Category
August 29, 2002
A Miracle Worker
Maria Teresa and Maria de Jesus Quiej Alvarez are twins who were born conjoined at the cranium. Headline-makers since arriving at the Pediatric Intensive Care Unit at UCLA\’s Mattel Children\’s Hospital in Westwood, the twins were separated in a nearly 23-hour surgery on Aug. 6.
Funny ‘Guys’
\nIn between schmoozing with kids for his acclaimed Fairfax High documentary \”Senior Year\” in 1998, filmmaker David Zeiger hung out with the funny old guys who did lunch with his dad on Tuesdays at the Mulholland Tennis Club.
Campus Envy
I am not a big fan of Jewish unity when it\’s ideological. A room full of informed\n\nand opinionated Jews, arguing their ideas back and forth, is a sign of a healthy people.\n\nBut I do support Jewish physical unity. Life is with people, and Jewish life flourishes when we learn, play, pray and — of course — argue together.
Searching for Cohens
When Andrea Kalinowski was a little girl in Montreal, her father had an unusual ritual. Any time the family stopped in a little roadside town, he would find a phone book and search for Cohens. He would inevitably get excited when he found even one, amazed and proud that his people were everywhere.
However, Kalinowski was more skeptical about her connectedness to Judaism. \”What really turned me off from Judaism was that it was difficult to be Jewish,\” she said.
The Strongest, Most Vulnerable Man on Earth
\n\”I do not see Jews as victims fated to perish in a Holocaust,\” says German filmmaker Werner Herzog. \”I see them as the strongest and most confident people in the world.\”\n\nTrue to this vision, Herzog has titled his latest film \”Invincible.\” At its center, he has put Zishe Breitbart, an actual, shtetl-raised, pious blacksmith, who in the early 1930s was acclaimed by German and American audiences as \”the strongest man in the world.\”
‘Invincible’ Obsession
In the 1920s, the son of a destitute blacksmith from Lodz, Poland, amazed the world with his feats of strength. Heralded as the modern Samson and the Iron King, Zishe Breitbart became a Jewish folk hero, twisting bars of iron, pulling trains by his teeth and killing bulls with his fists.
Twenty Hours in Munich
\nThe Germans, desperate to erase memories of the Nazi-tainted 1936 Olympics in Berlin, billed the 1972 Games as \”The Happy Olympics.\” By the time the international sportsfest ended, it went down in the history books as \”The Munich Massacre.\”
Making His Mark
On the afternoon of Monday, Sept. 4, American swimmer Mark Spitz won his seventh gold medal at the 1972 Olympic Games in Munich, and set his seventh consecutive world record. It was a feat unprecedented in Olympic history, and the handsome 22-year-old Californian became an instant international media celebrity, nowhere more so than in the Jewish press.
History Comes Alive
Italian scholar Francesco Spagnolo is keenly aware of the long-standing Jewish presence in Italy.
\”Never before the creation of the State of Israel did Jews of so many varied origins live together, and in such a stimulating, if at times threatening, environment as in the land they called in Hebrew \’I-Tal-Yah,\’\” he says.
\”I-Tal-Yah\” — Island of Divine Dew in Hebrew — means Italy in Italian, a land where Jews have lived for more than 2,000 years and which has seen layer after layer of immigration from all over the Jewish Diaspora.
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