The regulars who take their morning coffee at the sun-bleached Good Day Cafe aptly have nicknamed the spot \”Moshe\’s Parliament.\”
Sitting on red plastic chairs and leaning over flowered tablecloths over the weekend, retirees dissected and debated the various new Middle East peace proposals.
In a single passionate interview recently, Ehud Olmert, Israel\’s deputy prime minister, managed to do what most politicians only dream about — recast a nation\’s political and diplomatic agenda.
Jonathan Koch was trying to decide between two pairs of shoes when he happened to notice that one pair was made in Israel. That sealed the deal for him.
Six Jewish sportsmen from the United States, Britain and Canada have been elected to the International Jewish Sports Hall of Fame.
What do you get the person who has everything? There is always someone on your list that gives you a hard time, the person who would appreciate something more creative and less generic. The chocolate gift baskets are too businessy and the gift certificate is too impersonal. So what to do? Get the gift that screams Jewish festivity and thoughtfulness; the gift that is kitchy, creative and will surely be a conversation piece at your Chanukah celebration.
For playwright Miriam Hoffman, Yiddish is hardly a dying language. \”It just doesn\’t want to die,\” said Hoffman, who will teach Yiddish at the Dec. 14-20 intensive language/culture immersion courses at UCLA and the University of Judaism.
\”Yiddish was always a problem since its birth,\” said Hoffman, who writes children\’s books on the subject, lectures at Columbia University and writes for the Yiddish-language newspaper, Forvertz. \”It had to compete with the sacred language, which is Hebrew. Yiddish carried [Zionism] on its back for 1,000 years.\”
Scratch away at any Jew and you\’ll find a storyteller. The people of the book dream of spinning out personal memories and Old Country stories to a rapt circle of children. That\’s why the first-ever Jewish Children\’s Literature Conference, held in the fall at Sinai Temple through the auspices of Mount Sinai Memorial Parks and Mortuaries and the Association of Jewish Libraries, attracted 125 eager attendees. Many were there specifically to grapple with the question: So you want to be a writer of children\’s books?
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