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Jewish Journal

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October 10, 2012

A journalist’s perspective

Leave a Comment / Blogs, Cover Story, Opinion /

Why are you asking so many questions and wanting to write about our community in the newspaper? Why do people care about Iranian Jews in Los Angeles? Do you really think you’re accomplishing anything by writing about our triumphs and failures in the newspaper?

These and other intense questions were often fired at me by local Iranian Jews, starting about 12 years ago, when I first set out to report on this very special community. It is my community, and traditionally it has been very tight-knit and intentionally private, closed off to outsiders. But it includes an array of individuals with many stories and a very rich background. As a son of this community whose parents fled Iran’s fundamentalist Islamic regime more than three decades ago, I nevertheless felt called to share the beauty of Southern California’s Iranian-Jewish heritage.

In my opinion, the Iranian-Jewish immigration to the United States represents, perhaps, one of the greatest sociological experiments of the 20th century. It is the story of what happens when you uproot one of the world’s oldest Jewish communities, a group that was deeply rooted in Iran for centuries, and then transplant it into the United States — one of the most advanced and dynamic modern societies in the world. Who would have thought that this immigrant community could, in such a short time span, blossom and successfully acculturate as it has in the United States in slightly more than three decades?

I feel tremendously blessed to have had the unique opportunity of sharing some of the local Iranian Jewish community’s incredible accomplishments in business, the arts, philanthropy, literature, politics, education, medicine, real estate and contributions to the betterment of Southern California. For example, if you just venture into downtown Los Angeles’ garment or jewelry districts, you will find that a vast majority of businesses are owned by Iranian Jews. Local elected officials often point to the fact that downtown Los Angeles has gone through a tremendous transformation during the last three decades, with billion-dollar industries thriving in neighborhoods that once were blighted.

This is largely the result of Iranian-American Jewish entrepreneurship. Iranian-Jewish families, such as the Delijanis and others, have invested heavily in downtown’s real estate and the revitalization of the area’s historic Broadway district. And, at the same time, some members of the Nazarian family have shown extraordinary entrepreneurship in the community. The Nazarians are among the major shareholders in the telecommunications giant Qualcomm, and they own major hotels and nightclubs throughout Los Angeles. There’s also the Orange County-based Merage family, which in 2002 sold its privately held corporation, Chef America (maker of the popular Hot Pockets frozen foods), to Nestle for $2.6 billion. These and countless other Iranian-Jewish entrepreneurs have, without doubt, contributed significantly to the economic vitality of Southern California.

Iranian Jews have not been successful only in business; many from the community have also pursued higher education in medicine, architecture, the law, engineering and various sectors of academia. You need only to walk into any of a handful of Los Angeles-area hospitals, including Cedars-Sinai, UCLA, Los Angeles County-USC Medical Center or St. John’s Health Center to encounter Iranian-Jewish physicians in almost any specialty you can imagine. It is no secret that Southern California’s Iranian Jews are perhaps one of the most highly educated immigrant communities because of their families’ strong emphasis on the importance of education.

Area universities also have countless Iranian-Jewish scientists and researchers, among them the prestigious City of Hope medical facility in Duarte, which regularly boasts of having in its ranks Dr. Samuel Rahbar, a leading endocrinologist who is on the brink of finding a cure for some types of diabetes.

In recent years, Iranian-Jewish writers Gina Nahai, Angella M. Nazarian and  Roya Hakakian have received international acclaim for their books in English, which often reveal aspects of the community’s personal struggles in moving from the traditions of Iran into the United States. And, yes, even celebrity Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, who is currently a candidate for U.S. Congress in New Jersey, has written countless best-selling books and appeared on television programs, is half Iranian-Jewish.

With Hollywood close by, the community also has entered the entertainment industry, and Iranian-Jewish film producer Bob Yari is one of the success stories. In 2006, Yari’s film “Crash” won the Academy Award for Best Picture. More than a dozen local Iranian-Jewish actors in recent years also have appeared in countless major films and television programs, including the popular suspense drama “24.” 

Local Iranian Jews also have ventured into politics and fully embraced American democracy since their exile. Most notable was Jimmy Delshad, a businessman who became the first Iranian Jew elected to public office in the United States when, in 2003, he became a Beverly Hills city councilman. Then, in 2007, he made national news when he became that city’s mayor. Delshad left public office last year,  but now Beverly Hills has two Iranian-Jewish city commissioners. Likewise, in 2008, Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa appointed Iranian-Jewish attorney H. David Nahai to be the general manager of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power. For a time, Nahai oversaw one of the largest public utilities in the country.

A new, younger generation of Iranian-American Jews — many of them born in the United States — formed the organization 30 Years After (30YA) nearly five years ago, and it quickly became one of the community’s most successful civic and political nonprofit groups, mobilizing Iranian Jews in Los Angeles and New York to become more engaged in the U.S. political process.

Interestingly enough, the younger generation of Iranian-Jewish professionals in recent years has been at the forefront of sharing their parents’ and grandparents’ countless stories of escape from the persecution of Iran’s fundamentalist Islamic regime. That narrative has been critical in helping other Americans to better understand the threat that the current Iranian regime poses to the rest of the free world.

In 2009, I remember being given the opportunity to interview family members and close friends of Habib Elghanian, the late leader of the Jewish community in Iran, who was executed by Iran’s Islamic regime in 1979 on trumped-up charges of spying for Israel and the United States. Hearing their bone-chilling stories of the circumstances surrounding Elghanian’s execution made me realize how his murder became a primary catalyst for thousands of Jews to flee Iran after the revolution.  

For all of the Iranian-Jewish community’s financial and academic success, local Iranian Jews have, over the last three decades, not forgotten their strong Jewish roots. You cannot walk into any of the major Los Angeles-area synagogues, among them Stephen S. Wise Temple, Sinai Temple, Tifereth Israel Sephardic Temple and Valley Beth Shalom, without encountering local Iranian Jews who make up a substantial portion of these congregations.

I often ask myself what would have happened to many of these local synagogues today if the Iranian Jews had never immigrated to this city? Perhaps Los Angeles’ robust Jewish community would not have been as strong as it is today. For instance, Pico-Robertson and Encino are now among the most vibrant Jewish areas in Los Angeles as a result of a large segment of Iranian Jews living and working there.

And this also has led Iranian Jews living in both West Los Angeles and in the San Fernando Valley to establish more than two dozen synagogues of their own. Both big and small, many of these Iranian synagogues operate from store-front properties all along Ventura Boulevard, while, at the same time, many in the community are still drawn to lavish synagogues, including the Nessah Synagogue in the heart of Beverly Hills. 

