Bernie Brillstein, a veteran talent agent, manager and resident iconoclast, said, \”Hollywood is a small company town and you figure everyone is entitled to his position. Anyway, everybody takes it for granted that Gibson is an anti-Semite, so people say, \’Well, he did it again.\’\”
Stephen Lachter didn\’t know what to expect when a friend dragged him to a men\’s club meeting at his Conservative synagogue five years ago.
\”My father was in a men\’s club, and to me, it was guys sitting around playing pinochle and volunteer ushering,\” he admitted.
Lachter was surprised to see \”interesting people having serious discussions,\” and he \”fell into a session on kiruv,\” or outreach, to intermarried families. \”I said to myself, this is something shuls need to be talking about.\”
Michael Sachs remembers that he had initially thought that a program on death wasn\’t really important for people in their 40s.
\”But, in fact,\” he now says, \”I learned things I assumed I wouldn\’t need to think about for many years. I thought the program dealt with potentially distressing material in a nonthreatening, matter-of-fact fashion,\” he said.
In anticipation of Easter, a slightly modified version of \”The Passion of the Christ,\” the film by actor and director Mel Gibson, and screenwriter Benedict Fitzgerald, has been re-released. The second coming if you will. This re-cut version is widely available in a DVD gift format.
Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa\’s first state-of-the-city speech is likely to put bone and muscle on his school takeover pitch which, up till now, nearly a year into his term, has been theoretical and short on specifics. If Villaraigosa delivers what people all over town have been waiting for, a slew of interest groups will know where they stand and will begin to respond accordingly.
While there are only four questions posed in the haggadah, most seders struggle with the unasked fifth question, \”When are we going to eat?\” It is asked, not only by hungry children, but also by adults who feel disconnected to the rituals of their ancestors.
In a measure of the acclaimed movie\’s respectability in some quarters of the local Jewish community, the University of Judaism recently sponsored a screening of and panel discussion on \”Paradise Now\” that featured the film\’s director, Hany Abu-Assad.
The \”One People/One Book\” plan is for synagogue members to meet and discuss \”As a Driven Leaf\” in small groups at least four times between last November\’s opening at the UJ and a closing event on May 24 at Milken Community High School.
The authors propose a new map with \”multiple homelands\” that displaces Israel from \”the center of the Jewish universe.\” They point out that since the mid-19th century, most Jewish religious innovation has originated in the United States, rather than in Europe or Israel. As of 2003, more people emigrated from Israel to Russia than vice versa, and New York is the communal and philanthropic center of Jewish life. Ultimately, the authors find, contemporary Jews are at home wherever they live. \”New Jews,\” they argue, \”connect emotionally and culturally with multiple places and traverse routes across national boundaries but are nonetheless rooted in a specific place they call home.\”
Guilt & Pleasure — \”A magazine for Jews and the people who love them\” — hit newsstands across North America last month, offering readers content ranging from long-form essays and memoirs to fiction, comics, photography and archival material.
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