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December 22, 2010

Robert ‘Bobby’ Frankel honored

Tom Tugend December 22, 2010

Legendary horse trainer Robert “Bobby” Frankel, a long-time Pacific Palisades resident, is among seven athletes and sports figures elected to the International Jewish Sports Hall of Fame (IJSHOF) for 2011. Frankel, who died a year ago, scored 3,654 first-place victories and his nearly $228 million in career earnings made him the second winningest trainer in horseracing history. He was a five-time recipient of the Eclipse Award for Outstanding Trainer. Among this year’s seven honorees are five Americans, one Briton and one Russian. They will be inducted into the IJSHOF museum, on the campus of Israel’s Wingate Institute, in July 2013.

Calendar picks and clicks: Dec. 25–Jan. 7, 2011

Ryan Torok December 22, 2010

THU | JAN 6 (CURRENT EVENTS) Reza Aslan, the Iranian American author of “No god but God: The Origins, Evolution and Future of Islam” and editor of the recently released anthology “Tablet and Pen: Literary Landscapes From the Modern Middle East,” lectures on “Iran, Israel and The U.S.: Conflict or Cooperation?” Afterward, he discusses the topic with Sinai Temple’s Rabbi David Wolpe and signs copies of his books. Thu. 7:30 p.m. Free. Sinai Temple, 10400 Wilshire Blvd., L.A. (310) 474-1518. sinaitemple.org.

‘Glee’-ful Magevet bringing sound of (Jewish) music to L.A.

Rachel Heller December 22, 2010

They might not have Kurt Hummel or Rachel Berry among their members, but Magevet, Yale University’s Jewish a cappella group, exudes plenty of “glee.” Round them up at a Jewish historical site and they’re liable to belt out a spirited tune. They’ve serenaded passersby on the streets of New York, the beaches of Florida and in the Jewish Quarter in Prague. In fact, there are few places where the New Haven, Conn., group isn’t prone to spontaneous fits of crooning. “We all love to sing, especially with each other, so we burst into song rather often,” Daniel Olson, the club’s student manager, explained.

The sex and me monologues

Mona Eltahawy December 22, 2010

How do you discuss virginity with a class of American university students without the conversation sounding irrelevant to their lives or, worse, an exercise in exoticizing another culture? Women, sex and culture can be a Bermuda Triangle that threatens to demolish discussion through either defensiveness — when students feel compelled to defend a cultural practice — or superiority — when students feel compelled to parade their culture as being above whatever cultural challenges are being discussed. The personal is not only political, but it demolishes that Bermuda Triangle. I got a powerful reminder about that in September when I taught a course on gender and new media in the Middle East, in Oklahoma. We had watched the Lebanese film “Caramel,” directed by and starring Nadine Labaki, as the owner of a Beirut hair salon whose friends and co-workers portray a cross-section of Lebanese female experience.

Facebook blues

David Suissa December 22, 2010

Besides the mandatory Belgian chocolate pretzel challah from Got Kosher?, I always try to bring a little food for thought for my kids to our Friday night Shabbat table — either an interesting story or dvar Torah or an experience I had that week. Last Friday, I decided to bring something I’d read in Tablet magazine on the modern-day obsession with Facebook: “What computers can do is think in code, a series of simple, mathematical statements. Human beings, on the other hand, can imagine and dream, hope and despair, hate and love with all their hearts. When they meet — truly meet, face to face and at leisure — with their friends — true friends, not an assortment of barely recognizable acquaintances living on the periphery of an enormous virtual network — they are capable of subtle wonders. If, instead, they opt for convenience, if they reduce their thoughts to brief posts, if they don’t bother finding out who they really are outside the bounds of their Facebook profiles, they’re doomed to wither into a virtual oblivion.”

The 5 Commandments

Rob Eshman December 22, 2010

Every year I read the copy for our annual Mensch List, and every year I feel like a big loser. The people who make the list are most often unsung heroes, below-the-radar types. They’re not the ones who write the big checks, run the big organizations or draw big salaries. The most common reaction they have when our reporters call to tell them they’ve made the list is, “Why me?” Which just proves why them. This year I can answer that question easily, by example. There’s the 13-year-old who devotes his free time to ending the trade in conflict rare-earth minerals. The two friends who gave up their professional lives to start an organization that gives beauty treatments to cancer patients. The 80-year-old Dutch Holocaust survivor who spends his days digitizing survivors’ photos. When I read the story behind the woman on our cover, Lauri Burns, who picked herself up out of a life of abuse and prostitution and created a haven for at-risk teen foster kids, I immediately logged on to her Web site and sent in a contribution. How could I not?\n

The Mensch List 2010

JewishJournal.com December 22, 2010

This fall, we again put out our call for nominations for our annual list of mensches, and you responded with your usual outpouring of suggestions of amazing people. We face this enormous response only to wonder, once more, how do you choose between a 13-year-old who rallied his entire school to help victims in the Congo and a Holocaust survivor who spends 800 hours a year volunteering at the Simon Wiesenthal Center? (And those are just two who made the cut.)

Letters to the Editor: High-paid Jews, Children’s library, crazy bar mitzvahs

Jewish Journal December 22, 2010

None of the articles in your Dec. 17 issue on the salaries of Jewish leaders (“High-Paid Jew$”) so much as mentions, much less explains, the tax rules that govern compensation for leaders of tax-exempt organizations. These rules, known as intermediate sanctions because their violation leads to excise taxes rather than revocation of exemption, require that such compensation be reasonable. Under the applicable regulations, compensation is reasonable if it “would ordinarily be paid for like services by like enterprises under like circumstances.” The regulations permit boards or compensation committees setting these salaries to consider comparability data not only from tax-exempt organizations, but also from data from taxable organizations, if the organizations are similarly situated and the positions are functionally comparable.

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