Category
April 15, 2004
Can Purity Last?
In this week\’s Torah portion, Moses elaborates the laws of impurity. Touching or holding something impure will render people, clothing, food, beverages, containers, wood, leather, earthenware and ovens impure. Shemini is concerned with the consequences of contact with living, ritually impure animals, as well as carcasses.
Is It Safe?
Los Angeles Mayor James K. Hahn, now into his third year in office and facing what is shaping up as a tough re-election bid, is not that kind of pol. He is friendly enough, but otherwise aloof and detached. When I\’ve seen him at events, banquets and the like, he seems to prefer going only lightly noticed, a strange trait for the mayor of the second-largest city in the most populous state of the most powerful country on earth. Los Angeles, City of the Stars, has a mayor who shrugs off the spotlight.
Date My Friend
I\’m always looking for new ways to meet new guys. So I was beyond excited to see a Date My Friend e-vite in my inbox (www.datemyfriend.net). Guys at organized singles events can be, well, honestly … weird. I\’m talking droolers, heavy breathers, socks and Tevas. But like a live Friendster, DMF is all about six degrees of separation. The party promoters invite their single friends, who invite their single friends, who invite Kevin Bacon.
Frank McCourt, Let Our People Eat
Consider the hot dog.
For some of us, it\’s nature\’s perfect processed food — with bun or plain, grilled or steamed, sliced up and cooked with beans or lathered with spicy brown mustard, sweet onions and pickle relish. But always enjoyed best at the ballpark — especially at Dodger Stadium.
Or so they tell us.
If you keep kosher and you\’re a Dodger fan, enjoying a hot dog in Chavez Ravine is about as remote as right field, about as unlikely as a championship pennant or of even harboring thoughts of baseball in October in Los Angeles. And that\’s too bad.
Danger in Not Knowing Our Story
Claire Luce Booth, the wife of the owner of Luce Publications, reported a frank conversation with a Jewish friend. Booth said, \”I must admit being positively bored by all this talk of the Holocaust and its constant repetition of Jewish suffering.\” The Jewish friend replied, \”I know just how you feel. I feel exactly the same way about the Crucifixion.\”
Each would like to see the other\’s story go away. But neither will go away. Golgotha and Auschwitz, the Crucifixion and the Holocaust, remain the dybbuk of our culture. They must both be confronted and understood.
Power of Prayer?
In the wee small hours of Dec. 7, 2003, my husband and I got the phone call that every parent dreads. A matter-of-fact voice said, \”This is UCLA Medical Center. Your son, Jeffrey, has been hit by a car. He\’s got at least a couple of broken bones, but he\’s alert and he\’s asking for you.\”
As I gasped, unable to take it all in, the voice added, \”Your son was very lucky.\”
Jesus: The
\”Jesus in America: Personal Savior, Cultural Hero, National Obsession\” by Richard Wightman Fox (HarperSanFrancisco, $27.95).
\”American Jesus: How the Son of God Became a National Icon\” by Stephen Prothero (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, $25)
One of the staples of American humor is the \”three proofs that Jesus was…\” joke, whose completion is always an ethnic identifier.
Thus, three proofs that Jesus was Jewish:
1. He went into his father\’s business.
2. He lived at home until the age of 33.
3. He was sure his mother was a virgin, and his mother was sure he was God.
Interestingly enough, this ongoing joke series includes no entry headed, \”Three proofs that Jesus was American.\” Only in a country like Israel, where \”American\” names an ethnic group within the nation, could such a joke be told. If such has been told, I hope somebody will be kind enough to send me the three proofs.
New Memoirs Join Shoah’s Canon
\”To write or not to write,\” Eva Gossman ponders in the first chapter of her Holocaust memoir, recounting the internal debate she had about whether to write this book. She asked many deep and tough questions: about whether it made sense, given all that has been written about the period, to write one more account; whether a personal narrative would add to historians\’ understanding; whether memory is reliable after so many years.
Evan and Jaron
\”Hey, Mr. Lowenstein, welcome to life.\”
That\’s the wakeup call that Jaron Lowenstein, half of the pop duo \”Evan and Jaron,\” says that he got this last year as he and his brother plan their comeback — without a major studio backing.
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