Over the last 30 years, Southern California’s Iranian Jews also have set up and funded many of their own nonprofit groups, including the Hope Foundation, the Jewish Unity Network (JUN), the SIAMAK organization, and others, to support Iranian-Jewish families struggling financially. In recent years, younger Iranian Jews have been giving back to the larger community in Los Angeles by donating money, time and energy to nonprofits dealing with the homeless and to local law enforcement, such as a the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department.

In 2005, Iranian-Jewish businessman Paul Merage gifted the University of California, Irvine, business school with a $30 million endowment, the largest in university history. The Merage family also donated $3 million to the Jewish Community Center of Orange County, which bears the family’s name, and supported the Orange County Performing Arts Center as well as the Second Harvest Food Bank in Orange County. 

After encountering firsthand the horrors of Iran’s 1979 Islamic Revolution, Southern California’s Iranian Jewry has made support for Israel a paramount concern over the decades. A large segment of local Iranian Jews has been involved with a host of philanthropic causes related to Israel, through Hadassah, the Jewish National Fund, Israel Bonds, Friends of the Israel Defense Forces and the many universities based in Israel.

In the late 1980s, it was a group of Southern California’s Iranian Jews that established the widely successful Magbit Foundation, which has since provided millions of dollars in interest-free loans to cash-strapped college students in Israel. The Iranian-Jewish Y&S Nazarian Family Foundation also has donated extensively to an array of higher-education institutes in Israel, and in the last few years, also funded the establishment of an Israel Policy Center at UCLA. The Iranian-Jewish Merage Foundation over the years has provided endowments to universities in Israel, and, since 2004, has helped fund the Ayalim Association’s program in Israel that is slowly establishing various new settlement blocs in the Negev and Galilee regions of the country. In 2010 the SIAMAK organization launched and funded Project Jacob, a revolutionary new program to nurture and develop innovative medical, high-tech and alternative energy research at Israel’s Ben-Gurion University.

Despite Southern California’s Iranian-Jewish community’s success and generous philanthropy, the community has not been immune to an array of problems. Community activists such as JUN’s Dara Abaei will attest to the difficulties some local young Iranian Jews today face with the sale and use of illegal drugs. I remember reporting on the tragic story of three young Iranian-Jewish men who were killed in a West Hollywood apartment during a drug deal that went bad in August 2010.

There are also families struggling with issues of spousal abuse and alcoholism. There are a number of poverty-stricken Iranian-Jewish families, who, over the last four years, were hit hard by the bad economy. Some are on the verge of homelessness. No doubt the few Ponzi schemes allegedly carried out by Iranian-Jewish businessmen in recent years — against their own community members here in Los Angeles — have wiped out the finances of hundreds of families and destroyed the long-standing trust that many Iranian Jews once had in one another. 

Covering these stories of difficulties faced by local Iranian Jews has been personally heart-wrenching for me, and not easy to write about, because the community has a long-standing, albeit unspoken, taboo of not airing its dirty laundry in public. Many feel their reputations in the community will be destroyed, or the “authorities” will come after them for speaking out, as had been the case for them in Iran. 

I will never forget two years ago, when I first reported on the community’s businessmen involved in the alleged Ponzi schemes, and I was approached by a 79-year-old Iranian-Jewish grandmother who overheard me interviewing one of the victims. With tears in her eyes, she grabbed my arm and said to me,  “They’ve stolen $100,000 of my entire life savings, which I brought out of Iran with great difficulty — I am so ashamed because I have nothing and have to live with my children. Why won’t any of the local rabbis or leaders tell them to at least pay back the money they took from us old people?” 

I had no answer for this poor, old woman but I believed it was important to cover this story in order to shed light on the suffering of the victims instead of trying to sweep the issue under the rug, because this community needs to face its demons and find real solutions to help people. The local community also has  struggled in recent years with not having a base of strong leaders and serious activists to properly address the continually evolving issues of Jewish immigration from Iran, social problems within families and creating a closer overall cooperation with the larger Jewish community through the Los Angeles Jewish Federation.

My reporting has focused on many of these significant accomplishments and changing elements within the local Iranian-Jewish community, and as a journalist I don’t mean to boast about them. Yet I cannot help but feel a tremendous amount of pride for how this 2,700-year-old community has remained vibrant in this new world, yet held steadfast to its Jewish identity and continued to grow and thrive. Who would have thought that a Jewish community that once lived for centuries as second-class citizens in Iran, and that faced unimaginable persecution, would one day be thriving in a country that represents the greatest democracy on Earth? The story of the Iranian-American Jews continues to amaze me. With its mix of ancient history and rich traditions, and its embrace of a whole new, modern world, it is a community that I truly love and respect. 

My only hope is to continue to have the opportunity to share Iranian Jewry’s remarkable story in the coming years.

Learn more about L.A.’s Iranian-Jewish community by visiting Karmel Melamed’s blog at jewishjournal.com/iranianamericanjews.

Iranian Jews: The art, culture and history

A journalist’s perspective Read More »

Under the Tehran sky

Leave a Comment / Cover Story, Worldwide /

Yom Kippur 2010. The part of the synagogue where I sit is full of women talking with one another, and small kids giggling and playing around. It is extremely hot, and the extra layers of manteau (long outerwear) and the scarf covering my hair add to the intolerable heat.

I try to grab a prayer book for Yom Kippur and concentrate on reading the prayers, but to hear the rabbi, who doesn’t use a microphone on Yom Kippur, amid the constant murmurs of the chitchatting women is almost impossible. But everything seems and sounds so familiar. This is what I grew up with. So now, about 10 years after leaving, I am back home, back in Tehran.

When I left Iran on an early-morning flight in 2001, the minute the airplane started to fly under the star-filled sky of Tehran, even as I was trying hard to hold back my tears, I made a pledge that one day I would come back. Living in Iran as Jews obviously was not as easy as it is in the United States. Sometimes we were afraid of revealing ourselves to be Jewish specifically because of a political situation in Israel. We had to separate ourselves from Israel, stating that Jews and Judaism are different from Israel and Zionism. But my family was never persecuted because of being Jewish. I always wanted to return, at least for a visit, so now, on my flight back a decade later, as the plane touched down, my heart pounded so hard that I could hear it in my ears. Was I dreaming? A short while later, the voice of the officer at passport control saying, “Welcome back,” cast away my doubt. 

