Jack Miles\’ uninformed and reckless statement linking the \”anger of secular Israelis about the ultra-Orthodox Israelis who called for the execution of Yitzchak Rabin and who applauded Yigal Amir when he did the deed\” with the action of some Jews in the death of Jesus, was simply outrageous.
While the Los Angeles community has it share of rabbis and teachers who can teach a great class or two, there is always an allure of having someone come in from overseas as a special guest speaker. But now, airplanes are no longer necessary to get an overseas speaker to talk in Los Angeles.
Teen magazines like YM or Seventeen are usually aimed at young girls who can spend hours contemplating the deeper questions of life like \”How can I tell if he likes me?\” or \”Is 50 Cent hot or not?\”
Since the program began, it has brought some 60,000 Diaspora youth between the ages of 18 and 26 to Israel for free 10-day guided trips of the country. For many, it is their first trip to Israel. Only youth who never before have been on a peer tour of the country are eligible to participate.
In a rehearsal room at the Odyssey Theatre, Colette Freedman propped her electric-blue high tops on a chair and good naturedly laughed at herself. \”I\’m truly flawed,\” the 30-ish actress-playwright said. \”I am totally a hypocrite.\”\n\nWell, not totally. While her \”Deconstructing the Torah,\” an evening of one-acts, skewers part of herself, it mostly dissects conflicts faced by Freedman and other modern Jewish women.
Three words, among the last uttered by journalist Daniel Pearl before his murder two years ago this month (on Feb. 21, the public learned of the murder), have become a nucleus for thoughtfulness and creativity. \”I Am Jewish,\” edited by his parents, Judea and Ruth Pearl (Jewish Lights), is a collection of brief essays by almost 150 noted contributors who tease out meaning from these words and compose personal statements of Jewish identity.
Diane Arbus, acknowledged as one of the greatest photographers of the 20th century, thought photographs were the ultimate enigma.
Joseph Kanfer deftly wrapped wires and affixed pieces of material to a truncated test tube. Then he glued the Hebrew letter \”shin\” to the creation, producing a mezuzah.
After a year\’s sabbatical in Boston, my family (a husband who is a Conservative pulpit rabbi, myself, and our three children aged 6, 11 and 14) returned to our home in Victoria, British Columbia. The sabbatical year had a profound experience on us — one that we had not anticipated. We decided that after 16 years living in a small Jewish community, where we found ourselves stretching in ways we never intended, where open-mindedness and adaptability were the ultimate virtues, and teaching religious parameters and structure to our children was viewed as parochial, it was time to move to a larger and more engaging Jewish community.
Israel advocacy on campus has become a front-burner enterprise for the American Jewish community. Attacks by anti-Israel campus activists, including a fair number of Jewish students and faculty, demoralize and often intimidate most Jewish students who are ill-equipped to counter these efforts to delegitimize Israel. It is a mark of the Jewish community\’s growing concern that more than 25 national organizations are now involved in training campus activists to defend and promote Israel and thereby inspire Jewish students to feel a sense of pride in themselves and the Jewish State.
More news and opinions than at a Shabbat dinner, right in your inbox.