Last week, delegates to the Presbyterian Church USA\’s (PCUSA) General Assembly in Birmingham, Ala., voted to undo their hateful 2004 anti-Israel divestment resolution.
The centerpiece of the third section of the Tanach, the section known as Ketuvim (the Writings), is the Book of Psalms. The Book of Psalms contains some of the most majestic poetic images in the history of the Hebrew language.
Three times over the past six years that I\’ve been editing this paper, I\’ve come to work in the morning to find an old man waiting for me. A different man each time, though I remember all of them being thin and frail.
My girlfriend \”E\” was the first to declare what others had been observing for a while. \”God sure is having a good laugh,\” she said. \”You write a column called \’A Woman\’s Voice.\’ And yet you have no voice\”. The irony had crossed my mind.
I\’m drinking at a bar called the Dirty Horse on Hollywood Boulevard. Well, that\’s not the real name, but I never got a look at the sign and that name seemed right.
When I came to The Journal as a copy editor and had the opportunity to write and edit stories and interview celebrities (both real and pseudo), I couldn\’t have imagined a better job. Then came the curveball: In addition to writing and editing, I was asked to coordinate the obituaries. Ouch.
Haruach sings with a modesty and softness that enhances the simple and good-natured spiritual messages of her songs. That, in itself, is an unusual trait, because audiences have come to expect artists who make spiritual/new age, religious music to have overproduced studio performances.
I began my career in journalism at The Jerusalem Post, then the only English-language newspaper in Israel. It wasn\’t a Jewish newspaper per se; more than covering \”Jewish news,\” its mission was to cover Israel as a country, and that included arts, business, science and technology, politics and crime — which most often turned out to be Jewish.
On Jan. 25, 1997, my oldest son, Zachary, became a bar mitzvah, a ceremony that inaugurated him into the Jewish community as a responsible young adult. It also catapulted me into the world of Jewish journalism as a family columnist. Call it writing therapy. Call it black humor. Dealing with the bar mitzvah preparations — from the trivial to the transcendent — sent me scrambling for books explaining the ritual\’s history and meaning.
When I joined The Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles in late 2002 after 3 1/2 tumultuous years at the Los Angeles Times, I expected to stay at the paper a maximum of six months. My plan was to use The Journal as a safe haven while I hunted for a prestige magazine gig. But a funny thing happened on my way out the door. I fell in love with The Jewish Journal and nearly everything about it, including the myriad opinionated readers who never hesitate to let me know when they think I\’ve blown it.
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