January 29, 2015

L.A.’s newest rookie transplant: Elaine Soloway

Leave a Comment / 50 Plus, Books, Culture / Jewish Journal

Next time you move cross-country to Los Angeles, do it the Elaine Soloway way. (The SoloWay?) Pack whatever you can into flat-rate Priority Mail boxes from the post office and mail them over a period of six months. Get a place on airbnb.com in a hip L.A. neighborhood, close to shops, restaurants and the Upright Citizens Brigade, an improv comedy theater that reminds one of their connections to Chicago’s Annoyance Theater. Don’t bother with the expense and hassle of a car; use your own two feet, a public transit pass, Uber and Lyft. Arrive in L.A. on a Friday, and find community by Saturday morning at Temple Israel of Hollywood’s weekly Torah study. Live close enough to your daughter and grandsons to be in their lives regularly, but never underfoot. And don’t worry about that bookstore reading of your new book, “Green Nails and Other Acts of Rebellion: A Life After Loss” … you may be new in town, but it will be standing room only.

“Be sure to mention my age,” the petite 76-year-old writer/blogger, PR and social media consultant urged me. “I don’t ever want people to see their age as a deterrent.” After one conversation with Soloway, there’s no chance you will.

After a lifetime in Chicago, Soloway uprooted herself to be closer to her daughter, Jill Soloway — the creator of the wildly popular Amazon dramedy “Transparent”— and two grandsons. Those of us who are familiar (or obsessed) with the show already know the Pfeffeman family, and that Shelly, the matriarch (played by Judith Light), endures two major life shifts: her first husband comes out as transgender and her second one suffers from a debilitating illness.

Although “Transparent” is a work of fiction, it has some biographical elements. When the show won best television series, comedy, at the Golden Globes, Jill Soloway thanked “my own ‘trans parent,’ my Moppa,” referring to Elaine’s first husband, who came out as transgender. And, as Elaine’s second husband, Tommy, fought a little-known dementia called frontotemporal degeneration, she was his primary caregiver. As she watched her strong, independent husband’s decline, becoming someone who was unable to speak and who needed round-the-clock care, Soloway wrote about it in her blog, The Rookie Caregiver, which, after Tommy’s passing, became The Rookie Widow. Those two blogs served as foundation for “Green Nails,” which brings the author’s book total to three (in addition to “Green Nails,” she’s written a memoir, “The Division Street Princess,” which started as a blog, and a novel, “She’s Not the Type”). She also contributes to the blog Never Too Old to Talk Tech — Soloway used to work at the Apple store in Chicago and helps people learn how to use their tech devices. Some Internet digging reveals some additional blogging efforts, including Soloway Stories, and a professional website, elainesolowayconsulting.com, offering services in public relations, coaching and technology.

Shortly after the book reading, Soloway launched another blog, The Rookie Transplant, chronicling her experiences as a newbie making her way as she always has — independently, taking L.A.’s roads less traveled, specifically, bipedal locomotion and public transit over the expense (and convenience, some might argue) of a car. One recent Facebook post chronicled her trip to the Apple Store: “My visit to Mecca at the Grove. Took the 780 from Hollywood and Vine. 30 minutes.”

“Because I walked so much in Chicago, I walk here.” She explained how she has mapped her neighborhood by walking it, using trips to Ralphs or to the bank as an excuse for what she calls “functional exercise.” When she’s not on foot, she’s on a bus, watching the landscape go by and listening to people’s conversations. “You miss the world if you’re in a car.”

While her most recent move happened after Tommy’s death, Soloway has been charting her own path for decades. At 51, yearning to learn more about Jewish life, tradition and Hebrew, she organized her own course of adult bat mitzvah study, performing the traditional bat mitzvah tasks and planning her own party. At 60, “to proclaim a new me … an audacious me,” according to her blog account, she got a tattoo on her left biceps — “a wildly-colored, 5-inch picture of a chubby heart, musical notes, rays of sun and roses, intersected by banners bearing the names of my two cheeky daughters, Faith and Jill.”

Soloway also doesn’t let mortality get in the way of regularly conversing with those who have passed on — primarily her husband Tommy and her parents — using them as characters in her essays and blog posts. One recent post was about her deceased mother wanting the new iPad. “It’s all a way into conversation,” Soloway observes. “The main thing about people who die is that we shouldn’t forget them — this way, they’ll never fade away.”

As someone who had been in Los Angeles only a few months, Soloway had expected 10 people to show up at Skylight Books in support of “Green Nails,” but the reading drew more than 60, including a few from the “Transparent” crew, among them actor Lawrence Pressman, who played Shelly’s ailing husband, Ed. Although her daughter’s network undoubtedly was responsible for a few of the folks in the room, the packed house had more than a little to do with the auteur herself, a master marketer who expanded her skill set as technology developed, incorporating her insatiable curiosity for computers into decades of solid public relations and marketing experience.

“I love pens and spiral notebooks, but I also love the mystery of computers,” she said. “Social media saved my PR business; I hated calling people on the phone to pitch, but by following journalists on Twitter and sharing columns with them, I built relationships. These days, you have to know all the bloggers.” When it came to the book, she again blended classic and modern methods: running a Kickstarter crowd-funding campaign to get the book made, mailing personal notes to backers, and sending promotional postcards about book readings to ensure her message reached everyone.

Now the septuagenarian Soloway is looking ahead and hoping for companionship. “I’ve been widowed for two years; I am interested in meeting a man my age who is seeking a companion, not marriage. He should be healthy and able to drive — at night would be a bonus. But, at the top of this list is: He should make me laugh.” Until that man comes along, Soloway is counting her blessings for the Los Angeles friends and family who have made her feel at home.

“This crowd is funny as hell, and it’s wonderful to laugh,” Soloway said. “I’m so grateful for this brand-new adventure.”

Esther D. Kustanowitz was once a carless rookie transplant to L.A. Now she blogs at myurbankvetch.com and writes about social media and communications at her professional site, EstherK.com.

L.A.’s newest rookie transplant: Elaine Soloway Read More »

Pursuing the Counter-song: Haftarat Be-shallah, Judges 4:4-5:31

Leave a Comment / Israel, Mobile, Mobile-Homepage / Jonathan Zasloff

Let me make the songs of a nation, and I care not who makes its laws.

—“>Deborah Schloss has “>Ilana Pardes of Hebrew University calls a Biblical “counter-tradition” pitting a feminine – and perhaps feminist – voice against male domination.