The taxi driver who drove my family to my parents’ home — including my husband, me and our two daughters, ages 4  1/2 and 2 — was speeding so fast that I felt the vehicle was going to fly.  My parent are, essentially, my only remaining relatives in my country, and this was the first time my father was going to see my younger daughter. 

The streets of Tehran seemed different, with so many new roads. Even the airport was not the one that I had departed from. I felt like one of the “Companions of the Cave”; a story from Persian literature about a group of youths who fall asleep in a cave and wake up after 300 years to see that everything has changed.

The money had changed, too, and some coins are now worthless. The price of a magazine or bread was not even close to what I paid 10 years before. It took me a while to learn to decipher the currency, with so many zeros behind the first number. Sometimes it was easier to read the Arabic numeral on the back of the bill, which gave a clue to its dollar worth. For example 1,000,000 rials was now worth almost $100, and you could read the number 100 in Arabic on the back of that bill. (Iran’s currency has since declined in value to almost one-fourth of what it was when I lived there, much of the loss because of recent sanctions.)

Even the street I grew up on was different. There was no trace of the single-family houses with pools and big backyards anymore. All I could see on my street, and later, to my surprise, throughout the whole city, were tall apartment buildings. But the old, three-story apartment in the west part of Tehran where I lived for my whole life before I left, was almost the same, except for a little remodeling my dad had done.

Taxis offered us the best form of transportation, although the newly constructed underground metro was an option. Driving between lane lines didn’t mean anything here, and drivers honked at each other all the time. I decided I could never drive in a city like this. (To see a car marked “Women’s Taxi” was the last thing I would have imagined, but the sign indicated that the driver was a woman and was allowed to pick up women traveling solo.) 

We always tried to speak pure Farsi, although we could hear a lot of new words and slang that we weren’t familiar with, but often, our kids speaking English would reveal our foreignness. It took us a few days to get used to the smog. When we first arrived, I thought something was on fire until I realized it was simply air pollution. As a friend told me sarcastically, “This is one of our improvements. Tehran is one of the top polluted cities in the world.”

Despite all this, my hometown of Tehran is still beautiful. Trees, hundreds of years old,  on both sides of one of the main streets stretched their branches toward each other, making a lovely, tall, green tunnel. The streets were full of young faces of men and women, so many that an older person was barely noticeable. Although it was against the law, you could see so many young women wearing heavy makeup, nail polish and colorful, tight manteaus; and young men wore the latest European hairstyles and clothing. Their connections to fashion, and more generally to the outside world, came mostly through the more than 300 European and Asian TV channels available via satellite in almost every home. Although many international Web sites are blocked or filtered, software programs have been secretly invented and sold within the populace, allowing access to the blocked sites.

The price of food at restaurants, or uncooked meat and chicken at the supermarkets, was almost the same as what we pay here in the United States.  You could always hear people complaining about the inflation, but, surprisingly enough, the shops and expensive restaurants were packed with people. I also saw expensive and luxurious imported European and Japanese cars on streets; owners must have purchased the vehicles, including an added 100 percent import tax, because there is no such thing as leasing a car in Iran. 

Yet it is also clear that sanctions have added to people’s difficulties — one day, when I tried to simply access my PayPal account from an Internet cafe, an alert window popped up reading: “You are trying to access this account from a banned country.” And you could hear those fashionable kids debating and discussing political, philosophical and religious issues on streets, in coffee shops, in Internet cafes and at almost any gathering. Sadly, there were also stories of drugs and addiction. I was surprised to hear that even in the Jewish community, drug addiction has been an issue. 

The Jewish community of Iran, estimated to be between 10,000 and 20,000, is mostly concentrated in Tehran. A few other big cities are home to Jewish families as well, but compared to the approximately 120,000 Jews who were living there before 1979, it’s a minuscule number. There remain quite a number of synagogues in Tehran, which were filled with people during the High Holy Days when my family visited. Several of my Jewish friends, whom I hadn’t seen for so long, were now married, had kids and, despite the political rumors, were trying to live their lives peacefully in their native country. 

Ten years away seemed quite long, and now some of the boys and girls I’d known during my years at Tehran’s Jewish student organization had become top authorities and leaders of the Iranian-Jewish community. My family got a chance to meet with two young Jewish artists, brothers who had moved from their hometown of Isfahan to go to art school in Tehran, and were now residing in a small unit attached to an old synagogue in the north of Tehran. Dana Nehdaran was a painter who had become known for his “Mona Lisa”-
inspired artworks; Dariush, his younger brother, was a photographer. 

We also visited an art gallery in a wealthy neighborhood of Tehran, where amazing paintings were priced as high as $20,000; we were told that the gallery was owned by an Iranian Jew in Los Angeles. Visiting my former work colleagues at Ettela’at, Iran’s premier print-media conglomerate, was another dream come true. I had worked there as a journalist for 10 years, from when I was only 16 until I left the country. On my return, I surprised my boss, entering his office with my husband and two kids. 

The Jewish day school where I spent almost all of my childhood school years was still the same, located just steps away from the University of Tehran. It still had the same old brick walls, the same old windows opening onto the street that we took any chance to peek at, and the same blue sign that reads: “Etefagh school complex.”

And finally, in the south part of the city, which consists mostly of low-income, traditional and religious citizens of Tehran, a huge building with a blue sign caught my eye. The sign reads: “Love your fellow as yourself,” in Hebrew and Farsi. This sign is on the entrance of the Sapir Hospital, a Jewish-funded hospital and charity center in Tehran founded more than 50 years ago that serves many low-income patients, free of charge, no matter what their religion.

My return to Tehran left me feeling proud, and rooted, as a Persian Jew.

Iranian Jews: The art, culture and history

Under the Tehran sky Read More »

‘Feel the rhythm’ of Jamaica’s Judaism [PHOTOS]

Leave a Comment / Mobile, Mobile-Homepage, News, Travel, Worldwide /

The first thing you notice at Shaare Shalom Congregation in Kingston, Jamaica is the sand on the floor, softening the sound of your footsteps as you take your seat. You bend down and let the grains, smooth-gritty, run through your fingers. Is there some meaning in it, a reference to the 40 years the ancient Israelites wandered in the desert? 

Hurricane season is in full swing, so it’s hot and humid, with occasional thunder, the tail-end of tropical storm Isaac passing by; but inside the stately chapel, it’s comfortable: The large windows of the 100-year-old building are wide open, and overhead fans keep the place airy. 

There are 40 worshippers, and it’s a diverse group: Most are white, some are black, others are shades in between, as well as one of Asian descent. This feels natural for a country where most of the population is non-white, where there’s been a mingling of ethnic groups, and where marriage, or at least romance, between different races has been going on for hundreds of years.

