I know what happened with those three women in Cleveland, how one man was able to imprison and torture them in the middle of a residential neighborhood for 10 years, even though he had grown children, brothers, cousins who visited the house for hours at a time. It’s not a pretty tale, but we’ve all heard it, although to a lesser degree, countless times before.
Modern slavery is everywhere, and women principally are its victims.
Be aware. Trafficking victims are everywhere, and they often exhibit characteristics similar to victims of domestic violence and sexual abuse.
Before His Holiness Mirza Masroor Ahmad, leader of the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community, entered the gilded ballroom of the Montage Beverly Hills last Saturday afternoon, a spokesman took the microphone and explained the rules to the 500 or so acolytes, dignitaries and invited guests.
After the Los Angeles Times recently published a piece by Hector Becerra on the deplorable conditions of the Mount Zion Cemetery in East Los Angeles (the subject of a Jewish Journal investigation in the May 10, 2013, issue, as well), I joined with others in the Jewish community to express my disgust — not only over the conditions of the cemetery but also over the fact that leaders of our community knew about the problem and chose to ignore it.
In the late ’70s, I carried a beeper when it was my turn to be on call for a rape-victim helpline. One evening I had it clipped to my jacket during a faculty meeting at the community college where I taught.
On an otherwise unremarkable day in 1938, a chubby but charming student at John Burroughs Junior High in Los Angeles “cracked the code of his comic gift and discovered his life’s work,” as we learn in “Overweight Sensation: The Life and Comedy of Allan Sherman” by Mark Cohen (Brandeis, $29.95), a penetrating biography by a savvy observer of show business.
In a few weeks, Eric Garcetti might become Los Angeles’ youngest mayor in more than a century. When Eric was a Rhodes scholar at Oxford University from 1993 to 1996, we were close friends and he was a regular at my L’Chaim Society.
Back in the 1970s, when I attended the freshly integrated Fairfax High School, black and Chicano gangs would spar in the lunch yard. I used to joke that we Jews should also form a gang.
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