Shortly after the Oslo peace process got underway, composer Nabil Azzam met with Yasser Arafat and offered the Palestinian leader a new national anthem for his nascent Palestinian Authority.\n
Little girls at a San Fernando Valley Jewish preschool report for circle time in midriff tops and lipstick. In Hollywood, a teen-ager acquires a tattoo, a designer backpack and a baby within a year of her arrival here from rural El Salvador. A \”soccer mom\” at a park in Van Nuys chats blithely about buying her 17-year-old daughter breast implants for her birthday. \”This is the real world,\” she says in response to my look of disbelief.
A payment slip from 1927, part of the documentary evidence to support Freddy Jackson\’s claim. Sitting in the Fairfax Avenue deli where he worked for four decades of his life, Freddy Jackson reflects on his chances of getting the millions of dollars due him.
Steven S. Cohen was a hard-working businessman, a good friend and the father of two young girls, ages 2 and 5, when he suffered a massive heart attack during a game of weekend basketball and died. He was 35.\n
What is there about klezmer music that sends feet flying and excitement levels of certain Jewish audiences soaring? Nostalgia for the past or a just-found fondness for a \”new\” music\”? Whatever it is, when the klezmer band struck up a \”Freylach,\” almost instantly, a woman in a red baseball cap jumped to her feet, raised her arms to the sky and began bouncing joyfully to the music. She was quickly joined by someone in a jaunty straw hat and a T-shirt emblazoned with the word \”Danceaholic.\” Soon, there was an impromptu circle of happy bouncers — young and old — stepping lively under the warm California sun.
I went to Israel last month as someone who is a supporter of the peace process; as someone who believes in exchange of land for peace; as someone who is dedicated to peace with security for Israel; and as someone disturbed by the construction at Har Homa and the opening of the Hasmonean tunnel. Over the course of many years, I have supported Israel\’s peace movement and have worked to promote a just peace between Israel and its Arab neighbors.
While that may sound like an old Jewish joke, it\’s an arrangement that well suits a community which feels at home in this overwhelmingly Buddhist nation but keeps a low profile.\n
The last days of the Passover holiday brought a shocking message to 14 faculty and staff members at the University of Judaism: They\’re laid off.
Mike Gold* had a successful small business, a nice home, a wife and two kids when he began to wonder about his soul. Questions about life\’s meaning, about God and spirituality and his Jewish heritage would not go away. \”I started studying Judaism by myself, and I realized,\” he said, \”I didn\’t know anything.\”