Thus, while we can understand the Tanach to be the word of God, or the words of divinely inspired people, the Song of Deborah also helps us understand it as an artifact of popular culture. Songs like Deborah’s form the heart of such popular counter-traditions. Subordinated (and thus often illiterate) groups tend to express their culture orally. The Song of Deborah thus may also be compared to slave spirituals, or blues.

If it is amazing that Deborah is there at all, we can wonder about – and mourn — the popular traditions that did not make it into the canon. Canadian philosopher Leonard Angel did this one better. In 2010, he published “>Devra Kay and “>Leah Horowitz (1680-1755). Horowitz’ achievement as a liturgist, Talmudist, and Kabbalistic scholar would be impressive in any century: for a woman in the 18th it comes close to miraculous – much like Deborah’s achievement as judge and prophetess.

“>In Kay’s rendering, we pray:

On this day,
From the purity of
Your Divine Presence
You created for the world
Great and good and pure light,
So the world,
And everything in the world,
All those in Heaven,
And on earth,
Would benefit from that light.

Then you saw
With great clarity and insight,
That creation was not worthy
To benefit from this holy and dignified light,
So you divided it, and lifted
The greater light
Into the concealment of the next world,
For the benefit of those who worship You,
And fear and love Your Name
With all their heart….

[L]et us know the magnificence
Of the holiness of Your Name
For in Your light shall we see light.

In honor of Deborah and her generations of daughters, it is high time to integrate tkhines into the liturgy. Much of the traditional prayer book comes not from scripture but rather from later poems and hymns without any overwhelming liturgical value. (I like “>Pharaoh’s Daughter.

We should study them as we would study any sacred text, such as the song in Haftarat Be-shallah. For when they were composed, the Shekhinah dwelt within their authors, as it dwelt in Deborah on Mount Tabor.

Pursuing the Counter-song: Haftarat Be-shallah, Judges 4:4-5:31 Read More »

Rahat’s week from Hell

Leave a Comment / Israel, Mobile, Mobile-Homepage / Simone Wilson

Mayor Talal Al Krenawi was tired. He’d been in and out of media interviews, meetings, mourning circles and angry phone calls for days. His limbs hurt; his lungs hurt. “I’m still feeling the effects of the gas,” he said, speaking from behind his desk in a worn municipal building at the heart of Rahat, Israel’s largest Bedouin city.

Four days earlier, on the evening of Jan. 18, the mayor said, he was placing a municipal flower wreath on the grave of Bedouin 20-year-old Sami Al Ja’ar — shot dead Jan. 14 outside his home in a drug bust gone awry — when police lights flashed near the cemetery gates and the pop-pop of weapons interrupted burial prayers.

The mayor himself was knocked halfway unconscious by a tear gas canister, then set on fire and nearly trampled by funeral attendees.

“The amount of tear gas shot in two minutes on the people, I’ve never seen it before,” said Rahat resident and Bedouin activist Fadi Masamra, another witness. “It was a massacre. There was no more surrealistic picture than hiding behind graves to keep from being shot.”

The majority of the 10,000 to 20,000 people estimated to have turned out for Al Ja’ar’s funeral had no idea what had triggered the rain of crowd-control weapons. They would later learn that an armored police truck had unexpectedly entered the outskirts of the procession — and that when it did, hundreds of Rahat residents and out-of-towners, angry about Al-Ja’ar’s officer-involved shooting, had surrounded the vehicle and pelted it with stones. Some of the stones were more like “boulders,” police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld said, and included an 8-by-12-inch cement block.

“People were so stressed and so angry in this time,” Masamra said. “In a moment, everything became chaos.”

The five officers inside the police truck told their commanders later they thought they would die that night. “Every Jewish person, if he’s religious or not, when he feels this will be the end of his life, the last words he will say is ‘Shema Yisrael.’ All five officers said these two words,” said Yoram Halevi, commander of the Israel Police’s southern district.

Added his Arab affairs adviser, Shalom Ben Salmon: “When a Jew says ‘Shema Yisrael,’ he understands it’s the last second of his life.”

Backup arrived minutes later, and for the next half-hour, Rahat’s cemetery turned into a battleground. Flying stones, stun grenades, tear gas and live bullets were lit from behind by stadium and helicopter lights, tinting the scene a hazy, apocalyptic blue. Ben Salmon described it as “World War III.” Rahat resident Khaled Al Ja’ar, who had come to the cemetery that night to bury his son, said that when “the gas grenades came right up to the grave,” he and others “crawled” blindly between the tombstones, trying to find a way out. “Everybody was confused — police were confused, people were confused,” Masamra said. “No one knew what happened.”

By the time the gas cloud had dissipated, one more villager was dead.

According to Israeli officials, Sami Ziyadne, 43, died from a heart attack amid the chaos — making it the most deadly week of police-civilian clashes in the history of Rahat.

Such clashes have never been a hallmark of Rahat, the only Bedouin city to be officially recognized by Israel. Rahat was founded in 1972 and recognized as a township in 1994 — a sort of pilot for resettling the nomadic Bedouins in Western-style townships. It has since become one of the poorest municipalities in the nation, an underserviced ghetto of 70,000 whose average monthly income is below $300. Still, its leaders have never given up on the dream of integrating into Israeli society.

The lobby of Rahat City Hall is lined with framed photos of a younger Al Krenawi shaking hands with Israeli leaders, including Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres. An Israeli flag hangs from a pole near his desk.

“When Rabin was prime minister, that’s when the industrial zone was created,” Al Krenawi said, pointing to a dirt plot at the southeast corner of Rahat on a jumbo map behind his desk. But construction in the zone has been snail-paced — often standstill. In the meantime, Rahat’s unemployment rate is surging at nearly 40 percent. Eighty percent of residents live below the poverty line, and less than half graduate high school.

Talal Al Krenawi has been mayor of Rahat, Israel’s largest Bedouin city, on and off for two decades. “We demand investigations,” he said of two recent killings in Rahat, “and the people demand that the people responsible for this be held accountable.” Photo by Simone Wilson

For opponents of Israel’s plan to consolidate spread-out Bedouin tribes into structured villages — the Prawer Plan — Rahat has become a case study for what not to do. In a 2013 op-ed for Israeli newspaper Haaretz, the head of a local coexistence nongovernmental organization called towns like Rahat “magnets for crime and poverty because the Bedouins living in them have been torn from their agricultural sources of income and their culture.”

Al Krenawi said that although he has tried for decades to collaborate with Israeli officials, his town has never enjoyed equal treatment from the federal government.

“We’re discriminated against. We have no funding, no recognition,” Al Krenawi said. And now, after this week, he said, “We have no trust in the police.”

