The roof of Yuval Bar-Zemer’s condo is a very nice place to be. It’s mid-summer, and a grape arbor thick with leaves and hard green fruit winds along one side of it. There’s a pond, fig trees, several raised beds filled with herbs and vegetables, and, just around the corner, a swimming pool.
When 13-year-old Gosha got into a violent fight with some local kids, the police gave him a choice: live with an incriminating police record, which would prevent him from serving in the Israel Defense Forces, or enroll in Yedidim, an organization that runs programs for new immigrant children and marginalized at-risk youth.
On a recent sunny afternoon, City of Hope, a National Cancer Institute-designated Comprehensive Cancer Center, celebrated the unveiling of its newly restored campus synagogue. Now dubbed the La Kretz House of Hope, the chapel has been renamed for philanthropist Morton La Kretz, who donated $1 million toward the project in 2009.
Rabbi Morris (Moshe) Rubinstein, who served as rabbi of Valley Beth Israel in Sun Valley from 1972-2000, died July 24 at 78.
A flood of money brought in by prominent national political action committees has become the norm in this year’s U.S. Senate race in Ohio, which pits first-term incumbent Sherrod Brown, a Democrat, against Republican Josh Mandel, the state treasurer and a Jewish Iraq war veteran.
The Skirball screens four documentaries that address the richness, complexity and inherent contradictions of the Jewish experience in the modern age.
“Nobody in this world thinks they’re having enough sex,” said director David Frankel, whose film “Hope Springs” spotlights a beleaguered 60-something couple played by Meryl Streep and Tommy Lee Jones. “Watch any night on television, or any comedian in a nightclub, and every other joke is about people who aren’t getting enough. It’s true of people Meryl and Tommy’s age, and it’s true of teenagers — everybody thinks somebody else is doing it more.”
We all assume, and for good reason, that the prime minister of Israel would probably want Mitt Romney to get elected, instead of having to deal with a free-of-political-considerations second-term President Barack Obama.
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