Whether a Jewish wedding is white tie and tails at a five-star hotel, blue jeans and bare feet on a beach or something in between, today\’s betrothed couples are choosing to custom mix and match the components that come together to form a unique and perfect union.
The fast-emerging religious left contrasts sharply on many issues — from homosexual marriage to socialized medicine — with its longer-established competitor, the religious right. Yet these two Bible-citing political movements equally have woken up to the realization that there is something intrinsically American about using the Bible as a guide to practical politics. That\’s good news and a blow to secularist orthodoxy.
Sen. Joe Lieberman of Connecticut, the first Jewish candidate for vice president, is in a world of political trouble. Facing a tight race for the Democratic nomination from Ned Lamont, he has already started to collect signatures to run as an independent, should he lose the primary on Aug. 8.
Rallies Demand Gilad Shalit\’s Return; Palestinians Support Attacks from Gaza Strip, Poll Finds; Women\’s Area at Jerusalem\’s Western Wall Will Be Expanded; Four Jewish Denominations Join to Combat Major Jews for Jesus Campaign in N.Y.; Israeli Hotels Charge Tourists More; Reconstructionists Dedicate Camp JRF; Roman Polanski Draws on Holocaust for \’Oliver Twist\’
\”Men in their 30s are like milk,\” a rabbi recently said to me as I told him some stories about my dating life. \”The longer they sit out the more spoiled they get.\” For once, someone wasn\’t telling me, \”What\’s wrong with you?\” and was trying to say, \”What\’s wrong with all of them?\” Still, it was disheartening.
Jason Robert Brown began his musical, \”The Last Five Years,\” about a doomed relationship, while in the midst of his own messy divorce seven years ago. Back then, Brown, like the show\’s fictional husband, was a \”young, ambitious Jewish kid from New York\” with a non-Jewish actress wife, he said in a telephone interview from his New York home.\n
Rabbi Deborah Bravo of Temple B\’nai Jeshurun in Short Hills, N.J., went through plenty of placement interviews after her 1998 ordination as a Reform rabbi. Everywhere, she got the same question: not about her attitude toward homosexuality, not whether she wore a kippah and tallit, but whether she would officiate at an intermarriage. \”It has become the litmus test for placement,\” Bravo said in San Diego at last month\’s annual convention of the Central Conference of American Rabbis (CCAR), the Reform movement\’s rabbinical association.
He didn\’t know it at the time, but when Doron Gazit discovered twisty balloons while working as a camp counselor at a Jewish summer camp in Texas, it was the start of something big. The twisties served as the Israeli\’s inspiration for creating artwork out of large colorful air tubes made from a stronger plastic and supporting them with heavy duty high pressure blowers. Today, he produces tunnels, canopies and decorations galore using the tubes and highlights, air sculptures that inflate to specific shapes.\n\n
City officials have vowed to aid a Persian congregation in Tarzana whose new synagogue was vandalized last Friday by an arson attack and anti-Semitic graffiti. Two days before the scheduled July 9 ceremonial moving of Beith David Education Center\’s Torahs to its new facility, congregation leaders discovered the newly renovated building had been the target of what police are labeling a hate crime.\n
Letters to the editor: Jewish Converts\’ Hardships; Kosher Meat; Response to Rob Eshman on The Terrorist Finance Tracking Program; Response to \’20+ Ideas to Jump-Start Jewish L.A.\’
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