Ben Salmon, who advises the Israel Police’s southern district commander on Arab affairs, agreed that socioeconomic inequality partly is fueling tensions between police and residents. “The Bedouin section needs investment from the government,” he said. “When you have a special situation that channels your anger, you will channel your anger to whoever is in front of you. And the police are always in front.”

On his office map of Rahat, the mayor retraced the Al Ja’ar funeral procession route that he had meticulously planned with local law enforcement. “Police were supposed to block this road,” he said, pointing to Highway 264, which cuts across the desert plains on Rahat’s western edge, dividing the town from its cemetery.

“In order to keep the peace, because we were expecting a lot of people, we made an agreement with the police not to come in,” he said. “We made an agreement — I was there in their offices!”

Halevi confirmed: “We talked with the mayor. There was some kind of agreement. We said police would not go inside, would not be involved, would not be there.”

However, one police vehicle did breach the no-go zone: a truck full of officers from a special branch of the Israel Police with separate headquarters. It’s known as the Yoav Unit, and it was set up in 2012 as the enforcement arm of the Prawer Plan to demolish Bedouin homes and resettle residents in planned towns.

According to Masamra, who serves as general director of the Bedouin Council of Unrecognized Villages, the Yoav Unit is perceived by locals to be more of a “militia” than a civil police force. “When we see such a car, we know there’s a demolition,” he said. “So, them being there that night doesn’t mean anything except provoking the people — they are saying, ‘We are the bosses of the place.’ ”

Police from the Yoav Unit claimed in an interview with Israeli news site Ynet that they were unaware of Rahat’s arrangement that night with local police.

According to Halevi, when the Yoav driver “arrived to the police checkpoint” blocking off Highway 264, the two officers from different departments made eye contact — but the Yoav driver didn’t stop. “He was not part of the operation,” Halevi said, “and he thought he could cross the highway. He didn’t know that there was something on the road.”

Halevi declined to give further details of the encounter, as it is now undergoing an internal investigation.

However, the commander stressed, “It doesn’t matter whether he stopped or not. It was a human mistake. The car should not have been there. But in the moment that the commander saw or understood the mistake, it was too late.”

Video footage taken from a police helicopter — dispatched by Israel Police southern district officials before the funeral began — shows the Yoav truck ramming into cars parked at the funeral as it apparently tries to flee the area. Young men can be seen hurling stones in the truck’s direction.

“They were lucky to get out of there alive,” police spokesman Rosenfeld said.

Rahat’s mayor said that once he had personally escaped the besieged cemetery, he called the police, screaming. “I said, ‘You abused us — and you almost killed thousands of civilians!’ ” he said. “They told me, ‘We apologize. A police car just ran through the checkpoint.’ ”

The mayor rested his forehead in his hands, the picture of a man torn between his obligations to his government and to his people.

“We could have buried tens of bodies,” he said. “What would I tell the widows?”

Across town, in a mourner’s tent pitched adjacent to the Al Ja’ar family home, Khaled, 44, lay despondent on a floor mat. His left arm was wrapped in a cast, a wound he said he sustained in police custody, and his head was crowned in a loose red keffiyeh. As he spoke of his son, tears welled silently under his eyes.

“His employers loved him,” Khaled said. “I loved him. He was like a friend to me, not a son. We’d laugh together. He wanted a field bike, but I didn’t want to give it to him, and I’m sorry about it today. I thought it would end his life. If I knew what I know now, I wouldn’t have taken that from him.”

He added: “It’s true that people always talk well of the dead … but Sami was a great person.”

Sami Al Ja’ar, a handsome young man whose smile now lights up banners and protest leaflets across Rahat, came home early Jan. 14 from his job at a factory near Beer Sheva. His mother, Hadassa, remembered serving him his last meal: “Kebap,” she said. “Meat is always the favorite here.”

Police allege that later in the evening, when they showed up to the high school across from Al Ja’ar’s house, they found him taking part in a marijuana deal inside a car parked in the school lot.

What happened next is murky. Neighbors told the Journal that police got aggressive with the drug suspects, at which point Khaled ran over to intervene. Police claim that Khaled attacked the officers with a metal rod, and that dozens of locals began throwing stones at them. Police also say they heard gunshots nearby — prompting them to spray their own live fire into the sky as a warning.

What’s clear is that 20-year-old Sami Al Ja’ar was killed amid the chaos. Multiple witnesses said he was standing in his own driveway, located directly across the street from the police operation, when he took a fatal bullet to his abdomen.

His father remembered: “He came back to me, and he said, ‘Dad, they shot me.’ And I saw the gunshot wound.”

Khaled served for years as an Israeli border police officer, as well as a tour guide for Birthright students at the Bedouin tents in Kfar Hanokdim, located between the Dead Sea and Masada. “No one should ever have to experience something like this, no matter what his religion is, no matter what his origins are,” he said from his mourning tent. “I hope the last one to be killed will be the last one to be killed — that people will know no sorrow and that they won’t feel the pain I’m feeling now.”

Al Krenawi, Rahat’s mayor, said there can be no trust between the Bedouin community and police until the state completes a thorough and transparent investigation into both deaths.

After the funeral, President Reuven Rivlin called Rahat City Hall to promise as much. “I know that the police commissioner will do everything in his power to restore peace and security in the region,” Rivlin said, according to a transcript provided by his office. “We all have an obligation to treat the wounds of the Bedouin community, and it is important that we do it together.”

Al Krenawi said he told Rivlin: “You’re treating us worse than you treat Jabalia and Gaza. Even in the West Bank, they don’t shoot that amount of ammunition.”

Nightly riots since the funeral have died down, in part thanks to efforts by the southern district police to respond with minimal force. Local Bedouin leaders are back in delicate talks with police officials on how to regain trust in the community. The Ministry of Justice has launched an investigation into Sami Al Ja’ar’s killing.

But Al Ja’ar family members and neighbors told the Journal they won’t soon forget this week of pain — and that they won’t believe Israel values its citizens equally until Sami’s killers are brought to justice.

“The Bedouin community in the south is a very patient people, but for a long time now we’re suffering this unfair, systematic policy against the community,” Masamra said. “There is a new generation of highly educated people who are taking charge and … not accepting these policies. It’s a turning point in Rahat between the Arab community and the state.”

Rahat’s week from Hell Read More »

Bibi must stop an Iran bomb even if it offends Obama

Leave a Comment / Opinion / Rabbi Shmuley Boteach

There is nothing wrong with an Israeli prime minister doing his utmost to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon, even if it offends the sensibilities of the American president. A nation that has experienced the world’s worst genocide just 70 years ago has not just a right but also an obligation to take seriously any existential threats that loom against it.

