James D. Stern, 40, a part-owner of the Chicago Bulls, got his chance after breaking into the movie business with \”Michael Jordan: To the Max,\” a successful large-format documentary film about the athlete\’s final days in pro basketball. He quietly secured the rights to Keith Reddin\’s play, \”It\’s the Rage,\” which is now a film dedicated to his murdered friend.
It\’s not easy being 52, especially when you\’re a country. Israel and I are the same age, and I get the feeling it\’s harder on her than on me. The other night my high school classmates living in Israel got together for a 35th reunion. There were 116 graduates of our modern-Orthodox day school that June long ago, and today 12 of us live in Israel, four men and eight women. Half the women are grandmothers by now; one has a granddaughter the same age as my daughter. Jeepers, how time flies.
Israel had good reason to remember King Hassan II of Morocco as \”a friend and a statesman,\” and not just because of his tireless efforts to build bridges between the Jewish state and its Arab neighbors.
Secret cooperation between the Moroccan and Israeli intelligence services began in 1961 under King Hassan\’s father, Mohammed V, who allowed Moroccan Jews to emigrate to Israel. The younger monarch broadened and institutionalized the contacts after Meir Amit, the then-head of the Mossad, Israel\’s CIA, clandestinely met Hassan in Marrakech in 1964. Undercover contacts continued, with only two brief interruptions, until Hassan\’s death last Friday.
Girl meets clown.
Girl is fascinated by clown, who is a bona fide graduate of clown college and can walk on stilts.
Each Yom Kippur, a vestigial loneliness creeps over me. I achingly feel that my parents and family are back East; that my cousins live in Japan; that some of my dearest are dead. On this day, dispersion and alienation seeps in, and I cling to my community like fog to the shore. And this is the way it should be.
My friend Jane and I met for dinner last week andhad a good laugh about death. California\’s political campaign seasonis just commencing, and we were discussing, in an offhand way, whatmy husband, an attorney, might have made of an upcoming ballotproposition were he still among us.
\”It\’s amazing that he\’s still dead,\” I said,without quite knowing what I meant. Simultaneously, Jane and I letout a roar, a \”yipes!\” of astonishment, as people do when they touchsomething hot, or come too close to the sitra atra, what kabbalists call\”the other side.\”
My friend Susie asked me to recommend a \”goodhaggadah\” for her seder. Tell me first about your guests, I said. Arethere many children? Grandparents? Republicans? Buddhists? Today,selecting a haggadah is a form of Rorschach test, a unique,personalized snapshot of you in the here and now, never to beduplicated again.
\”Don\’t you want to play with the other little girls?\” my grandmother asked me one summer, while the two of us sat on a park bench near a pack of screaming children.
I buried my head deeper into my book.
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