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December 22, 2010
The city of lights at its darkest hour
Adolf Hitler may have been bloody in tooth and claw, but he was enough of an aesthete to understand that Paris was the center of gravity for European culture. On the only visit he made to the city during World War II, he went sightseeing like any other tourist, then or now. Still, the open-mindedness that made Paris so appealing to artists, writers and intellectuals from around the world inspired only contempt in the führer. “Does the spiritual health of the French people matter to you?” he remarked to architect Albert Speer. “Let’s let them degenerate. All the better for us.”
Lovitz, lies and Torah
“I hate lying,” Jon Lovitz, the comedian, actor and comedy club owner, said without a touch of humor in his voice. “I just can’t stand it. I don’t see the advantage of it. It makes me physically ill.” It’s the reason, he said, that he has become something of a specialist in portraying characters who are truth-challenged, or, in his words, “sleazy.” He was Tommy Flanagan, president of Pathological Liars Anonymous, on “Saturday Night Live”; the guy on “Seinfeld” who fibs about having cancer, then dies in a car crash; a loudmouth baseball scout who steals scenes from Tom Hanks in “A League of Their Own”; the voice of an obnoxious movie reviewer in the animated series “The Critic”; and the father, in the film “Rat Race,” who tells his family they are on a minivan “vacation” when he is actually trying to win $2 million in a cross-country dash.
How the Hai-Bar animals were rescued from fire
Persian fallow deer now graze peacefully in their enclosures at the Carmel Hai-Bar Nature Reserve as ranger/caretaker Yakoub Makladeh feeds them nutritional pellets from a metal bucket. Earlier this month, the lives of these rare animals were in jeopardy for four days as flames from Israel’s historic Carmel fire threatened the reserve nestled in the mountains outside Haifa. The vulture cage was destroyed; flames licked the fences of the deer enclosures, and the surrounding terrain is now ashen. “Thursday, Dec. 2, around 11 a.m., we saw smoke coming from the direction of Isfiya, a Druze village south of our Hai-Bar location,” Makladeh remembers. “The animals already sensed something was wrong and were acting nervous.”
SoCal soccer stars bound for Aussie Maccabi Games
They are united by country, religion and their love of the beautiful game. Four young men from Southern California will represent the United States as members of the open men’s soccer team at the second Maccabi Australia International Games in Sydney, Dec. 26 through Jan. 2. And they will take the soccer pitch together, along with teammates from across the country, to challenge for the gold medal and national pride. They have taken divergent paths to the field.
A lawyer’s personal investment in Mideast peace
Josef Avesar is a soft-spoken lawyer with a wife and four children, but for the past six years he has spent most of his time and a considerable amount of his own money on an all-consuming project: to establish an Israeli-Palestinian Confederation (IPC) and break the interminable impasse between the two groups. Unlike another dreamer, Theodor Herzl, the father of modern Zionism who in 1897 foresaw, amid widespread derision, that in 50 years there would be a Jewish state, Avesar is more circumspect in his predictions. In 2006, speaking before a UCLA audience, Avesar asserted that his vision had a 5 percent chance of becoming reality in his lifetime, but he was more optimistic in a recent interview.
Schools go to war with Nazi-insignia clothing company
Will T-shirts and other items bearing logos and designs resembling World War II Nazi insignia become the latest fashion trend in an Inland Empire school district? Clothes by the Irvine company Metal Mulisha are currently banned by the Murrieta Valley Unified School District, but the company wants back in. This won’t happen if Rabbi Barry Ulrych, a child of Holocaust survivors, can prevent it. His 80-family synagogue, B’nai Chaim of Murrieta, was founded in the 1970s by Jews living near Murrieta Hot Springs, many of them Holocaust survivors. The congregation is located in the middle of the school district, and many of the congregation’s children attend district schools.
Early bird deadline for LimmudLA
Israeli reggae/rock, the New Testament taught by a Jewish Orthodox scholar, Reform social action, art, cooking, dance, yoga, technology, archaeology, literature and film — all this may sound unrelated, a little too something-for-everyone — but these all will be among the offerings at the upcoming LimmudLA taking place over President’s Day weekend in February. It’s all part of what makes the four-day conference so powerful, organizers say. “There is a whole universe of people who have decided Judaism is X, and there is no better place to kind of get an eye-opener of what the wider potential is than at this conference,” said Caroline Kelly, chair of LimmudLA.
The Brothers Wolpe talk bioethics at Sinai Temple
On Sunday morning, Dec. 12, near the end of his weekend-long stay as a scholar-in-residence at Sinai Temple, bioethicist Dr. Paul Root Wolpe was asked by Rabbi David Wolpe to give a few quick responses to some of the most challenging contemporary bioethical dilemmas. “No,” Dr. Wolpe replied, provoking laughter from the nearly 300 people in attendance. “I can’t give quick responses; I’m a Wolpe.” Dr. Wolpe is professor of bioethics and Jewish bioethics at Emory University as well as senior bioethicist for NASA and the first national bioethics adviser to Planned Parenthood of America. He had already delivered two talks to his brother’s congregation on Shabbat, so one highlight of Sunday’s breakfast was a picture-heavy PowerPoint presentation, which included quite a few photographs of genetically and otherwise engineered animals. He started with hybrids like the beefalo, the zorse (zebra-horse), the cama (camel-lama), the geep (sheep-goat) and, much to the delight of fans of “Napoleon Dynamite,” the liger (lion-tiger). Later, he showed pictures of mice, kittens, pigs, puppies and monkeys that, thanks to some genetic material from jellyfish and deep-sea coral, had been engineered to glow in the dark.\n
Israeli firefighters, underfunded heroes
Amir Levy, fire chief of the Western Galilee, remembers encountering a little girl in an elevator while he was training in the United States a year ago. She looked at him admiringly, commenting to her mother how firefighters are heroes. “That’s not the reaction we were used to getting in Israel,” Levy told an audience of 250, including Los Angeles city officials and the morning shift of the Beverly Hills Fire Department, at an executive breakfast meeting of the Jewish National Fund (JNF) on Dec. 14 at the Beverly Hilton. Following the inferno in the Carmel forests earlier this month that left 44 dead, Israel’s firefighters are now getting recognition as heroes — but heroes whose skill and bravery are undermined by insufficient resources.
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