Iran is a genocidal regime. It has stated on countless occasions that it will destroy and annihilate Israel. And it is now building the doomsday weapons that can translate rhetoric into action.

For years, Iran has been hell-bent on developing nuclear weapons. The Obama administration’s strategy to engage the Islamic tyranny in talks has produced no demonstrable results. Unfreezing Iran’s financial assets has only emboldened the brutal regime in continuing its genocidal rhetoric against Israel and disgusting human-rights abuses.

While the administration indulges Iran’s stalling tactics, Iranian centrifuges continue to spin. And with every minute that Tehran gets closer to realizing its diabolical nuclear dream, the civilized world inches closer to its peril. And this is especially true of Israel, which sits in the crosshairs of Iranian rage.

Iran is running out the clock. According to the International Atomic Energy Agency, Iran already has 13,397 kilograms of uranium enriched to 3.5 percent uranium-235. If they use all 9,000 of their reactors at Natanz, the Iranians could enrich this further, to the weapon-grade level of 90 percent uranium-235 in just over a month and a half. And, if Iran’s close ally North Korea can serve as an example, they absolutely will.

The consequences of Iran obtaining a nuclear bomb are catastrophic — for Israel, the Middle East and the entire freedom-loving world. Israel would be under existential threat and would have its hands tied in any dealings with Iranian proxies such as Hamas, Hezbollah and Islamic Jihad. The Middle East would be instantly destabilized, with a nuclear arms race certain to take off. And with the rogue state wielding end-of-days capabilities, the entire world would be forced to witness all levels of Iranian belligerence, virtually unable to intervene.

With so much at stake, it seems the last thing we should be concerned about is offending President Barack Obama. The American president is human just like the rest of us. He can be wrong. He can make mistakes, just like the rest of us. He does not enjoy the divine right of kings. He is not infallible. And if he is offended by being second-guessed by the leader of a nation that had more than a million children gassed to death seven decades ago, he’ll get over it.

The implications of a nuclear Iran for the world are far greater than such simple considerations as the wounded ego of the leader of the free world or a breach of diplomatic protocol.

I do not envy the position of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. He lives every day with the understanding that if he errs in the confrontation with Iran, the consequences for his people are catastrophic, devastating and irreversible. History will hold him completely accountable for his failure to protect Israel.

Now, when it comes to launching a military strike against the Iranian nuclear apparatus, we can argue that perhaps the risks of something going horribly wrong are simply too great. Many already have said so. But can the same argument really be made of a speech delivered to the United States Congress by invitation of the House speaker? What are the terrible consequences that should prevent the prime minister of Israel going before the United States Congress to call for increased sanctions against Iran?

News reports are now saying that Obama administration officials are threatening serious consequences for Israel and the prime minister because of this breach of protocol. In fact, Haaretz just quoted an anonymous U.S. official as saying, “Netanyahu spat in our face … there will be a price.” I had no idea that Al Capone worked in the administration.

Such Mafia language is beneath aides to the president of the United States. I, for one, have become fatigued with the continuous threats issued to the press by “undisclosed sources” in the administration against Israel.

Is it not unseemly for America to continually issue anonymous threats against its staunchest ally, especially when the rest of the world is going to hell in a hand basket?

Perhaps the Obama administration should threaten President Bashar Assad to stop slaughtering his people in Syria and actually, this time, do something about it. Perhaps Obama should threaten devastating and immediate consequences for ISIS leader Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi should he continue to kill Western hostages with impunity, rather than just the airstrikes that have not stopped the vile beheadings. Perhaps officials of the Obama administration can focus their energies on occasionally mentioning the words “Islamic terror” rather than continually threatening the sole democracy in the Middle East with “consequences.”

Israel is not America’s threat. Why Obama despises Netanyahu so deeply is beyond me. Can the explanation really be that Bibi doesn’t accord Obama sufficient respect? Even if that were true, it would explain why Obama dislikes him, but not why he positively despises him, seemingly more than almost every other world leader.

Regardless, the prime minister of Israel is not elected principally to understand the mindset of the American president. He is elected, first and foremost, to defend a nation that has experienced more hatred, more torture, more bloodletting and more wholesale slaughter than any nation on Earth. That prime minister has the responsibility to do everything in his power to protect the Jewish people in Israel from a nuclear annihilation.

One Holocaust is quite enough.

Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, whom Newsweek and The Washington Post call “the most famous rabbi in America,” is the founder of This World: The Values Network, the world’s foremost organization defending Israel in the media. He is the author most recently of “Kosher Lust” and 29 other books. Follow him on Twitter @RabbiShmuley.

Bibi must stop an Iran bomb even if it offends Obama Read More »

Moving and shaking: Bet Tzedek, Beit T’Shuvah and Forbes

Leave a Comment / Los Angeles, Movers & Shakers, Moving & Shaking / Ryan Torok

Halfway through Bet Tzedek’s annual dinner gala at the Hyatt Regency Century Plaza hotel on Jan. 22, Jessie Kornberg, the brand-new president and CEO of the nonprofit legal-aid organization, stepped onto the stage. As she approached the microphone, one member of Bet Tzedek’s new leadership council whispered ecstatically to a reporter: “We love Jessie.”

Kornberg has been on the job only since December. This was her coming-out party, and she immediately owned the stage — bringing up with her about 45 of the 60 members of her staff — and as she started to speak, she spread her arms wide and announced to the 1,100-member crowd: “This is Bet Tzedek.” Then she went on to tell of the anonymous clients whose homes the attorneys had saved, the Holocaust survivors whose legal claims they had garnered, the infirm whose care the lawyers had assured.

“You are not alone,” Kornberg told the affluent crowd, although she was actually addressing those clients whose many needs the organization sets out to alleviate. “We will fight for you,” she said. “We are the army at your back.”

First impressions are often the most lasting, and in those few words, Kornberg, with her giant smile and simple message, had the crowd in her hands and on its feet for a full minute of standing ovation. The evening raised more than $2.25 million for Bet Tzedek, including meeting the challenge, announced from the stage, of a matching gift of $250,000 from Art and Dahlia Bilger, according to David Bubis, Bet Tzedek vice president of development.

Former Los Angeles County Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky was honored with the Rose L. Schiff Commitment to Justice Award for his extensive service to the community. Southern California Edison President Pedro Pizarro was awarded the Luis Lainer Founder’s Award for his longtime support of the organization. Board member and vice president of Millco Investments Samantha Millman received the Rebecca Nichols Emerging Leader Award, and Bet Tzedek attorney Erikson Albrecht was honored with the Jack H. Skirball Community Justice Award.

