U.S. Jewish groups condemned rulings by rabbis in the Israeli city of Bnei Brak that ban residents from renting apartments to African refugees.
The pianist François Chouchan has nothing against contemporary music, but for the first season of the monthly chamber music series Le Salon de Musiques, he and co-artistic director violinist Phillip Levy have filled all eight concerts with masterpieces of the Western classical canon.
Among the many tragedies of the so-called “clash of civilizations” is the fact that we have been blinded to the richness and diversity of the cultures of the Middle East. “[T]here is no such thing as a monolithic ‘Muslim world,’ “ argues Reza Aslan in “Tablet & Pen: Literary Landscapes From the Modern Middle East” (Norton: $35), “save perhaps in the imaginations of some in the West.”
With the news that two bombs sent from Yemen were addressed to Jewish communal organizations in Chicago, it would be easy to imagine that Jews are uniquely positioned in the crosshairs of a global movement of radical Islam. And with newspaper headlines about Israel following every shift in Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s position on whether to reinstate a freeze on Israeli settlement building in what is to be the territory of a future Palestinian state, one might think that Israel and the Palestinians are at the center of the global Islamic consciousness.
The Los Angeles Police Department-sponsored carnival that took over three blocks of Pico Boulevard Nov. 12-14 got an enthusiastic reception from local Jewish parents. The reaction from businesses on those blocks was decidedly more mixed, particularly from those under Jewish ownership.
On Nov. 11, in an event that felt like a combination political rally, cocktail party and parlor meeting, about 200 Angelenos and a number of local elected officials gathered at the Taglyan Cultural Center in Hollywood to launch the local Los Angeles chapter of J Street.
In Parashat Vayishlach, Ya’akov is returning home. Twenty years earlier, he tricked his father, stole the blessing from his brother, Esav, and ran away. For 20 years he has held onto the hope that, given time, Esav’s anger would abide.
In the Los Angeles Jewish world, the Sephardic Jewish community stands out for two things: its stylishness and its separateness.
At the opening class of “Day of Kabbalah,” Rabbi David Sacks of the Happy Minyan talked about the mysteries of the letter aleph, which he called “the Gateway to Infinity.” Sacks’ talk was filled with what those unfamiliar with the subject imagine kabbalah to be: mystical ruminations based on numerology, seeing the entire cosmos in its microcosmic elements, repeated references to “the unity of all things.”
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