Mid Way NBA Report
The world has been taking by storm via Lin-sanity. But we here in the Jewish world, well, we are still waiting for something to spark. Last year, Mark Cuban assembled a NBA championship and won it over Micky Arison. This year we do not have anything near that great of a story….yet. Let’s take a look at how the Jewish NBA looks mid-way through the year.
Miss Los Angeles Chinatown Queen dishes on her Jewish roots
On Jan. 14, the Chinese Chamber of Commerce of Los Angeles crowned Lauren Zhou Weinberger as the 2012 Miss Los Angeles Chinatown Queen. In the pageant’s 47-year history, Weinberger is the first queen with half-Chinese and half-European ancestry.
Weinberger’s father is Jewish and her mother Chinese. And although she identifies and practices as a Christian, the 22-year-old considers herself “a Christian with Jewish values.”
“I was taught the importance of questioning, of using my intellect, of exploring scholastically a lot of the issues that come up,” Weinberger said at a Chinese Chamber-sponsored event held at a factory in the City of Commerce last week. “Doubting and challenging things — that’s very Jewish, and I consider myself to have a very Jewish mentality when it comes to those things.”
For the pageant, along with walking, etiquette and public speaking, Weinberger and the 17 other contestants had their mental chops tested.
“Beauty should not be just perceived as an outside thing,” said Nicki Ung, who took over the reins as executive director of the Chinese Chamber of Commerce of Los Angeles five months ago. “In order to be successful, you have to be intelligent.”
Weinberger graduated from Vanderbilt University with a degree in communications last spring and now works in production on a brand-new TV show that she preferred not to name. In advance of the pageant’s Q-and-A session, she binged on news.
“I was listening to NPR, I was reading CNN, China Daily, I was reading a ton of news articles, every single day, listening to the radio on the way to work,” Weinberger said.
All that preparation for one question.
“The question that I got was about organ donation,” Weinberger said. “Not once had I thought about that.”
She must have answered the question reasonably well — and Weinberger has since put her body where her mouth is.
“On Sunday, I signed up for the registry to donate my bone marrow,” she said last week.
She may wear sparkly earrings and perfectly applied eye makeup, but Weinberger is still new to the role of a queen. In January, she rode on a float with the other five members of the Miss Chinatown Los Angeles Court in this year’s Golden Dragon Parade. The Pasadena native’s previous float-riding experience: one test-ride of a Rose Parade float. A former cross-country runner, Weinberger said she felt very much at ease bestowing medals in the Firecracker 10K footrace in Chinatown in early February.
But certain encounters — such as a recent event where she and her court met with dozens of young girls adopted from China by Los Angeles-area families, many of them Jewish — have begun to show Weinberger just how weighty the task of being a role model to young women can be, especially for someone wearing a crown.
“Older people may look at the tiara as a symbol of the pageant or whatever,” Weinberger said. “But the younger girls, they looked up to it, and that’s really changed my perspective of moving forward, of what my reign is going to be.”
While she’s fulfilling her duties as an ambassador for Los Angeles’ Chinese-American community, Weinberger is also hoping to use the year as a chance to learn more about the person she’d like to become, the identity she’d like to craft.
Of course, that identity will be hybrid.
“I wouldn’t say that I am closer to one side or the other,” Weinberger said, “but I’ve definitely used parts of each to make who I am.”
Miss Los Angeles Chinatown Queen dishes on her Jewish roots Read More »
El Al employees share brighter side of Israel
As most people who care about Israel know, it’s difficult to have conversations about the Jewish homeland without broaching the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
This is why StandWithUs, a pro-Israel organization that focuses on on-campus advocacy, along with the Jewish Agency for Israel and Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, recently launched an initiative involving employees of Israel’s seldom-discussed private business sector in leading discussions around the world that are focused on the brighter side of Israel — the food, the partying, the in-your-face feel-good vibe of Israelis.
The program, dubbed Blue and White El Al Ambassadors, brings pilots and flight attendants who work for El Al airlines, one of Israel’s largest private companies, to visit college campuses, synagogues, Federation programs — even churches — around the world for informal conversations with students, congregants and others over Israeli chow.