Shaare Shalom Congregation, also known as the United Congregation of Israelites, is the last active synagogue in Jamaica. Its services seem familiar yet exotic, like the congregants themselves: a mix of Sephardi and Ashkenazi, Orthodox and Reform, English spoken with that distinctive Jamaican lilt, and prayers sung beautifully in Hebrew by a man and woman, both of African descent.

In the social hall next to Shaare Shalom’s sanctuary, Ainsley Henriques, 74-year-old doyen of Jamaica’s Jewish community, proudly points to an exhibition of centuries of Jamaican Jewish life. Displays show contributions made in commerce, art, politics, journalism, medicine and law.

Henriques says that nowadays, there are only about 250 people left on Jamaica who self-identify as Jews (less than one-hundredth of 1 percent of the island’s population). Their numbers are dwindling, and on occasion it’s hard to put together a minyan, but Henriques and others in the community emphasize their determination to keep Judaism alive in Jamaica. 

For one thing, Shaare Shalom has brought in a new rabbi, after 33 years without one. Rabbi Dana Evan Kaplan, a 51-year-old American Reform rabbi, has ideas intended to attract younger people: a bar/bat mitzvah program, nature-adventure activities for young families, informal social gatherings for young parents. And more plans in the works.

Henriques says the community is also being revitalized by Jamaicans who have discovered their affinity to Judaism, like the two cantors: Winston Mendes Davidson, called Winty, a 66-year-old doctor and public health official who converted after learning of his Jewish roots (Mendes, his mother’s family, is a venerable Sephardic last name in Jamaica); and Marie Reynolds, who was brought up Christian and discovered her love of Judaism while living in London.

As charming and moving as Shaare Shalom is, it’s unlikely that a Jewish tourist, even an observant one, would go to Jamaica only for the Jewish sites, or would remain in Kingston — in the southern part of the island — during the whole vacation. 

More likely, a typical tourist would go to the northern shore, spending time in those places whose exotic names — Montego Bay, Ocho Rios, Runaway Bay — evoke images of rum drinks with little umbrellas, spectacular white-sand beaches, warm Caribbean waters, lush foliage and estates where legends like Noel Coward or Errol Flynn cavorted to their hearts’ content.

Over the years, Jamaica has gone through well-known phases. To mention a few: piracy (including Jewish pirates); the laid-back lifestyle of Negril on the western part of the island during the 1960s; and Rastafarianism, spear-headed by the late reggae icon Bob Marley. 

Modern Jamaican resorts have moved well beyond those notions. The country has developed eco-tourism activities, thrilling adventures and pleasant diversions aimed at appealing to a wide range of tourists: college students, singles, families and couples of all ages. 

You can take a chairlift over the treetops, steer a bobsled down Mystic Mountain (on steel rails, not ice), or glide down the rainforest canopy on a zip line.

Swimming with and getting kissed by a dolphin (no joke) may be on many people’s bucket list, especially when that dolphin is a frisky adolescent female named Misty; but much more heart-thumping is the hike up Dunn’s River Falls. 

Wearing only a bathing suit and water shoes that grip the wet rocks (you can rent them there), you start at the bottom, where the waterfall empties out into the Caribbean, and climb up the slippery boulders, heading up toward the waterfall, with occasional dips or slides into deeper pools. Depending on your fitness level, it can take from a half-hour to an hour to get to the top, where you’re rewarded with a waterfall shower.

Ocho Rios tourism offers quiet moments as well: birds of exotic coloring pecking at seeds on your palm, hummingbirds with spectacularly long tails, panoramic views of the north coast. 

It also offers jerk chicken and other local delicacies by the shore, in the moonlight, with other tourists as well as Jamaicans. A country that’s an island paradise for tourists and cruise-ship day-trippers is still mired in thatched-roof poverty for too many residents; but Jamaicans’ radiant smiles seem genuine and unquenchable, whatever their economic reality. 

A Bob Marley lyric comes to mind: “Forget your troubles and dance. Forget your sorrows and dance. Forget your sickness and dance. Forget your weakness and dance …”

Wherever you go in Jamaica, local music is always playing, from Harry Belafonte to Toots and the Maytals to a steel-drum band. And if you start to dance, people will smile at you. They might even join you. They understand: Forget about whatever you left back home and dance. 

Still, there was a mystery to be solved: the sand on Shaare Shalom’s floor.

There’s plenty of evidence that Jews have been in Jamaica since the mid-1600s. For example, the oldest of Jamaica’s Jewish cemeteries, at Hunts Bay, west of Kingston, has been explored by the International Survey of Jewish Monuments, which found a gravestone with Hebrew and Portuguese writing. That gravestone is dated 1672. 

But because of family lore, Jamaican Jews are certain there were Jews in Jamaica before that, as far back as the 1500s, when Spain controlled the island. Spain had brought the Inquisition to the New World, so if there were Jews in Jamaica in the 1500s, they wouldn’t have expressed their faith openly. When worshipping together, they would have quieted their footsteps. 

“The sand on the synagogue floor goes back to that time,” Henriques said, “when it was important for Jews not to arouse suspicions. Once the British took over in 1655, Jews could practice their Judaism openly.” 

And practice openly they did. They built synagogues and schools and a great deal more; they’ve been involved in every aspect of Jamaican life. But now, because of assimilation and intermarriage, because the core membership is aging and many Jamaican Jews have chosen to live elsewhere, the Jewish community is struggling to maintain its identity and integrity.

It’s working … for now. But who knows what lies ahead?

So after you’ve had your fill of rum drinks and spa treatments and glides over the rainforest canopy, you might want to check out Jamaica’s Jewish life while it’s still there. Like some other disappearing communities in exotic locales, it may not be around forever, mon.

Roberto Loiederman’s trip was sponsored by the Jamaica Tourist Board. 

‘Feel the rhythm’ of Jamaica’s Judaism [PHOTOS] Read More »

Rami Jaffee: The Perks of Being a Wallflower

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In 1986, it wasn’t unusual to find 17-year-old Rami Jaffee, a lanky, scruffy-looking longhair in a Grateful Dead tie-dye T-shirt, improvising on the grand piano in Fairfax High School’s auditorium during recess.

Cut to Sept. 6, 2012, on stage in Charlotte, N.C. Jaffee, 43, his long locks shorn, jammed with Dave Grohl and the rest of the Foo Fighters at the Democratic National Convention. 

