance. Even when CBS aired the first episode in 1971, “the network had 200 switchboard operators standing by to handle the complaints,” Lear said.

In response to a question posed by a reporter at the Skirball, he said that the show’s sensibility is Jewish. “Dick van Dyke used to say that all humor is Jewish,” Lear said. “I don’t know if that was, because he had so many Jewish writers working with him, but what he meant was that if it’s a good joke, it’s got a Jewish curve to it.”

Norman Lear on Comedy, TV and His Mother Read More »

Defending Their Serbia

Leave a Comment / Old Stories, Worldwide /

When Dusica Savic Benghiat makes her daily phone call to her mother in Belgrade, she can frequently hear the air-raid sirens as a backdrop to the 78-year-old woman’s increasingly discouraged voice.

“My mother tells me she doesn’t care anymore. She just stays in bed. If the bombs miss her, that’s fine, and if they hit, somebody will pick up what’s left,” says Benghiat.

The Pacific Palisades resident tries to empathize with her mother’s plight. “If I had to go to the shelter every day, I don’t know what state I’d be in,” she says. “How long can you go on before you go crazy and give up on life completely?”

During the fighting in Bosnia-Herzegovina during the first half of this decade, Benghiat, who immigrated to the United States in 1974, served as regional president of the Serbian-Jewish Friendship Society.

She often called The Jewish Journal and other media, championing the cause of the Serbian people and contrasting their resistance against Nazi Germany to the Croatian collaboration with Hitler during World War II.

But now, contacted by The Journal, she says that the society’s membership in Los Angeles is practically dormant because “it has become uncomfortable to support anything in favor of the Serbians. And I guess we’re weary of fighting the same battle over and over again.”

As to the mood in her native country, “people feel ostracized and demonized, but once you’re bombed, you have no choice but to resist,” says Benghiat.

Like most Serbian-Americans, she charges the American media with bias and historical ignorance. While most Western observers assign much of the blame for the present conflict to Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic’s 1989 edict that abolished the autonomy enjoyed by the ethnic Albanians in Kosovo, Benghiat has a different perspective.

“My uncle lived in Kosovo in the 1970s, but had to leave because of the persecution by Albanians,” she says. “They were expelling the Serbians; that’s why autonomy was revoked.”

As a Jew, Benghiat particularly resents analogies of the Serb action in Kosovo to the Holocaust. “The Holocaust is unique,” she says. “It is unjust and dangerous to use the term in the present situation.”

However demoralizing and damaging the NATO bombing may be, it will not topple the present government, Benghiat asserts. “I tell you, Milosevic will be the last person to feel the pain,” she says.

Defending Their Serbia Read More »

Stand Up To Be Counted

Leave a Comment / Judaism, Old Stories, Torah /

A young woman called, asking if I would be willing to visit with her 95-year-old grandmother. She seemed to be slipping away from life more and more each day, and had been asking to speak with a rabbi. I didn’t know the woman or her family, but I figured anyone who lives to be 95 years old deserves to have a visit from just about anyone she wants (besides, I’ll go anywhere to meet with anyone who actually asks to see a rabbi).

So I went. When I arrived in her home (of some 60 years), she was sitting up in a wheelchair, waiting. She immediately got down to the business of telling me her story. She told me of her active, fulfilled life with her husband (a physician now deceased) and son, and of her many travels around the world. In the midst of her life story, she suddenly stopped and began to cry. As I held her hand and asked what she was thinking about, she looked up at me with profound emotional pain and despair, and simply said, “My son.”

“What about your son?” I asked.

And with tears continuing to fall, she slowly shook her head and replied: “I need you to help me with my son. He married a second time not too long ago, to a woman who isn’t Jewish, and he vowed never to step foot in a synagogue for the rest of his life. Please help me. Will you call him? Will you tell him what the results will be of marrying someone who isn’t Jewish?”

“How old is your son?” I asked.

“Seventy-one years old,” she answered, “and his bar mitzvah experience was so lacking in meaning that he said he’d never go into a synagogue again, and he hasn’t.”

I must admit that for the first time in a long time, I was speechless. Nearly 60 years had passed, and they were both still living in the aftermath of a bad bar mitzvah. I wasn’t sure exactly what she was asking of me. But while I was ruminating on the uncomfortable image of delivering a lecture to her son on the impact of his marriage on the larger Jewish world (and the pain it and his vow were causing his mother), she turned to me and, in a barely audible whisper, said: “I want him to leave this world as a Jew. I want him to leave this world as a Jew.” There it was. A lifetime of Jewish regret and pain and life-cycle moments unfulfilled.

Now I had tears in my eyes, as I thought of all the missed opportunities for meaningful Jewish experiences, study and celebration that somehow managed to pass right by this man and so many, many others.

This is really what this week’s Torah portion, Bamidbar (“In the wilderness”), is all about. For, in the very beginning of the first chapter of Numbers, Moses is told to command the Israelites to take a census of “the whole Israelite community.” A census is the opportunity for individuals to stand up and be counted as part of the community and say, “Here I am, willing to take my place and be a responsible part the society in which I live.”

More than 3,000 years later, there I was, standing in the home of a frail 95-year-old woman as she asked me to do something similar to what Moses had done so long ago, and find a way to have her son counted as part of the community of the Jewish people.

It reminded me that my challenge as a rabbi is to help both youth and adults discover the meaning of life itself through the inspiration of Judaism. Then they will all stand up to be counted with pride.

