Ten years after the shooting of three children, a counselor and a receptionist by a white supremacist at the North Valley Jewish Community Center, and then his subsequent murder of a Philippines-born postal worker, the bond forged between the Jewish community and the Asian American community remains strong.
Over the last 30 years, the great majority of Jewish voters have maintained their support for the Democrats. Jews are integral to the party’s current leadership in Congress and in the White House. And that party now faces its greatest opportunity in a generation to remake health care policy, and also its greatest challenge.
First there was the good news. “Prayers for Bobby,” a film my partners Chris Taaffe, David Permut and I spent the last 12 years struggling to produce, received an Emmy nomination for Outstanding Made for Television Movie.
It’s become pretty rough being a rabbi in New Jersey, where your friends call you up to ask not what you’re planning to talk about in your Saturday sermon but whether you have a phone in your cell.
The venue was Wilshire Boulevard Temple, but the atmosphere was a mix of revival meeting and political rally as about 800 adherents of One LA cheered each speaker to the rafters at a recent Sunday assembly.
There is a particular vocabulary familiar to those who frequent Jewish summer camps, an English sprinkled liberally with Hebrew words that shifts further into the latter language as adults attempt to keep campers from learning that today’s aruchat arba will be some kind of kinuach (that is, that snack will involve dessert).
The White House is facing mounting criticism over its decision to give a prestigious award to the former United Nations official who presided over the infamous 2001 Durban conference and has a history of criticizing Israel.
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