At this time of year, it is common for many of us to pick up our phones and send e-mails apologizing to others for the ways that we wronged them in the past year. In addition to doing personal repentance (teshuvah), Rav Kook, the first Chief Rabbi of Israel, explained that we as a people (klal Yisra’el) must also do teshuvah. How do we, as a nation, ask the nations of the world for forgiveness?
Seventy percent of Americans do not want this grotesque monument to Islamic supremacism built where it would overshadow that hallowed ground, that stricken field, that graveyard of our murdered countrymen who were slaughtered one awful September morning (“The Islamic Center,” Aug. 6). If they must build it, let them build it elsewhere and without trying to insult our intelligence by trying to fool us into thinking that it is an act of contrition symbolizing universal outreach and the brotherhood of man, two concepts which are as alien to them as their undiminished ambition of a global caliphate, under the gruesome apparatus of Sharia law, is to the rest of us.
Cantor Ilan Davidson, executive and artistic director of KindredSPIRITS, presented Joel E. Jacob, chair for MAZON: A Jewish Response to Hunger, with a $30,000 check during an Aug. 9 luncheon at Spago in Beverly Hills, hosted by Barbara Lazaroff. MAZON received half of the net proceeds from the June 13 KindredSPIRITS concert at Walt Disney Concert Hall.
Modern folk artist Clare Burson, a Fulbright Scholar who has recorded with T Bone Burnett and performed with Alison Krauss, holds a release show for her new album, “Silver and Ash.” Each track imagines the life of Burson’s grandmother, who was born in Germany in 1919 and escaped one year before the outbreak of World War II. Burson traveled to the childhood homes of her ancestors in Germany, Latvia, Poland, Lithuania and Ukraine for the project, which also speaks to her own struggles with rupture, silence, guilt, empathy and continuity. Rounder Records, JDub Records and Six Points Fellowship for Emerging Jewish Artists cosponsor the event, which is made possible with support from The Jewish Community Foundation of Los Angeles. Mon. $10. 7-10 p.m. Hotel Cafe, 1623 1/2 N. Cahuenga Blvd., Los Angeles. (323) 461-2040. hotelcafe.com.
Jews who call themselves “progressive” and are overwhelmingly in favor of building a $100 million Islamic center and mosque two blocks from Ground Zero need to explain why, 26 years ago, “progressive” Jews were just as adamant in opposing the Catholic convent that was built near Auschwitz.
Here in Pico-Robertson, many of us approach the month of Tishrei with a certain amount of ambivalence, if not culinary dread. Especially this year, when the holiday meals are back to back with Shabbat, we are bracing ourselves for 30 days with — I’m not kidding — at least 20 Thanksgiving-level meals, if you include the High Holy Days, the first and second holidays of Sukkot (eight meals right there) and the weekly Shabbat feasts.
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