Quick, name one thing that 99 percent of all American Jews agree on. Impossible, right? We are the People who pride ourselves on our contentiousness, who revel in our stiff-neckedness, who love to remind the world that where there are two Jews, you\’ll find three opinions.\n\nBut it\’s not always so.
Only in Los Angeles can you have a convention of Orthodox Jews where the keynote address is given by a woman named Bacon, the special guest speaker is a famous Hollywood film critic and the executive director begins his Shabbat sermon by talking about Christmas.
Do you write from memory? Someone always asks, and I become tongue-tied and uncertain, scrambling for the words, the ways to make believable what I know will sound bizarre — a too-complicated response where all that is required is a simple \”Yes\” or \”No\” or \”Sometimes; the rest is research.\”
I lived in Iran for only 13 years. I remember very little — a handful of places, a couple of dozen friends and relatives. Yet, I\’ve spent my entire career writing about the country and its people, and I\’ve written it all — this is the part that\’s difficult to explain — from memory.
The tragic assassination of former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto will engulf Pakistan in grief and turmoil. Her death symbolizes the wider calamity that envelops us all — throughout the Middle East, Asia, Europe and the United States.
In Israel, the \”non-Jewish Jews,\” as some Israelis call them, are everywhere. They drive buses, teach university classes, patrol in army jeeps and follow the latest Israeli reality TV shows as avidly as their Jewish counterparts. For these people — mostly immigrants from the former Soviet Union who are not Jews according to Israeli law — the question of where they fit into the Jewish state remains unanswered nearly two decades after they began coming to Israel.
\”The Kid From Brooklyn,\” a musical based on the life of Danny Kaye, now playing at the El Portal Theater in North Hollywood, takes us back to the heyday of Kaye (born David Daniel Kaminsky), a versatile performer whose tongue-twisting verbal artistry and physical high jinks have influenced such modern-day performers as Robin Williams and Jim Carrey.
If you were paying attention during Genesis, the opening statement of this week\’s parsha may be perplexing: \”And God (Elohim) spoke to Moses and told him: I am Adonai, I have appeared to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob as El Shaddai, but I did not make myself known to them by my name Adonai\” (Exodus 6:2-3).
How can that be possible? All through Genesis, God speaks to the patriarchs using the Tetragrammaton; the Ineffable Name; the Name written with the four quiet, almost mute letters Y, H, V and H but spelled Adonai, the Master. How can He tell Moses now that he never revealed this name to the patriarchs?
It sits at the lowest spot on earth, is fed by one of the world\’s most significant waterways, and served witness to humanity\’s passage out of Africa. And it\’s dying. The Dead Sea, among the most remarkable natural phenomena on the earth\’s face, has lost a third of its surface area over 50 years, and continues to shrink three or more feet annually — entirely because of human behavior.
David Nahai is an environmentalist and an attorney, not an engineer, and his major previous management challenge was running a 15-employee law firm. But he is the man Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa tapped take on the $304,000-a-year job as general manager of the Department of Water and Power, the nation\’s largest — and frequently troubled — public municipal utility. He\’s also the first ever to helm the DWP without decades of experience in either the utility business or city government.
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