In 2001, Temple Israel of Hollywood (TIOH) overwhelmingly decided to end its sponsorship of Cub Scout Pack 1300 to protest the Boy Scouts of America’s (BSA) policy banning openly gay scouts and leaders. It ended a nearly 50-year tradition of scouting at the Reform congregation.
When the Supreme Court decided on June 13 that unaltered human DNA cannot be patented, it was more than a victory for cancer patients and corporate rivals in the field of genetics; it was a reason to celebrate for Dr. Wayne Grody, a professor at UCLA School of Medicine who assisted in the case that the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) brought against Myriad Genetics.
In 2010, Judith Prays, a 26-year-old multimedia expert from Long Beach, created a great deal of buzz (CNN, Time, “The Colbert Report”) by inventing Pheromone Parties, a matchmaking experiment based on scent.
Apps entertain, make life easier, provide a way for us to stay up to date on current events and much more. Some are vital, others less so, but the best are the ones that strike that balance between simplicity and innovation and leave us asking, “How did I ever get by without this?”
As her mother’s yahrzeit approaches, a middle-aged woman undergoes a crisis of the soul in the play “Heart Song,” currently at The Fountain Theatre in Hollywood. The woman, Rochelle (Pamela Dunlap), then joins a flamenco class and experiences the transformative power of that dance form.
One of the profound changes in American popular culture that emerged during the 1960s was the willingness of famous Jews to openly embrace their Jewishness rather than hiding it behind phony names and personas.
My father, originally from a small-town farm in Kansas, converted to Judaism when I was a young child. You can imagine that my seder table looks a lot like many American seder tables. Ours hosts a grand mixture of people — religiously, ethnically, socially and politically diverse. My congregational family at Temple Israel of Hollywood reflects the same. The Jewish communities I occupy are, at their core, wonderfully varied.
In late April, some 200,000 people on foot and on cycles — most with two wheels, some with three or four and even one jerry-rigged to be two stories high — swarmed Venice Boulevard, clogging the roadway from downtown Los Angeles to the beach.
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