The Guardian newspaper retracted its claim that Tel Aviv is the capital of Israel after a watchdog group filed a lawsuit against Britain\’s Press Complaints Commission.
Around 2,500 people turned out for the citywide Siyum HaShas celebration at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion Aug. 1. The event marked the completion of the seven-and-a-half year cycle of daily Talmud study known as Daf Yomi.
After seven and a half years of daily study, my voyage through the sea of Talmud ended with these words, as approximately 90,000 Jews filled every seat of MetLife Stadium in New Jersey to celebrate the completion of Daf Yomi in an event called the 12th Siyum HaShas. My voyage began with a miracle, and ended in transformation.
My childhood best friend was Billy Thein. We met at Encino Elementary School in Mrs. Bernstein’s third-grade class, and were pretty much inseparable after that. Billy was funny and smart and cool — and in a public school packed with the striving, anxious, gawkward spawn of suburban Jewry, cool stood out.
There are two ways to look at the Obama administration’s decision to exclude Israel from its global anti-terrorism initiative. If you recall, when Secretary of State Hillary Clinton traveled to Istanbul last month to convene the Global Counterterrorism Forum, the group of invitees included 29 countries and the European Union — but not Israel.
It is a given among liberal and progressive Jews that gun ownership among the general population is a bad thing. The ideal is near-universal disarmament with only a handful of individual exceptions and, of course, the police.
Ten years ago this month a little- known Iranian dissident group — the National Council of Resistance of Iran — held a news conference in Washington, D.C. to present a finding that sent shock waves around the world: Iran had under construction two covert nuclear facilities — a large underground enrichment plant in Natanz and a heavy-water instillation in Arak — that, in time, could serve a nuclear weapons program.
I met Laurie through another single peep, Katie. They were eating breakfast at one of my favorite breakfast spots, Hugo’s in West Hollywood. Try the El Desayuno Burrito De La Casa. It’s less complicated than it sounds on paper. So is Laurie. She lives in Brentwood. She has two dogs — Maltese mixes. Her ideal is to meet a man and “live on the Westside forever.”
Consider the artichoke for a moment. It is an odd but instructive vegetable. An artichoke is prickly and surrounded by an armor of leaves protecting the soft center, the heart of the food. Boiling or steaming it loosens the protective leaves, permitting you to pick them off one by one, unwrapping the delicious gift that lies inside.
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