An associate member of Foo Fighters, keyboardist Jaffee was in Wallflowers mode this week as the American roots band he co-founded with singer/songwriter Jakob Dylan returned Oct. 9 with their first album in seven years, “Glad All Over,” and a date at the Fonda Theatre in Hollywood.

For Jaffee, September was a blur of bicoastal flights and performances with his two internationally known, Grammy-winning groups. 

Last week, over a plate of spaghetti at Andre’s in the Town & Country food court at Fairfax and Third, Jaffee spent the few scant hours of downtime with the Journal before heading East for a Wallflowers “Good Morning America” appearance.

Jaffee grew up in the Fairfax District. Sephardi on his mother’s side and Ashkenazi on his dad’s, he attended Temple Beth Am and at 16 worked as a JCC camp counselor.

Fairfax Avenue has always been central to Jaffee’s life, from receiving his education at Hancock Park Elementary and Fairfax High to fueling his musical education at Canter’s Deli’s Kibitz Room. 

After spending 1982 to 1987 playing in bands, most notably the David Bowie-esque group Daisy Chamber, Jaffee cultivated the Kibitz Room into a weekly Tuesday night magnet for local musicians. He became transfixed with roots rock, indulging in lush Hammond organ sounds. 

Jaffee and Dylan, who met at Canter’s, formed the Wallflowers (originally the Apples) in 1989. But when the band released its self-titled album in August 1992, the grunge scene, ushered in by Grohl’s former group, Nirvana, was firmly established and rock fans were in no mood for the Wallflowers’ Americana. 

The band also didn’t help their own cause with their label, Virgin.

“We were not willing to talk about Jakob Dylan’s lineage,” Jaffee said. “We were under contract for eight records. And we’re the biggest nightmare for promotion. We were known as this difficult band who spent their money and didn’t want to admit Jakob was Bob Dylan’s son.”

From 1991 to 1994, the Wallflowers toured nationwide, opening for Spin Doctors and 10,000 Maniacs. In 1994, Virgin dropped the group, which had rung up a million-dollar debt while failing to connect with their first album. 

Jaffee dealt with this blow by staying active in L.A.’s music scene, continuing to play the Kibitz Room, Viper Room, the Mint and the now-defunct Pico-Robertson venue Jack’s Sugar Shack. He also crossed the street from Canter’s to deliver pizzas for Damiano’s.

“It was soul-crushing, but I’m a worker,” Jaffee said. “You do what you have to do to make a living. I was developing the biggest music scene. We had Peter Tork of the Monkees, Lenny Kravitz on drums, Melissa Etheridge on bass. Rick Rubin was walking into the Kibitz Room, saying there should be a Kibitz Room anthology album.” 

Jaffee chalks up the “lightning-in-a-bottle” energy to the Fairfax area’s magical “Gilmore Island” history.

“Anyone could play the Kibitz Room,” he said. “A bum would walk in and grab the mic.”

One such ostensibly odd person was avant-garde producer Jon Brion (Kanye West, Fiona Apple).

“He came in with a weird look, a bow tie,” Jaffee recalled. “They were like, ‘Please don’t let this guy in the place; he looks like a transient.’ ”

Meanwhile, the Wallflowers persevered. “We created our own scene. One label head got wind of our live performances; Jakob’s lineage, everything helped. Jakob was gorgeous,” Jaffee said.

A bidding war broke out and Universal Music Group’s Interscope signed the band. Produced by T-Bone Burnett, 1996’s “Bringing Down the House” sturdily posited the Wallflowers on the map. Pillared by hit songs “6th Avenue Heartache,” “The Difference” and their biggest single, “One Headlight,” the quadruple-platinum album and two Grammy awards propelled the Wallflowers forward for four years.

“We toured relentlessly,” Jaffee said.

A hit cover of Bowie’s “Heroes” from the “Godzilla” soundtrack in 1998 “acted as a fifth single,” he said. “Let’s just say that’s when we bought our second houses.”

“All the 12-year-olds thought we wrote it,” Jaffee continued, laughing as he recalled a DJ asking him on the air, “ ‘This next song is brand-new. Where did you learn to write this stuff?’ ”

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The gift of water

Leave a Comment / Mobile, News, Opinion, Rob Eshman /

On Sept. 2, I drove to the Valley, where it was 95 degrees. I pulled my car over onto the dirt shoulder of Woodley Avenue, walked down an embankment to the Los Angeles River, slipped a kayak into the cool, deep water,  and paddled away.

For most Angelenos, the L.A. River is a nonrunning joke, a glorified drainage ditch. Somehow, it’s easier to conceive of the Curiosity Rover landing on Mars, 154 million miles away, than of someone boating the L.A. River. 

What few know is that Los Angeles only exists because about 230 years ago, Spaniards settled along the lush banks of what the explorer Juan Crespi called a “good-sized, full-flowing river” that had supported Tongva Indian villages for millennia.

The city grew up around the river. Until the construction of the Owens River Aqueduct in 1910, it was the primary water source for Los Angeles. Once the city fathers deemed the river unnecessary and its seasonal flooding dangerous, they brought in the United States Army Corps of Engineers to entomb most of it in concrete.

That’s what I expected to see: concrete, garbage and sludge.

We put in about a mile south of Lake Balboa. We crossed beneath the Burbank Boulevard overpass and glided between banks green with narrow-leaf willows and sycamore trees. The water was cool and deep. Small fish darted beyond our paddles. White egrets and black grebes floated past. A blue heron landed in a thicket of poplar and watched us approach.

Only two years ago, a trip like mine would have been unimaginable. The first group in modern times to ride the 51-mile L.A. River did so illegally. A Venice writer named George Wolfe entered the river on kayaks with a dozen other trespassers on July 25, 2008, and spent the next three days following its course from its start in Canoga Park down to where it spills into the Long Beach harbor, near the Queen Mary. They evaded patrol officers, intransigent Army Corps officials, angry residents and police helicopters. 

Their feat was more than symbolic. By proving that the L.A. River was navigable, they ensured its federal protection under the Clean Water Act. The ultimate arbiter of the river’s fate became not the Army Corps, which had long forbade entry to it, but the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), which became charged with seeing the river restored into a viable urban waterway.

That’s what brought me to the river. Wolfe’s group, L.A. River Expeditions, now legally runs kayak tours on a two-mile portion of the river that is not paved in concrete. 

Our group of 12 was led by volunteer guide Anthea Raymond and Dr. Joel Shapiro. 

“This is a river,” Shapiro, who was one of Wolfe’s original Gang of 12, said. “Just don’t drink the water.”

