Armin Szatmary takes his membership in the “People of the Book” very seriously. So seriously, in fact, that once per week, for 15 years, the 73-year-old retired salesman has set aside time to help illiterate kids in Los Angeles’ public schools learn to read.
For the past seven years, Leon Shkrab, 67, has volunteered every week at Bet Tzedek Legal Services, conducting intake interviews in Russian with Holocaust survivors who are applying for Holocaust reparations through the representation of lawyers at the pro bono law firm.
Wendy Colman Levin spoke with quiet intensity about the people who have touched her during her four-and-a-half years as an advocate on behalf of the homeless, among them the young woman who was thrown out of her childhood home when she told her stepfather that her stepbrothers were raping her, and the middle-aged man who spiraled into street life after his wife died of cancer.
Six days after its membership voted to implement an academic boycott against Israeli universities, the American Studies Association’s Caucus on Academic and Community Activism on December 21, 2013 hurriedly issued a defensive appeal for support bemoaning, in the wake of a tsunami of backlash and censure against the boycott, what it defined as a “campaign of intimidation against the ASA.”
Google and Israel signed a memorandum of understanding in which the tech giant agreed to provide technological services to the Israeli government.
Note to Los Angeles officials: We do like to party in public. Sure, we’re three hours behind the East Coast, but what’s wrong with that?
Israel is out and Palestine is in the Oscar race, as the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announced on Dec. 20 its nine semi-finalists in the best foreign-language film category.
It was late during World War II and Curt Lowens, a member of the Dutch resistance whose family had fled Berlin after Kristallnacht, saw an Allied plane in distress. He knew what he had to do.
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