Also in attendance were last year’s Lainer awardee, philanthropist Stanley Gold, as well as Jewish Federation of Greater Los Angeles President and CEO Jay Sanderson. L.A. City Attorney Mike Feuer and attorneys David Lash, Mitch Kamin and Sandy Samuels, all past Bet Tzedek presidents and CEOs, were also in attendance, along with California State Insurance Commissioner Dave Jones, L.A. City Controller Ron Galperin, and law school deans Robert Rasmussen of USC and Rachel Moran of UCLA.

— Susan Freudenheim, Executive Editor

Beit T’Shuvah, a Culver City-based facility that treats patients suffering from addiction and also operates a full-service synagogue, honored Jon Esformes during Road to Redemption, the rehabilitation center’s 23rd annual gala. The Jan. 18 evening at the Hyatt Regency Century Plaza drew 850 attendees and raised $1.6 million.

Esformes, who once suffered from alcoholism, was suicidal and homeless before undergoing treatment at Beit T’Shuvah, according to a Jan. 22 press release. Today, he is on the facility’s board and serves as the operating partner at Pacific Tomato Growers, a family-owned farming business in Florida that is one of the largest in the nation and that has fought to raise farmworker wages and improve farmers’ working conditions. (To learn more about Esformes’ work, watch a community screening of the film “Food Chains,” which features him, at Beit T’Shuvah on Feb. 8.)

Above: Entertainers at Beit T’Shuvah’s gala included singer Shany Zamir and Beit T’Shuvah resident Ben Foster.

Below: Beit T’Shuvah graduates Asher and Rachel Ehrman fell in love during their treatment and are now happily married.
Photos by Justin Rosenberg, Creative Matters Agency

“He went from pushing shopping carts to filling the shopping carts of others,” Beit T’Shuvah founder and executive vice president Harriet Rossetto said of Esformes, as quoted by the press release. She leads Beit T’Shuvah with her husband, Rabbi Mark Borovitz, its head rabbi and CEO.

The gala featured live entertainment — a musical performance by singer Shany Zamir and Beit T’Shuvah resident Ben Foster highlighted the event. Additional performers included Beit T’Shuvah Cantor Shira Fox and the Beit T’Shuvah Choir. Asher and Rachel Ehrman, who met and fell in love during their treatment and are now happily married, spoke about how Beit T’Shuvah has impacted their lives.

Co-chairs were Lise Applebaum, Meryl Kern and Janice Kamenir-Reznik.

Milken Community School alums Mark Gurman (class of 2012) and Asher Vollmer (2008) were included in Forbes’ fourth annual 30 Under 30 list, which recognizes millennials making moves in consumer technology, finance, education and other fields.

Mark Gurman, photo courtesy of Milken Community School

Already an accomplished journalist, Gurman was featured in Forbes’ crowded media section. He is currently the senior editor of 9to5Mac, one of the largest Apple product tracking sites. The 20-year-old began his ascent at the end of 2009, when he caught the eye of Seth Weintraub, the site’s founder, after locating several online references to Apple registering domains for tablet-related products and informing Apple news blogs about his discovery. This was all before the original iPad was announced and before Gurman’s junior year at Milken. Weintraub himself promptly hired Gurman as a 9to5Mac intern.

Asher Vollmer, photo courtesy of Milken Community School

Vollmer, 25, a graduate of the USC School of Cinematic Arts’ Interactive Media and Games Division, made the games category. He started as the “feel” engineer, dealing with controls, character movement and camera behavior for the game development studio thatgamecompany, but left in 2012 to pursue a more independent route. Shortly thereafter, his independent development team — consisting of himself, illustrator Greg Wohlwend and composer Jimmy Hinson — created “Threes!” a puzzle game in which the player moves numbered tiles to link multiples and addends of three. When there are no moves left on the grid, the tiles are counted for a final score. Vollmer collected an Apple Design Award last year when the tech giant named “Threes!” its best iPhone game of 2014.

Vollmer also designed “Puzzlejuice,” a Tetris-inspired puzzle game, and “Close Castles,” an IOS strategy game played on a grid map in the same vein as the board game Risk.

— Oren Peleg, Contributing Writer

Moving and Shaking highlights events, honors and simchas. Got a tip? Email ryant@jewishjournal.com.

Moving and shaking: Bet Tzedek, Beit T’Shuvah and Forbes Read More »

Funding for survivor services sees a big jump in 2015

A day in the life of the (model) Knesset

Leave a Comment / Culture, Education / Tess Cutler

American Jewish University’s (AJU) dining hall was abuzz with chatter on Jan. 18, when about 100 local high school students debated Israel’s proposed, controversial nation-state bill as part of The Jewish Federation of Greater Los Angeles’ Model Knesset Day.

Upon arrival, students were assigned the identity of a current member of the Knesset and, by association, that member’s party affiliation. After introductions and a few activities, students were divided according to their appointed parties to eat dinner and discuss the law that would have formally defined Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people. Introduced last November, it was shelved before the Knesset could vote on the legislation.

“I’m personally against this bill because I don’t think that any country based on a religion will be a success,” one student said.

Another responded, to a round of applause (and a few hearty whoops): “The idea that no democracy could be based on religion isn’t sound because democracies — including the United States, England, France, Russia and Germany — are all based on sects of Christianity, and they’re pretty successful so far.”

The event sponsored by Federation’s Community Engagement Strategic Initiative was part debate, part workshop and part dinner buffet. It was the perfect complement to current events, according to Dan Gold, Federation’s vice president of Israel advocacy and education.

“We got really lucky that Israel decided to have an actual election this year, so it’s timing up very perfectly,” he said.

It was meant to be engaging, too.

“All of you guys are proving that elections can be fun. Whoo!” an enthusiastic Dana Erlich, Israel consul for culture, media and public diplomacy, said to a Knesset’s worth of high-schoolers as the event started.

Participating students came from the Diller Teen Fellows program, Israel Scouts (Tzofim), Shalhevet High School in Los Angeles, New Community Jewish High School in West Hills and Village Christian School in Sun Valley.

Barbara Charash, an AP government high school teacher at Village Christian School, attended the conference with 44 of her students — and would have brought more if space hadn’t been limited. Raised in a conservative Evangelical Christian home, she said her parents instilled a fervent support for Israel in her as a child that she continues to uphold today. In June 2013, Charash visited Israel for the first time with Federation’s Holy Land Democracy Project, which brings Southern and Central California educators to Israel for a first-person experience.

“I think it’s really important for Christian kids to be exposed to other teenagers that they normally wouldn’t interact with,” she said. “Speaking as a mom, we need to broaden our perspective in our worlds.”

One of Charash’s students, Nathan Magalit, 17, said, “I don’t know many other classes who have field trips like this or have connections like she does.”

