While the Emmy Awards were under way at downtown’s Nokia Theatre on Sept. 23, a very different — but no less emotional — celebration of the arts took place less than half an hour away in the leafy residential community of San Marino.
Last Sunday, my wife, our daughter and I hitched our bikes to our car, drove toward downtown and parked just across from MacArthur Park, otherwise known as Langer’s Deli adjacent.
Tess Friedman passes Ethel Kamiyama a bowl of charoset, and Kimayama spreads a spoonful of the fruit and nut paste onto her shard of matzah. Kamiyama leans over her plate as the small sandwich crumbles at her bite, and nods at Friedman, signaling that she finds this foray into Jewish culture quite tasty.
Stop in to the iconic round-the-clock Canter’s Deli most nights during the 7 p.m.-to-4 a.m. shift, and you’re likely to encounter another icon — a short, solid woman in her 70s with auburn hair who wears a white waitress uniform with metal snaps, a black sweater and sports a youthful twinkle in her eye.
Amid all the hubris and rancor flying around the subject of women’s reproductive rights these days, I suggest we stop for a moment and send a word of thanks to Planned Parenthood for its 100 years of caring for both women and men with nowhere else to turn — almost 50 of those years in Los Angeles.
The Jewish community as well as the larger Los Angeles area has lost a giant in education in the passing this week of Shirley Levine. In an age where we debate how we gauge, appreciate and pay our educators, it is time to pause and celebrate one of the best that ever lived.
David Suissa’s “Salon Nation: Israel’s Struggle For Renewal” (Aug. 26) was excellent in describing what common-sense actions should be taken. Unfortunately, too many changes are required before Israel could be considered a “light unto the nations.” In my opinion, the best chance for peace would have been Israel’s unilateral establishment of a Palestinian state after the victorious Yom Kippur War and the signing of the Egyptian peace treaty.
Letters to the editor
The old man ambled up the cement stairs leading to the small front porch of his wood-plank, single-story house on Bridge Street. And, like the house, Adolfo Finkelstein, 85, is a reminder of a previous time when he would have represented the predominant demographic in the area, a time when he would have been part of the large Jewish community that once populated Boyle Heights.
A plastic bag whips in the breeze, trying in vain to free itself from the coil of barbed wire atop a chain link fence that surrounds the Breed Street Shul just off Cesar Chavez Avenue (originally Brooklyn Avenue) in Boyle Heights.
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