We passed some men fishing for carp. Imagine, Shapiro said, this river used to be full of steelhead trout.

Yes, times have changed. Plastic shopping bags fluttered in the trees. The water eddied and flowed past a tangle of rusted metal.  

“We call that Shopping Cart Island,” Raymond said.

Still, I couldn’t see the city through the dense trees and brush, or hear a single sound but the gurgling water.

Last week I went to the premiere screening of “Rock the Boat” a 90-minute documentary about the 2008 river expedition, made by Thea Lucia Mercouffer, who is married to Wolfe.

The movie is gutsy and spirited, more rock ’n’ roll than National Geographic. Mercouffer uses the outlaw river run to show how the future of Los Angeles is tied to the future of its river. 

Unlike most environmental docs, this one is ultimately uplifting — it’s what happens when a band of writers, poets and visionaries refuses to settle for reality.

“I had a crazy vision to go from beginning to end,” Wolfe told me. “That took my life in an unexpected direction.”

The vision worked. Thanks in part to Wolfe, and in no small part to poet and Friends of the L.A. River co-founder Lewis MacAdams and others, the powers that be, from the City of Los Angeles to the EPA to the Army Corps, are now sponsoring a multidecade master plan to revitalize the river and its habitat and turn it into a multiuse natural resource that will be good both for business development and for recreation.

In late August, Gov. Jerry Brown signed the L.A. River Access Bill (SB 1201), ensuring public access for recreation to the L.A. River.

“This will change the course of L.A.,” Omar Brownson, a real estate developer who is now the head of the L.A. River Revitalization Corp, told me. “It can be a river and a new infrastructure for economic development.” 

But it’s even more than that. 

“This,” activist and writer Jenny Price said at the screening, “is a massive act of reimagination.”

Two years ago, exactly zero people had kayaked down the L.A. River. This year, I was one of 2,000. Next year, you can sign up to do it — thousands more will. A restored river will connect Angelenos, rather than divide us. It will connect us to nature, to our heritage, to our families, to one another. Restoring the river will restore our very souls.

Think of it as a meaningful coincidence that the Clean Water Act — which celebrates its 40th anniversary this week — was signed in October, the same month that Jews around the world begin to recite Tefillat Geshem, the prayer for rain.

On the concluding day of Sukkot, Shemini Atzeret, we chant, “… O refuse not the gift of water.”

The L.A. River is just that, a gift of water we have already been given. Now we just have to relearn to receive it.

To arrange screenings of “Rock the Boat!” at your synagogue or group, visit rocktheboatfilm.com. To see the LA River Master Plan, visit www.larivercorp.com.  To sign up for river  trips with LA River Expeditions  click here.

Rob Eshman is publisher and editor-in-chief of TRIBE Media Corp./Jewish Journal. E-mail him at robe@jewishjournal.com. You can follow him on Twitter @foodaism.

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Surviving a Survivor

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It’s an age-old, common dilemma faced by adult children of aging parents: What is the right thing to do when those parents begin to lose their faculties? That theme is at the heart of “Surviving Mama,” by playwright Sonia Levitin, which opens Oct. 12 at the Edgemar Center for the Arts in Santa Monica.

“When you have an aging parent and you have to make a decision, it can’t just be a cookie-cutter decision,” Levitin said in an interview. “You have to take into account everything about that person — their early life, what they endured, their personality and how they are going to react. What’s going to be the next step for them? And people are very different. Almost everyone I talk to has an aging parent, and I hear many different stories — of sibling rivalries coming out, some parents going on their own, making a plan; others a little resistant.” 

Levitin’s play traces the life of Marlena, called Mama (Arva Rose as the older Marlena, Gina Manziello as her younger self), who, when we first meet her, is a feisty, independent woman of German-Jewish heritage in her mid-80s. She has almost set her apartment on fire and is displaying other signs of encroaching dementia. Her youngest daughter, Anne (Manziello, in a dual role) continually clashes with her middle daughter, Stella (Sharon Rosner), over whether to put Mama in a home, and it is clear Mama resists the idea with all her might.

Much of the action is shown in flashback, as we revisit significant events in Marlena’s life. The story reverts to Germany in 1923, when, at the age of 26, she exhibits the strength and resolve that will carry her through life by defying her autocratic father, learning a profession, and marrying the charming, flamboyant Gustav (Peter Lucas). Fifteen years later, with the advent of Nazism, Gustav flees to Cuba, and Marlena escapes to Switzerland with their three young daughters, where they are helped by a priest who enlists the aid of a Catholic family.

The following year, Marlena, the girls and Gustav reunite in America, and Gustav, who is a designer, goes into the shmatte business. But he is a womanizer, and Marlena endures an unhappy marriage.  

After Gustav dies, Marlena falls in love and has a short-lived relationship with another man as the dementia overtakes her.

Levitin based the work on her own late mother’s life, incorporating memories her mother related, as well as on her own recollections, some of which go back to her days as a young child in Nazi Germany.

“I remember that Hitler parade that I refer to in the play. It was very frightening.  I remember scattered things. I remember being in Switzerland.”

Levitin said she also remembers how impoverished she, her mother and her sisters were in Switzerland. “My mother wasn’t allowed to work because she wasn’t a citizen, and you had to be a citizen. She was willing to do anything, and she was absolutely destitute. She went to an agency that was supposed to help refugees, and they told her to go back to Germany. She did go to a rabbi, and he found families for her who were not Jewish but would take the children.” 

Once in America, Levitin’s mother, who had been raised in a beautiful home, with a nanny and maids, still struggled. “She had to work,” Levitin recalled, “and she had to work at very grimy jobs, cleaning other people’s houses, scrubbing the floor, after hours, in a restaurant. This is a woman who came from a well-to-do family.

“My mother’s experience has had an effect on my children, in that they understood her independence and her courage,” Levitin added.

Levitin recalls that just as the character of Anne, her counterpart in the script, is in denial about Marlena’s dementia, she herself could never acknowledge her mother’s mental deterioration. 

“Anne says in the play, ‘You know, I haven’t even said it to myself.’ And it was gradual, and the truth is, I never said it until this woman came over to assess her, the woman who ran the group home, who was lovely. She met my mother, and we talked. I remember it was outside on the lawn, and my mother went in for a sweater or something, and the woman said, ‘Well, she’s going to fit right in. They’re all demented.’ It was like the bottom had just dropped out. Yes, I knew, but I didn’t know. I had managed her; I really had.”