He continued: “So far, it’s been very educational. When I entered here, I had a little bit of an understanding of the Knesset — basic facts, like it has 120 members and it’s unicameral.” But he said that he didn’t understand the cultural significance until the Federation event.

Magalit was assigned to the Likud Party, which, he said, “means we’re centrist-right … and we’re fighting for strong family values, strong military — almost like a Republican ideology.”

Hamilton High School sophomore and Federation Teen Advisory board member Sasha
Reiss was assigned to the centrist party Yesh Atid. Reiss, 15, said he was excited by the diversity represented at the event.

“I think it’s really cool that so many people are here who aren’t Jewish but still came here to learn with an open mind about Israel,” he said.

After dinner, students were asked to return to the Knesset for a panel discussion. In this particular mock scenario, four student representatives were asked to debate Israel’s nation-state bill on behalf of their adopted parties. Moderated by Sinai Temple Millennial Director Matt Baram, students responded to a series of questions they had talked about previously in their discussion groups.

At the end of the discussion, all participants were asked to vote twice on the nation-state bill: first according to their party and a second time as themselves. The bill passed during the first vote by a very narrow margin; the second vote failed by a landslide.

“I think it’s important for teens to deepen their understanding of Israel and their empathy with the democratic process,” said Rabbi Hal Greenwald, assistant director of Federation’s Holy Land Democracy Project.

“This is a Sunday on a holiday weekend [Martin Luther King Jr. Day], and they came out to learn about political science. I’m not sure I would’ve done that!” he said, laughing.

A day in the life of the (model) Knesset Read More »

Rabbi Ariel Rav-Noy, shliach at Chabad Persian Youth Center, dies suddenly at 36

Leave a Comment / Obituaries / Jared Sichel

Ariel Rav-Noy, a rabbi at the Chabad Persian Youth Center in Los Angeles, and father to seven children, died suddenly in his sleep early Wednesday. He was 36.

According to crownheights.info, a Brooklyn-based community website for Chabad, Rav-Noy had no “known prior medical condition.”

As assistant director at the Chabad Persian Youth Center in Pico-Robertson, Rav-Noy did outreach work with young Iranian Jews at Beverly Hills High School, Santa Monica College and other local schools, according to Chabad.org. He also ran Jewish Students of Los Angeles, a young professional outreach organization.

Rav-Noy’s Facebook page says he was born in Rehovot, Israel, and spoke six languages, including Russian and Hungarian.

One friend of Rav-Noy described him to Chabad.org as someone with a “bubbly and outgoing personality.” Rabbi Hershey Novack, a friend and classmate of Rav-Noy’s told Chabad.org that he “was the kindest soul wrapped in a dynamo of positive energy.”

“It is tough to discuss Ariel in the past tense,” he said.

Rav-Noy is survived by his wife, Miriam, and their seven children: Mendy, Chani, Levi, Shaina, Sarale, Hindy and Avremile. He’s also survived by his parents, Zeev and Varda, and by four siblings.

The funeral was held Thursday morning at the Chabad Persian Youth Center and was followed by burial at Mount Olive Memorial Park.

Rabbi Ariel Rav-Noy, shliach at Chabad Persian Youth Center, dies suddenly at 36 Read More »

Me and La Migra

Leave a Comment / Opinion / Jewish Journal

I am carrying through here on my prior post about the Wong family by making visits on Xmas and New Year’s to their rented beach front manse (for one third of San Diego rents) in Rosarita Beach.

I found Northern Mexico rugged but beautiful, the people friendly to a fault. I ate at a “nouvelle cuisine” restaurant named “Mi Casa Supper Club” as good as any I’ve eaten at in Southern California, and we bought fish at a beachfront, pelican-populated market in Ensenada that has all the local color of John Steinbeck’s novels.

Yet Mexico is a society desperately in need of infrastructure investment. Maybe it’s the provincial American in me, but I could not help thinking what a few hundred billion in American—and European and Asian—capital investment could do if politics did not get in the way.

The worst of my experience was with “La Migra”—the U.S. border patrol. As best as I can understand it, we have for American citizens returning by car from Mexico, a three-tier system: one expedited lane for those holding a “passport lite” border document, one for returnees with a valid driver’s license or birth certificate, and one with some sort of special medical status. It’s very easy to get confused trying to find the correct lane.

That you have this special “border passport” is apparently a Border Patrol preference, but not an official legal requirement. We know this because many if not most Americans return with just a driver’s license, and are not hassled—unless the border agent is suspicious or in a bad mood.

On my most recent trip with my friend, Chris, driving me back to San Diego, we were sidelined for almost two hours for reasons we can only surmise: because Chris told the truth that he was born in the UK (on an American military based where his father was service as an Air Force medic), or because I only showed a California driver’s license, or because the agent did not like the look of us: Chris is a blend of Chinese and Latino, and I told the agent bluntly that I was born in the Bronx, three blocks from the old Yankee Stadium.

The experience at the interrogation center was like a combination of Kafka and the Keystone Cops. When Chris asked whether we would be given a number and treated in a logical order, he got back from an agent a sarcastic: “Welcome to the real world.”

To the contrary, La Migra seems to be the fantasy land police. The agents mill around endlessly, joking about who took the longest lunch break, and posing for selfies. The idea that these demoralized petty functionaries could arrest a real world terrorist is beyond laughable.

After a desultory inspection, we were allowed to return to “the promised land.” Fortunately for all concerned, my spastic colon did not erupt, nor did my New York Jewish temper which might have landed me in jail, possibly in a hospital ward.

For many years, I’ve favored a well-paid and well-treated border agents strictly enforcing border security, coupled with a liberal immigration policy. Now, I’m tending towards a libertarian-anarchist position. With neither party in D.C. apparently serious about comprehensive immigration reform, let’s put out of its misery by abolishing it. Homeland Security’s worse-than-useless INS.

The cantankerous California writer Ambrose Bierce crossed into Mexico at the time of the 1910 Revolution, and was never seen again. Probably his way of saying adieu to the human race. I’m not that misanthropic, but won’t revisit Mexico until La Migra cleans up its act. Unfortunately, that happening is a fantasy.

Me and La Migra Read More »

Shmoozing with Mel Brooks, the 88-year-old man

Leave a Comment / Blogs, Entertainment, Hollywood, Is Featured?, Mobile, Mobile-Homepage, News / Danielle Berrin

“OK, I can die now.”

That is what I said — out loud — when, on a recent rainy Monday afternoon, the phone rang and a familiar, gentle voice emerged on the other end of the line: “Hello, Mel Brooks!”

