Even as Ron Reagan makes a case for stem cell research at the Democratic National Convention, Californians may take matters into their own hands.
Two 15-person teams of congregants from Congregation B\’nai Tzedek joined the American Cancer Society\’s 24-hour relay, which began Friday, June 25 at 6 p.m. in Fountain Valley.
A Sunday in the park. A brilliant, bright sun warms the air. The frozen tundra has given way to seedlings, flowers and patches of green.
Two years ago, Andy Abrams was startled to notice a 20-something colleague tattooed with the Hebrew word, shechina. The woman hadn\’t been raised in an observant household, like Abrams: \”Yet she not only chose a word heavy with religious meaning, she chose a style of script only found in the Torah,\” he said. Her intention wasn\’t to show off a hipper-than-thou take on Judaism, a la Heeb magazine, or the kind of in-your-face ethnicity popularized by films such as \”The Hebrew Hammer.\”\n\n\”It was her identification with Jewish feminism and with some sense of the divine,\” Abrams said. \”And the word meant so much to her that she was willing to permanently ink it on her body.\”
\”It\’s All True\” (Simon & Schuster, 2004) by David Freeman offers us a portrait of an outsized Hollywood, so unbelievable that it must be dead on. It is, more precisely, a novel, lovingly unfolded about the movie business: How it works and how its players — adults spoiled by too much money and power — act out their lives. \”Oh me-oh, my-oh,\” as Henry Wearie would say.
Wearie is the novel\’s hero. He is actually a fictitious character, a screenwriter trying to hustle a script idea into a movie deal, but in a voice that sounds eerily like that of Freeman, who himself is a screenwriter. In its way, this book serves as a more knowing successor to Freeman\’s earlier work, \”A Hollywood Education,\” published 18 years ago, after the author had moved to Los Angeles from New York.
Primarily, I learned, as a writer, that if you live with a crime long enough, it seeps into you. You cry at the trials. You hug the siblings of the victim, and they hug you. You keep your distance. You know that the best thing most of the time is just to keep your trap shut and let people talk when they feel it is safe for them to talk — or when they feel they can do nothing but talk.
\”I will concede that conservative Jewish Republicans like myself are in the minority, especially out here on the Left Coast,\” reader Gillee Sherman e-mailed me. \”But we are growing in numbers every day, and this election should see a huge improvement for Bush in the Jewish community.\”
On July 18, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon festively proposed to \”all the Jews of France\” \”to move to Israel immediately … because in France today, one of the wildest forms of anti-Semitism is spreading.\”
Sharon is wrong — not in his concern about a real rise in anti-Semitism in France, but because he explains it too simplistically.
Ten percent of the French population is of Muslim origin. Most are not fundamentalists who feel solidarity with the Hamas suicide bomb campaigns.
Late one night, I was giving my friend Ethan a detailed play-by-play of my date when he made a frightening observation: \”You don\’t have many close female friends in town anymore, do you?\”
I like Mort Klein.\n\nTo people who know him and me both, that must seem as incongruous as a Bush/Cheney bumper sticker on a Prius.\n\nKlein is the national president of the Zionist Organization of America (ZOA). Over the years, including this year, he has espoused positions that I consider wrong, at the very least, if not outright dangerous.
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