The character of Marlena as an old woman shares her life story with the viewer at key moments in the play, coming to the apron of the stage to address the audience directly. Those segments transition into flashbacks, and, for director Doug Kaback, they represent Marlena’s growing isolation.

“Her mind is drifting to the events of her past, and I think what she’s really analyzing and experiencing in a way, because we bring these events to life, is a sort of validation of the things that she did to save her children and herself, to hold on to a marriage that was proving very fateful and without passion. Her arc is to come to terms with that and to recognize that, even though she sometimes has a caustic character, she has tremendous love and value, and has accomplished really heroic things in her lifetime.”

But, Kaback added, she is burdened by a lifelong sense of guilt.

“She carries such a huge weight, and this terrible horror of what she experienced getting out of Nazi Germany, and the fact that so many loved ones remained, and that she couldn’t help them, and the tragedy of their early deaths, is something that she just can’t quite make whole for herself.  Consequently, she drifts more and more internally, into a world of loss, and she’s pulling back from life in a way.” 

Rose, who plays Marlena, believes that her character’s guilt over having left her contentious mother, Lucie (also played by Rose), in Germany as the Nazis were taking power is pivotal.

“It creates a deep sadness, a great defensiveness and a depression that is not uncommon in many Eastern European Jews,” Rose said. “We come to guilt easily. She didn’t just abandon her mother. She abandoned her mother knowing, in her gut, that she was abandoning her to something terrible. So, even though she begged her to leave, she knew that she could have done more, and that it was, to a certain degree, self-serving that she didn’t do more.”

Rose was particularly drawn to this material because of its ethnic underpinnings. “I’m very Jewish. Most of the theater that I do, that is of consequence and that matters to me, often has a Jewish theme. I am not just an actor. For the last 25 years, I’ve been a family therapist, and the combination of the family dynamics, the Jewishness of the plot and the characters, made it completely irresistible to me.”

Rose would like the play to transmit a sense of what she calls “the incredible bond between family members, particularly mothers and daughters.”

And Kaback hopes that “whatever station we’re at in life, we’re able to see in Marlena a reflection of ourselves, and a recognition that we, too, have to confront some very challenging and difficult questions as we grow older.”

As for what Levitin would like audiences to take from her play: “I want them to come away with a feeling of the fullness of life, the triumph of life and of people over all the things that can befall them. I want them to become encouraged by the show, and to say, ‘Wow! That was a woman who knew how to live.’ ”

 

“Surviving Mama”

Edgemar Center for the Arts, on the Main Stage

2437 Main St., Santa Monica, CA 90405

Oct. 12- Nov. 18

Fri. at 8 pm, Saturday at 3 and and 8 pm, Sunday at 5 pm.

Tickets:  $34.99

RESERVATIONS: (310) 392-7327

ONLINE TICKETING: http://www.edgemarcenter.org/ 

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Balance between: Parashat Bereshit (Genesis 1:1-6:8)

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Readers long have been challenged by the blatant contradictions between the first two chapters of Genesis. In chapter 1, the creation of animals precedes people; in chapter 2, the order is reversed. In chapter 1, a single, androgynous Adam came into being; in chapter 2, Adam and Eve.

More interesting is that the two chapters show different concerns about the human condition, which modern biblical scholars attribute to different schools of (human) authorship. Chapter 2 is from J, the Yahwist writers. It begins, “When the Lord God made earth and heaven — no shrub of the field being yet in the earth and no grains having yet sprouted, because the Lord God had not sent rain upon the earth and there was no man to till the soil” (Genesis 2:4-5, JPS translation). J explores the origins of farming! The older of the two chapters, J’s account of creation reflects the agricultural vocation of most Israelites in the early days of the nation, and the outstanding, existential problem of the time: avoiding starvation.

Adam in chapter 2 is concerned primarily with his relationships — with God, the land and the creatures. God is the loving parent, and when Adam’s need for companionship cannot be met by the animals, Eve is created. His mission as a farmer is “to work and to protect” the land on which he depends (Genesis 2:15). 

Written later (during the Israelite monarchy), chapter 1 reflects the concerns and values of the Priests. The P writers were men of learning whose lives intertwined with the urban, merchant class. Fluent in the languages and traditions of the surrounding nations, their concern is nothing less than the place of Israel in the cosmos, and they begin with the creation of the world. Their narrative reshapes a well-known myth of the ancient Near East into a revolutionary account that reinforces Israelite distinctiveness by recognizing the one God as Creator rather than created.

P’s narrative is philosophical in style, making order out of chaos through ever-finer distinctions. Unlike chapter 2, it is hierarchal. Just as the priests serve as intermediaries below God and above the other Israelites, human beings are the intermediaries between God and the rest of creation. Humanity is charged to “fill the earth and master it, and rule…” (Genesis 1:28, JPS translation).

For me, the most perceptive commentator of these differences is the late leader of American Orthodoxy, Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik, who did not need the notion of human authorship to account for the differences mentioned here. The Adam of the first chapter he calls Adam 1. This is the noble human being, who strives for knowledge and beauty. Adam 1 is the portrait of human initiative. He asserts control against the forces of nature and builds civilization, making order from chaos, so that people can grow and prosper. This is the human who can cure polio and land on the moon. This is the Adam of human dignity.

Adam 2, the Adam described in the second chapter, needs love and lives in community. He can work and protect the land, but can never control its fertility or bring the life-giving rains. This Adam, writes Soloveitchik in “The Lonely Man of Faith,” is vulnerable and dependent, relating to God as a parent rather than a king. This is the Adam of redemption, whose life is redeemed through communal responsibility, right relationship and love.

These descriptions of humanity are brief; they can be easily caricaturized. I hate it, but the thought immediately arises: Adam 1 is a Ryan Republican and Adam 2 is an Obama Democrat. The Torah, one might argue, is presenting us with two different and sometimes conflicting visions of our role in the world, and if this column were appearing on Fox News or MSNBC, one view would be the correct one.

Fortunately, one can suggest a Jewish Journal approach. Are not both chapters true? This is Soloveitchik’s point. In navigating the world, we humans take control as best we can, but we are still vulnerable and dependent. We need individual initiative and depend on technology, but we must care for our community and the planet that enables it. To do less is to belie our potential and fail our Covenant with God.

The challenge, then, is not to choose between Adam 1 and Adam 2, but to recognize that we humans are both. Wisdom is not in favoring one over the other, but in knowing the proper balance between them, and knowing when and how much to emphasize one over the other. In today’s ideological environment, the commentators are clever and the sound bites are compelling, but terribly misleading. Long before us, the ancient Israelites knew that our complex world reflects multiple viewpoints and conflicting yet valid truths. But they need not be viewed as the source of conflict. On the contrary, in diversity and contradiction lies the fruitful tension of human life. In the paradox, we learn from the opening chapters of the Torah, lies wholeness.