During their layover in Los Angeles on Feb. 15, flight attendants Danny Young, 25, of Tel Aviv; Hagay Ashkenazi, 45, of Har Adar; Noa Renert, 50, of Reut; and Efrat Rael-Brook, in her late 30s, of Ra’anana, spoke with approximately 25 California State University, Northridge (CSUN), students at the university’s Hillel. The brainchild of El Al CEO Elyezer Shkedy, the program has enlisted approximately 60 staff members of El Al, out of hundreds who applied, who have volunteered to be cultural ambassadors for Israel. Since starting approximately three months ago, they have participated in nearly 30 events, in New York, New Jersey, Toronto and elsewhere, said Alon Futterman, development director at the Jewish Agency and the director of Blue and White El Al Ambassadors.
“What we would like to do, through this program, is talk about other sides of Israel that we feel people are not talking about enough, sides that are not related to the Arab-Israeli conflict,” Futterman said.
Young, who’s originally from London, shared stories about acclimating to life in Israel, including an incident in a bathroom on a train, where, unable to read the Hebrew, he pressed the button for the alarm believing it to be the flusher; Ashkenazi, who’s gay, discussed coming out of the closet in Israel and meeting his life partner in a club in Jerusalem — that partner, who is also a flight attendant, sat in the audience at CSUN. Renert, who has three adult daughters, opened up about her decision years ago to switch careers from being a therapist to a flight attendant. And Rael-Brook told the crowd how she met her husband, more than 10 years ago, on an El Al flight — he was a somewhat unruly passenger, she joked.
On Feb. 13, the flight attendants gave a similar talk at UCLA Hillel, and on Feb. 17, they appeared briefly during Shabbat services at Beverly Hills Temple of the Arts.
El Al employees share brighter side of Israel Read More »
A celebration of women visionaries
A rich but provocative irony suffuses Angella M. Nazarian’s latest book, “Pioneers of the Possible: Celebrating Visionary Women of the World” (Assouline: $45).
Recent headlines across the world, in America no less than Israel and the Islamic world, confirm that women are hardly secure in their right to live their lives as they choose,
or even in their right to decide matters of marriage, health, reproduction and career. Indeed, the same point is powerfully made in an exhibit now on display at the Skirball Cultural Center titled “Women Hold Up Half the Sky,” which identifies gender equality as “the human rights issue of our time.”
Yet Nazarian is celebrating the fact that, for some women in some places, the opposite is also true. “Today, perhaps more than any other time in modern history, women feel empowered to follow their true callings,” she writes in “Pioneers of the Possible. “[N]o matter where we are headed, learning about the lives of pioneering women is an inspiring way to honor who we are and to encourage each other toward greater possibilities and deeper lives.”
To illustrate her point, she has selected 20 stirring success stories of women, some living and some deceased, who have made a difference in our world. The list includes writers, artists, politicians, performers, spiritual leaders, business moguls, architects, athletes and activists, each offered as a role model for women who want to make a difference. “Each one has her own special way of expressing her spirit — whether through painting, politics, environmentalism, architecture or esthetics,” explains Nazarian. “Every one imagined what did not yet exist — but might someday.”
Story continues after the jump.
It doesn’t take long before Linda and George make a mad dash out of there and drive straight back to…
Elysium…where after a little debate, they decide that this place is home. A home that includes a very different life-style…that eventually makes Linda and George question…how free they really want to be.
Director and writer David Wain along with co-writer Ken Marino have populated their script with a lot of very funny bits as well as wonderful, colorful characters…including Alan Alda, Justin Theroux as the self-appointed Guru/ladies man, Lauren Ambrose, Kathryn Hahn, Malin Akerman and nudist Joe Lo Truglio, just to name a few.
Is ‘Wanderlust’ a film with a big, deep message…?…Not really, but it is a movie that will definitely entertain you. At least it did that for me and that’s why I gave it 3 1/2 bagels out of 5.
Check out our video to see how many bagels John, the other half of ‘Two Jews On Film’ gave ‘Wanderlust’ and what he thought of it.
Two Jews on Film: ‘Wanderlust’ review [VIDEO] Read More »