Three events last week celebrated the inauguration of John Pérez as the California Assembly’s new speaker while also emphasizing his connection to Judaism. Although he is not Jewish, Pérez, the first openly LGBT person to be elected to one of the state’s most powerful leadership positions, enjoys ties to the Jewish world.
Two political parties with anti-Semitic elements did well in Russian regional elections.\n\nThe Communist Party led by Gennady Zyuganov received as much as 25 percent of Sunday\’s vote in some regional parliaments, and the Liberal-Democratic Party led by Vladimir Zhirinovsky took up to 19 percent in some precincts. Neither party had done as well since the mid-1990s.\n
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Israel has shown that it is committed to peace after U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton affirmed the \”unshakable bond\” between the two countries.
An Israeli journalist who tried to infiltrate the Egyptian border with illegal migrants was arrested and may be tried in a military court.\n\nYotam Feldman, a reporter for Haaretz and several other publications, was working on assignment for Israel\’s Channel 10 reporting on African migrants infiltrating into Israel. The migrants and Bedouin guides with whom he was attempting to infiltrate managed to escape, according to reports.\n
Palestinians in the West Bank city of Ramallah on Tuesday named a street after a U.S. activist who was crushed to death by an Israeli army bulldozer in a 2003 protest against house demolitions in Gaza.\n\nThe dedication ceremony was held on the seventh anniversary of Rachel Corrie\’s death.\n\nCorrie\’s mother, Cindy, said her daughter stood for many other foreign activists who have come to the West Bank and Gaza in recent years to serve as a buffer between Palestinians and Israeli troops.
This week’s portion begins a new book of the Bible, Leviticus. It is fascinating to look at the first and last words of each of the books of the Torah:
Genesis: When God began to create the heavens and the earth … in a coffin in Egypt.
Exodus: These are the names of the children of Israel who came to Egypt … throughout their journeys.
Leviticus: The Lord called out to Moses … on Mount Sinai.
Numbers: In the wilderness of Sinai … on the Jordan opposite Jericho.
Deuteronomy: These are the words which Moses spoke … in the sight of all Israel.
I’ve never understood why the world goes absolutely bonkers when Jews try to build homes in Jewish neighborhoods of Jerusalem. Take the latest brouhaha about the announcement by Israel’s Interior Ministry that it had approved a planning stage — the fourth out of seven required — for the eventual construction of 1,600 units in the Jerusalem neighborhood of Ramat Shlomo.
In the 1940s, young Gerald Levey looked with awe at his family physician. Over the years, Dr. Samuel Rosenstein made regular house calls to Levey’s Jersey City home, including trips to sew Levey’s severed finger and set his broken nose.
“He had a presence and a sensitivity,” said Levey, who decided as a child to become a physician.
Surgery is wrong. This was what I convinced myself over a two-year stint of excessive holistic health care. Thanks to an imbalanced reliance on acupuncture, I neglected a herniated disc until it ruptured somewhere between Washington, D.C., and Salvador, Brazil. When I found out I needed surgery, I was forced to evaluate what, exactly, I saw wrong with cutting a human open and realigning her interior.
If you ask 35-year-old violinist Daniel Hope about his Jewish heritage, make sure you have time. It’s a complicated question.
“On my mother’s side was an incredibly Orthodox Jewish family that goes back to the first rabbi of Potsdam,” he said during a recent late-night cell phone call while in transit to Hamburg, Germany, for a concert the next day.
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