I had just finished watching his latest stand-up act, “Mel Brooks Live at the Geffen,” a 60-minute romp through his life and work filmed in Westwood last April that will air on HBO Jan. 31. It is Brooks at his most personal. At 88, Brooks is looking back on his life — reflecting on what his audience sees as an iconic career, but that for him comprised the simple fact of his existence. The show is a love-fest in which Brooks shares memories, anecdotes and even sings a song or two, offering up yet one more performance that is by turns homage, career retrospective and pure cotton candy for his fans.

“So how was it? Did you like it?” Brooks asks.

“I think you’re gonna be a real hit,” I tell him. “You’ve got a big career ahead of you.”

Before he utters a single word at the Geffen, Brooks commands a standing ovation just by walking onstage. I ask him if it’s hard to gauge how well he’s doing, comedy-wise, because at this point, people will laugh and love him no matter what.

“If you’re nearly 100 years old,” Brooks says, “and you’ve done it all your life, and people know who you are, they’re gonna come and stand up. But if you’re a brand-new comic bursting out on the scene, they’re gonna wait and see what you’re gonna deliver …”

Brooks is at a point when there is less waiting and seeing, more recollecting and reflecting. He may think his best days are behind him. The efforts that once went so stridently into building his life have relaxed into simply maintaining it. I ask him what is hardest about aging.

“Seriously?” Brooks asks, maybe not entirely sure if he wants to answer. But then he does.

“It’s empty spaces,” he begins, speaking slowly and deliberately, “that used to be filled with all the people that you grew up with, the people you love, your family — they’re all gone.” He often pauses between clauses, as his mind keeps forming thoughts. Everything he says is thoughtful — little is sarcastic, nothing is snarky. “That’s the toughest,” he concludes.

I feel bad for pushing a man who has rained down so much laughter on millions of people into the sad places in his life.

“And what’s the best part of growing older?” I ask.

“Stuffed cabbage,” he says, not missing a beat. “I don’t live for anything else. I don’t live for people; I don’t live for performing; I don’t live for promoting my movies and my shows. I live for stuffed cabbage. I love stuffed cabbage. There’s this place called Fromin’s that makes it, on Wilshire and 19th Street, and they have beauuu-tee-ful old-fashioned stuffed cabbage.”

There’s a part in Brooks’ stand-up routine at the Geffen, right near the beginning, when he talks about his first paying jobs. One of them was “pool tummler,” of which, he says, “It was my job to wake up the Jews around the pool.” He then recounts how he would dress up in dramatic costume, fake a suicide-by-drowning, and everyone around the pool would wake up and laugh. So I ask Brooks what it does for him to continue to work and perform when he could just as easily retire and be a Jew sleeping by the pool.

“It’s akin to walking,” he says. “It’s circulation. If you just sit at home and watch television, there’s gonna be a natural drying out and squeezing down and diminishing of your entire ability to see and to talk. But if you’re up and moving and have some goals in mind, you’ll stay alive a little longer.”

I’m a little nervous about steering the conversation to Judaism, because I can only imagine how many millions of questions Brooks has been asked about being Jewish. But, as it happens, many of the anecdotes he shares in the show are about his early days in Hollywood, and most of them involve Jews. So I tell him I noticed that his recounting of his Hollywood history is littered with Jewish names — Wasserman, Glazer, Cohn, Strauss …

Brooks interrupts.

“Let me correct you,” he says.

Oh, boy, I’m thinking. I’ve botched it on question three. “You’re a good writer, Danielle?” Brooks asks matter-of-factly. I say yes. “Don’t say ‘littered’; say ‘replete.’ ” He spells it: “R-E-P-L-E-T-E. Replete with Jewish names!”

Mel Brooks has just given me a grammar lesson.

“That said,” I continue, after thanking him for the tip, “Do you think of Hollywood as a Jewish place?”

This question elicited his longest answer.

“It was, absolutely was,” he says in a measured tone. “I don’t know about today, but the first time I came out was for, like, a small job working at Columbia in 1952, [and] I saw Hollywood for the first time, [and] I was just drunk with the lure of studios and motion pictures and Edward G. Robinson; stuff like that. It was thrilling. And I was also aware that, you know, maybe they didn’t let Jews own coal mines or airlines or railroads or big farms — the Jews had to find their places. And [a] great big niche was entertainment.

“Broadway, to this day — and there are very few exceptions — if you go to a Broadway musical, the book was [probably] written by, and the score was [probably] composed by, a Jew. I mean, 99 percent of Broadway musicals. The only great exception would be Cole Porter. But everything else, including me, Mel Brooks, [who did] two great musicals, ‘Young Frankenstein’ and ‘The Producers’ …”

Here, he digresses to point out his proudest achievement: “By the way, ‘The Producers’ is still No. 1 in terms of the Tony Award — we have 12. No one else has come close to 12 Tony Awards on Broadway.”

Without prompting, he gets back to his point:

“So I’m telling you, when I first came out here, it was a great opportunity for Jews.”

He offers a list replete with Jewish names: “The Cohns of Columbia, the Warners of Warner Bros., the Goldwyns, Mr. Goldwyn. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, right?

“Actually,” he reconsiders, “I don’t know if Metro is a Jew.”

I ask him whether Hollywood is different today from when he started out.

“It has changed. It’s not so tribal; it’s not so Jewish. And it’s like … bean counters have come in — heavily. The bean counters [of] the gross, the bottom line: ‘What has the movie made? What has it done?’ Nobody says anymore, ‘Is it good? Did you love it?’ ”

Brooks suddenly feels compelled to share with me his three favorite movies of last year: “Whiplash,” “Nightcrawler” and his top favorite, “A Most Violent Year,” the J.C. Chandor film with Jessica Chastain and Oscar Isaac — which I tell him also happens to be my favorite movie of the year. Then we both start exclaiming about how it was robbed of Oscar nominations. Brooks gets very excited that not only have I seen these less-popular movies, but also that I loved them.

“Danielle!” he cries with his perfect Mel Brooks-ian rasp. “We should hang out! We should live together!”

At this point, I really do feel prepared to die. Quite happily.

We do a little more raving about Albert Brooks’ performance in the movie, and because I now know that Mel Brooks and I share the same taste in film, I tell him to see Damian Szifron’s Oscar-nominated “Wild Tales.” He pauses to write it down.

“So,” I begin again, getting back to business. “I know you’ve been asked this like a zillion times, and you’re probably sick of this question, but … do you think Jewish humor comes more from fear and neuroses or creativity and intelligence?”

