Filmmaker Pola Rapaport grew up in a family of secrets.\n\nHer psychiatrist father never spoke of his life before meeting Pola\’s mother. He never spoke of his family. He never mentioned that he was Jewish, though Pola figured that out when he took her to Yom Kippur services when she was 10. And just before he died of cancer in 1972 — Pola was then 16 — his last words to his wife were, \”Be discreet.\”
David Suissa calls it the \”three-second war,\” the battle between Israel and Palestinians fought with sound bites more than mortar shells, a war fought in print and on television.
The founder and CEO of Suissa Miller Advertising, Suissa has unleashed an unconventional weapon in the three-second war: pro-Israel advertising.
Recently, though, La Voz has published scathing anti-Semitic remarks that have as its targets the L.A. Jewish community.
Every Sunday morning, four women meet at the Southwest Airlines terminal at LAX. The professor of architecture comes from Albuquerque, the cantor from Santa Cruz, the director of special education from Tucson, and the principal of a day school from Berkeley.
After a warm reunion, they wheel their overnight bags out to the curb, grab a taxi, and make their way to the corner of Sawtelle Avenue and Venice Boulevard, where they are all studying to become rabbis.
Update July 29, 2007: Rabbi Meyers passed away last week. Obituary here.
This has been a poignant month for Rabbi Carole Meyers. When The Journal visited her study in late May, she had just filed her last column for the temple newsletter. The next week was also her last family service. It\’s been more than a month of lasts, leading up to her last Shabbat service.
It was a long time coming: 261 excited students in burgundy caps and gowns filed through Temple Beth Am\’s sanctuary to collect their diplomas. But not all of these graduates were Jewish. Students of African, Latino, and Asian descent, in addition to Jews (most of them, of Russian or Persian heritage), comprised Los Angeles ORT Technical Institute\’s (LAOTI) Class of 2001.
I have written about Yitzhak Frankenthal before, and I will no doubt write about him again, because the man has the gravitas to say just about whatever he wants about the Israeli-Palestinian crisis.\n\nFrankenthal is one of a distinct minority of Israelis and Arabs these days who are engaged in dialogue with their political adversaries.
Letters to the Editor, Point of View in response to Articles.\n
Does Stanley Mosk\’s California Supreme Court seat naturally go to a Jew? In the political jockeying left by the death at 88 of California\’s longest-serving justice, the debate begins again: Is there a special \”Jewish seat\” that deserves to be enshrined on the high court?
In filling the seat Mosk occupied for 37 years, here are some names being mentioned: former L.A. City Attorney Burt Pines and former Rep. Lynn Schenk, both close aides to Gov. Gray Davis; Arthur Gilbert, presiding justice of the Court of Appeal in Ventura (and a jazz pianist); Appellate Justice Norman Epstein and U.S. District Judge Nora Manella. Personally I\’m for Pines (though I hear he eschews it). The Manella name has a certain poetic impact; her father\’s firm, Irell & Manella, was among the early \”Jewish firms\” in Los Angeles, responding to discrimination against Jews among old-line law offices.
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