As long as we turn off cable news.

Rabbi Mike Comins is the founder of the TorahTrek Center for Jewish Wilderness Spirituality (torahtrek.org) and the author of “A Wild Faith: Jewish Ways Into Wilderness, Wilderness Ways Into Judaism” and “Making Prayer Real: Leading Jewish Spiritual Voices on Why Prayer Is Difficult and What to Do About It” (Jewish Lights Publishing, makingprayerreal.com).

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Obama, Romney and the Lakers

Leave a Comment / David Suissa, Mobile, Mobile-Homepage, News, Opinion /

One of the reasons I love sports is that I can indulge my primal instinct for combat without feeling any guilt. I’m a huge Lakers fan, and I can easily spend hours poring through analyses of how the team will clobber the competition this year with the addition of two fearless warriors.

This thrill of competition will last all season — it is intense, strategic, unpredictable and utterly mindless.

Which is why I feel no guilt: Mindless means there are no stakes to speak of.

The Lakers can lose a big game, and it’ll make no difference to the conflict in the Middle East or to whether my kids get into a good school. Sure, if we win this year, I’ll celebrate like a wild man with my son, but little else will change.

Now, here’s the problem: What happens when this mindless thrill of competition starts to color how we view presidential campaigns, when the stakes are deadly serious?

This is precisely what I saw last week in the media’s reaction to the Obama-Romney debate. Instead of enlightened analyses about the candidates’ different visions for the country, we got “combat reports” that looked like they came right out of the sports pages:

Obama let him off the hook! He didn’t bring his A game! Romney was on fire! Romney won because he fought dirty! Obama didn’t fight back! He better wake up and take the gloves off next time! 

It could have been an NBA championship series with the underdog stealing the first game. Once the debate was over, everybody took their fighting positions: Romney fans started gloating and smelling blood; Obama fans started moaning and calling for blood.

Squeezed between these rabid fans are the tiny sliver of “undecided” voters who represent about 5 percent of the total and who will presumably determine the future of America.

How sad, if you ask me.

How sad that 95 percent of American voters had already made up their minds about which candidate to support without ever seeing the candidates face one another in real time.

How sad that most media and political pundits reacted to the debate the way rabid sports fans do on talk radio — with an obsession for winning and losing.

Take a look at Chris Mathews of MSNBC in the hours after the debate and tell me if he was any less apoplectic than any diehard Lakers fan would be after a big loss.

The “losing” side whined incessantly that Romney won because he misrepresented himself as a moderate — never mind the inconvenient fact that as governor of Massachusetts, he really was a moderate. No, as they saw it, he won because he lied and had swagger. Obama lost because he looked weak and didn’t fight back.  Case closed. Indicated action: Fight harder.

No wonder the battle cries went out for more “fact checking,” just like when coaches ask the referees to review a play. The man cheated! Don’t let him get away with it! He’s not really a moderate! He’s only promising the world so he can win more votes! How shocking!

As if candidate Obama never “promised the world” four years ago when he won. 

As Yuval Levin put it: “A Republican candidate stands before 60 million voters and commits to an agenda and his opponent responds that this isn’t really his agenda, and that voters should instead look to Democratic attack ads and liberal think-tank papers to learn what the Republican is proposing. That’s the strategy?” 

The point is, beyond all the attack ads and campaign strategies and partisan accusations, there’s a more important drama going on that we don’t hear enough about.

It’s the drama of two competing visions for the country.

Both candidates care about America’s future, but they have serious philosophical differences about how to address the nation’s chronic problems. 

Those philosophical differences are real — they’re not lies.

Of course, even visions can be described in partisan terms. To cite one example, Washington Post right-wing blogger Jennifer Rubin writes, “The Republicans call it a dependency society vs. an opportunity society. But it is really a face-off between modern conservatism and unrepentant liberalism.”

Romney himself describes the two visions as “Trickle down government vs. prosperity through freedom.”

President Obama has contrasted “the top-down economic policies that helped to get us into this mess” with “a new economic patriotism” that champions the middle class and ensures that everyone gets a “fair shot” at the American dream.

Partisan slogans aside, there are genuine and honest differences between the two visions on virtually every issue. It’s tempting to assume we understand them all — but do we?

As crazy as it may sound to some, there are compelling arguments to make for both sides.

In this national sport, when the stakes are so high, the definition of victory is when we all try to find out what those arguments are.

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Fairfax Legacy Gala a Lion-Sized Success

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When theater producers Pierson Blaetz and Whitney Weston established Friends of Fairfax to help Fairfax High School in 1998, they came up with the Melrose Trading Post, a flea market held every weekend in the high school’s parking lot. But the annual $200,000 from the Trading Post has not been enough to help Fairfax High cover the shortfall it’s currently facing due to statewide cuts in education spending. 

On Oct. 6, the Friends of Fairfax held its inaugural Legacy Gala and Hall of Fame Induction at the vintage Wilshire Ebell, where 500 people, including Fairfax alumni such as L.A. County Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky, attended to give back to the school that enriched their education and their lives. Honorees included philanthropists Joyce Eisenberg-Keefer and Annette Shapiro, Broadcom founder Henry Samueli, and the patron saint of Fairfax High’s music program, Herb Alpert.

Following dinner, the auditorium presentation saw Eisenberg-Keefer, who has supported myriad Jewish and medical institutions, and Shapiro, president of the board of Beit T’Shuvah, receive their medals of honor.

During his turn, Marconi Prize-winner Samueli spoke about how Fairfax helped put him on the path to becoming an electrical engineer. He credited Fairfax with “having good teachers who are passionate about what they teach” for furthering his education,” and urged people to support the school and make sure “they continue that tradition.”

After receiving his medal, Alpert, 77, was joined onstage by pianist Bill Cantos, drummer Michael Shapiro, bassist Hussain Jiffry, and Alpert’ wife, singer Lani Hall. 

Alpert performed a full-length concert for attendees, playing standards such as “Fever,” “Moon Dance” and “Mas Que Nada.”

Seeing Alpert perform brought back memories for Yaroslavsky, who as a Fairfax student in 1966 saw Alpert return to Fairfax with his Tijuana Brass at the peak of his success.
“They had to play two assembly concerts because they could not fit all the students in,” he recalled.

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