Here\’s a verse that should be written in Psalms: \”He who is lenient about Purim is a truly unhappy person.\” Or, as one rabbi put it: \”Who doesn\’t enjoy a bacchanalian feast where it\’s a mitzvah to get drunk?\”
Shabbat dinner at the home of two doctors, north of Montana Avenue in Santa Monica: There\’s a terrific chicken with lemons and green olives, the lemons plucked from a tree in the yard. There\’s crisp roasted potatoes, salad and a 1998 Cabernet. The table is set with silver candelabras and a sterling silver Kiddush fountain funnels sweet wine from one large cup into several smaller clones. My cup runneth over into a lot of little cups.
The stereotypical Jewish woman is strong, supportive, receptive and respected. Growing up, she is showered with love, pampered by objects and experiences of beauty and quality. She keeps a welcoming home. She attends to detail, wants what she wants and is unapologetically \”high maintenance.\” She is wise, and capable of keen manipulation. She is emotional — following her heart more than her mind. She is nurturing, loyal, generous and willing to sacrifice. She finds total fulfillment only when she has balanced her work with marriage (preferably to a doctor or lawyer) and children. Most significantly, she loves receiving beautiful clothing, fine perfume and dazzling jewelry.
With Passover around the corner, singletons everywhere are faced with a tough choice. Do you bring the person you\’re dating to the family seder? Or do you simply wish him or her a \”chag sameach\” and go off to your separate family celebrations. At the beginning of relationships we all face the issue of the timeline: How soon is too soon for the inevitable family Shabbat dinner invitation? After you become an official couple does that mean that your significant other is now automatically invited to all family events?
The Palestinian film, \”Paradise Now,\” which describes in an understanding way the lives of two Palestinian terrorists, won a string of important awards from major film festivals, culminating in this month\’s Oscar nomination as best foreign film.
At the beginning of the Lebanon War in June 1982, my Jerusalem roommate was packing to leave for grad school in America. Each day\’s newspapers had pictures of men who\’d died at Beaufort, Damour, Sidon.
The supposedly limited operation in Lebanon had morphed into a full-scale invasion that belonged in an updated edition of \”March of Folly.\” Dedicated as I was to living in Israel, I felt a touch of envy for my roommate, soon to be at a quiet campus far away.
I expected to be dealing with an empty nest when my daughter started college. I projected my availability to friends who had yielded my attention during my childrearing years. I dragged writing projects onto my computer\’s desktop to await the plane ride from NYU to the rest of my life. Instead, the levees broke in my hometown. I spent the next three months as a relief worker with the Red Cross and the New Orleans Jewish agencies in service to those displaced and/or traumatized by Katrina.
It\’s little more than a week to the airdate, March 28, and Ofra Bikel is still putting the final touches on her hourlong documentary, \”Israel: The Unexpected Candidate.\”\nThat\’s not like Bikel, a meticulous professional, described by critic Howard Rosenberg in the Los Angeles Times as \”one of television\’s premier documentary filmmakers … whose camera wields the power to mobilize public opinion through exposure.\”\n\”Usually, I take seven to eight months to make a documentary, but in this case I had only six weeks,\” Bikel said in an hourlong phone call from Tel Aviv, her speech a medley of Israeli, French and American accents.
\”I have a warped idea about my worth, my abilities as an artist, my intelligence,\” Jessica Shokrian says in her video installation at the Skirball Cultural Center. \”For much of my life, I\’ve been extremely concerned with how I look and how I think I look to other people. It\’s definitely been a sad obsession.\”
In his first decade as a filmmaker, Spike Lee wrote or co-wrote all of his films, which typically examined race in New York and featured African American protagonists. He began to diverge a bit in \”Clockers\” (1995), which he scripted with novelist Richard Price. Although \”Clockers\” was told more from the point of view of the teenage African American drug dealer than the half-Jewish, half-Italian cop played by Harvey Keitel, it led to other pictures like \”Summer of Sam\” (1999), with its ensemble cast of white characters from a Bronx Italian neighborhood, and the more recent \”25th Hour\” (2002), a film in which Lee does not have a screenwriting credit and which stars Edward Norton as a convict on his way to jail.
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