Steven Carr Reuben is senior rabbi of Kehillat Israel, the Reconstructionist congregation of Pacific Palisades.

Stand Up To Be Counted Read More »

Triple-Dating

Leave a Comment / Entertainment, Old Stories, Singles, Television /

The good news is that Roseanne may have finally found three nice Jewish boys as suitors for her three daughters. The bad news is that the boys live in England and the girls in Los Angeles.

American television viewers can watch the long-distance romance unfold on “The Roseanne Show,” on May 20 and 25.

First, some background. A few months ago, the outspoken television host voiced a desperate motherly plea for volunteers to marry her daughters and fulfill her dream of becoming a grandmother.

She stipulated some rigid requirements: Suitors must be Jewish, mentally stable, have most of their teeth, and not be money-sucking leeches. In return, she offered “girls who never get up, always complain, and who are lazy and smoke.”

Despite this tempting inducement, few worthy candidates applied. Roseanne’s quest seemed stymied until an expert matchmaker recently materialized on her show, in the person of Rabbi Shmuley Boteach (pronounced Bo-tay-ach). The 32-year-old Orthodox rabbi was barnstorming across the United States, pitching his best-selling book, “Kosher Sex,” and its just released prequel, “Dating Secrets of the Ten Commandments.”

Born in Los Angeles, Boteach founded the L’Chaim Society at Oxford University as “a high-profile Jewish education organization that hosts world figures and promotes Jewish culture.”

Well, Roseanne and Boteach, two loquacious extroverts, quickly realized that the 1,000 Jewish students at Oxford represented a large pool of eligible young men who might prove the answer to a mother’s prayer.

The rabbi, who knows a mitzvah — not to mention a great publicity gimmick — when he sees one, promised to hasten back to Oxford and come back with “three strapping British lads,” naturally of the Mosaic faith.

As good as his word, Boteach returned last week with the three lads, who were met by a black stretch limousine and whisked to the upscale Bel Age Hotel.

They weren’t all British or all Oxford students but, indeed, highly presentable, obviously intelligent, and well-mannered enough to treat the lark as the serious foray into Jewish matchmaking envisioned by Boteach, whose favorite appellation is “The Relationships Rabbi.”

At the following day’s taping, the three men introduced themselves to Roseanne and 2 million television viewers. They were Dorian Barag, 27, of Los Angeles, and Scott Silverman, 24, of Chicago, both attending Oxford on scholarships, and Jay Sinclair, 24, a London kosher caterer.

Their predetermined respective dates were Brandi, 27; Jennifer, 22; and Jessica, 23.

That evening, the three couples, with TV crew in tow, were chauffeured to the trendy Tokyo Delve’s Sushi Bar in glamorous North Hollywood, and then danced the night away at the Redrock Bar on the Sunset Strip.

A day later, the couples returned to the studio for the taping of the second segment and to brief Roseanne and Boteach on the results of their matchmaking efforts.

Here are some excerpts from the ensuing dialogue:

Jessica: “Jay is very sincere and down to earth. He’s not a liar or a freak.”

Roseanne: “Is there romance in the air?”

Jessica: “I like him.”

Roseanne: “Wow, fantastic.”

(Enthusiastic audience applause.)

And a little later:

Scott: “Jennifer is a beautiful woman, the woman of every man’s dreams. We had spectacular conversations.”

Boteach: “I am a super matchmaker. I dare not fail, and I’ll follow them all year. If you guys dare go out with other women, you’ll have to deal with me.

“This is a kosher relationship. The boys put the girls first; they are not ashamed to show their affection. All you [Roseanne] have to do now is bring the glass and the chuppah.”

On this promising note, hosts and visitors parted with the promise to meet in London for a follow-up show. — Tom Tugend, Contributing Editor

Triple-Dating Read More »

Discovering Zion

Leave a Comment / Israel, Old Stories /

State Sen. Richard Alarcon, along with state Assembly Speaker Antonio Villaraigosa and 16 other guests of the Anti-Defamation League, spent the week of April 24-30 touring Israel. The trip ran simultaneously with that of Children of the Dream, an ADL project to foster mutual respect and tolerance among young people.

It was during a trip to Yad Vashem with members of the youth group that Alarcon found himself caught in a bittersweet irony, one of those moments of spiritual beshert so frequent in Eretz Yisrael.

“The kids from Children of the Dream were presenting a wreath there and asked me to give the speech at the presentation,” Alarcon says. “Just prior to that, we had visited the Children’s Memorial. This was two days before the anniversary of my son’s death, and I felt this incredible bond with the parents of these 5 million children who were killed. I couldn’t help but express my feelings in the speech. When I later asked when the Children’s Memorial had been built, they said 12 years ago — the same year my son died.” (Alarcon’s 3-year-old son was killed in a car accident in 1987).

This was the senator’s first trip to the Middle East. A practicing Catholic, Alarcon said that he was amazed by the strong religious connection he felt to a place he’d never been before.

“From day one, it was an incredible experience,” he said. “The first thing you’re struck by is the sense of history and of being connected to that history. It really brings your spirituality to life.

Alarcon believes that the trip will benefit him and the other legislators.

“I have one of the largest Jewish communities [in California] in my district, and I now feel I have a better understanding of the issues of concern to them,” he said. “The trip also gave me a better appreciation for my own religion. Having gone to the Holy Land and seen all the different groups interact in Jerusalem, you see the equivalence of religion. I believe I have always been tolerant of other religions, but this embellished my belief that you can have peaceful coexistence and respect for each other.”

Honoring Thy Mother

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