“I don’t know,” Brooks says, thinking out loud. “There may be some deep — very deep — like, genetic message in our bones: ‘Tell the world, especially the Jews, to keep smiling, keep laughing, it’s gonna be all right, it’s gonna be all right,’ you know? It could be a deep message from one generation of Jews to another to keep it going.”

You think because we’ve been through so many hardships?

“Exactly. It may be some kind of survival mechanism that is deep within us to help us survive all the tragedies that the tribe has endured these 5,000 years.”

Because it’s been only a few weeks since the Charlie Hebdo massacre in Paris, when cartoonists and satirists were murdered for their art, I wonder if Brooks, a famous satirist himself, believes there should be limits to satire. After all, if there is anyone who understands the impact of satire on society, it’s Mel Brooks, who famously parodied Adolf Hitler in his hit film-turned-Broadway-musical “The Producers.”

“I’m gonna say a very strange thing,” Brooks declares. “I would like to say that there should be no limits whatsoever to anything satiric, that you can make fun of anything in the world, no matter what it is. However, you have to temper that with intelligence. I think it’s up to the [creator] to say ‘Wait a minute, this could bring havoc down on our heads.’ ”

Even when you feel it’s important to make a political statement?

“[Satire] should be tempered with reason, that’s all. When I did ‘Springtime for Hitler,’ and I made fun of the Nazis and, especially, of Hitler, there was no big Nazi movement in the world anymore — it was 15 years later. It was pretty safe. Today, it [might] be even more dangerous. Who knows?

“But,” he adds, “I would still do it. You couldn’t stop me.”

Despite his philosophical objections, the artist in him prevails. So I seize the moment to talk to Brooks about his own comedic legacy. I remind him that in describing his admiration for “Blazing Saddles” star Madeleine Kahn, he once told a journalist that Kahn had transcended comedy and entered the realm of art. I wonder if he thinks of himself that way, but because he is generally pretty reticent on the subject of his own significance, I’m not sure this will be a question he’ll want to answer.

“No, no,” he says, surprising me. “It’s a good question. Because certain cultures saluted comedy earlier in their growth as a nation — like the French saluted the great comedies of Moliere and Voltaire, and said that they’re great art. They’re as great as any of the more serious [dramatic arts]. Europe was way ahead of us in saluting comedy. America took a long, long time, and it’s still lagging behind. We still think, no matter what comedy is, we kinda still think of it as frivolous instead of as important.”

“Why do you think that is?” I ask him.

“It’s as simple as this: Laughter doesn’t have the gravity of tears.

“Tears mean so much more than laughter. [But] I’m saying they’re equal. Personally? Don’t print this … well, you can print a little of it: I think comedy is just a hair more important than tears, and that laughter is more important in our enlightenment and our development.”

It occurs to me when Brooks says this that he has had a deep personal investment in laughter, in comedy, in focusing on the humor in life, not only because he is a Jew (and there’s that genetic-survival thing) but also because he lost his father when he was 2 years old. He had to survive that, too. I ask him if it was a function of survival for him, as a young boy, to treasure the comic over the tragic?

“That’s a very intelligent and bright, good supposition,” he says, pondering my (amateur) analysis. “There might be some truth in it, really. I lost my father when I was only 2. I can’t even remember him. There’s something big, you know, emotionally, missing in my life. [Making] alliances with father figures was always very important to me. Like Sid Caesar — he was very important to me, emotionally as well as professionally. Father figures always meant a lot. Even, like, rejected father figures, like [Franklin Delano Roosevelt], meant a great deal to me. I thought Roosevelt was so important in my life, you know? He could be my father; he could save us. And he did. He actually did.”

While the comic is in the very serious realm of emotions, I linger a little longer and ask Brooks how he has coped with the loss of his wife of more than 40 years and the love of his life, actress Anne Bancroft.

“There’s no way to cope,” he says. “All you can do is just keep busy. Busy is the word. And keep [near] the ones you love.”

Unlike most grieving widows, Brooks is in the unusual position of having been married to a Hollywood actress who was immortalized on film. Does he ever pop in old movies just to visit her?

“Oh, all the time. All the time,” he says. “The Miracle Worker” is his favorite.

Despite his stature in the culture and his extraordinary success, I ask Brooks how he has managed to remain so lovely and so humble.

“When you watch giants like Sid Caesar or Anne Bancroft, talents like that, and [then] they pass away, it humbles you. You say, ‘Wait a minute: We’re not gods, we die; we go to the earth like everybody else. You’re not in any way superior to anyone on the earth.’ Just the fact that people who are so close to you and so talented pass away really does humble you.”

Still, humble though he is, Brooks must know what an indelible mark he has made on the history of American — even world — entertainment. That the movies and musicals and TV shows he created will serve as his legacy, and will be watched and cherished for generations to come.

“There will always be comedy,” he says, launching into his philosophy of its meaning. “There will always be jesters to the king that point out the inadequacies, the half-truths, that see the emperor naked. I think comedy has done more to straighten out civilization than wars and revolutions. But then, I’m a comic, so I like to take credit for the advance of the world.”

He seems to be on a bit of a roll, so, before we hang up, I ask Brooks what being Jewish has meant to him in his life. He is effusive on the topic.

“Being Jewish means a lot to me. I love my tribe. I love my people. I’m lucky to have been born a Jew. But I am not religious; I’m not frum, in other words. I will eat ribs; I’ll eat in Chinese restaurants. But I just love my people — their strength, their guts, their determination to survive. And I also love their sweetness, and their humor, and their talent. They’ve given me a lot of that. The sweetness, the humor, the talent. I can’t think of a tribe that is more profound and funny than the Jews.”

Finally, I ask Brooks to tell me his favorite Jewish joke. He instantly launches into a colorful, PG-rated and very clever joke that has me in stitches at the end.

“The Jews will love it!” he declares triumphantly.

Yes, I tell him, the Jews will love it. And they will always, always, always love him.

Shmoozing with Mel Brooks, the 88-year-old man Read More »

GET HOME DELIVERY! CLICK HERE »

Jewish Journal

Connect. Inform. Inspire.

Jewish Journal

L.A.’s newest rookie transplant: Elaine Soloway

Pursuing the Counter-song: Haftarat Be-shallah, Judges 4:4-5:31

Rahat’s week from Hell

Bibi must stop an Iran bomb even if it offends Obama

Moving and shaking: Bet Tzedek, Beit T’Shuvah and Forbes

Funding for survivor services sees a big jump in 2015

A day in the life of the (model) Knesset

Rabbi Ariel Rav-Noy, shliach at Chabad Persian Youth Center, dies suddenly at 36

Me and La Migra

Shmoozing with Mel Brooks, the 88-year-old man

Jewish Journal