Today, I struggle with my grief for Ramon as the \”international hero\” and for Ramon as the man who my family and I were privileged to meet, break bread with and get to know personally.
There were a lot of moments of silence this week. There was the one early Saturday morning when you first heard the news of the space shuttle Columbia\’s disappearance.
Yuval Rotem, Israeli consul general for the Western United States, delivered these remarks at a Feb. 1 dinner for Pressman Academy,
honoring him and his wife, Miri, at the Airport Westin Hotel.
As an aerospace writer, I have watched 87 crews slip the bonds of Earth\’s gravity and rocket away into space.
The bombs that ripped through crowds of Israelis and foreign workers in Tel Aviv this weekend may have saved Yasser Arafat from making some tough decisions.
Internal and external pressures have been building on Arafat to allow comprehensive reforms of the Palestinian Authority — reforms that effectively would undermine the PA president\’s grip on power.
But after Sunday\’s deadly attack by the Al-Aksa Brigade, a terrorist group from Arafat\’s own Fatah movement, Israel refused to allow Palestinian officials to attend a conference on PA reform in London or congregate in Ramallah to consider a draft of a Palestinian constitution.
Israeli Foreign Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Monday that there is no need for Palestinian officials to travel abroad to conferences when they have the power at home to end terrorist attacks, but don\’t use it.
Unintentionally, however, the Israeli moves may have allowed Arafat to dodge a political bullet, at least temporarily.
At one point in Jonathan Kesselman\’s \”Jewish exploitation\” comedy, \”The Hebrew Hammer,\” Mordechai Jefferson Carver strides into a seedy skinhead bar wearing a long leather coat, a black fedora, pais, a tallit and an oversized gold chai. A chalkboard advertises beer on tap such as Old Adolf, but the titular superhero orders \”Manischewitz, straight up.\” Then he crashes a bottle over the bartender\’s head, whips out two sawed-off shotguns and shouts, \”Shabbat Shalom, Motherf——s!\”\n\nIn this outrageous world of the Hammer (Adam Goldberg), the Orthodox Jewish hero must battle the evil son of Santa (Andy Dick) to save Chanukah.
As The Journal went to press last week, word came that terrorist kidnappers in Pakistan had brutally murdered Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl.
Who needs Halloween or Mardi Gras? On Purim, the masquerade of characters is lively and intriguing: Spangled Vashtis, bearded Mordechais, snarling Hamans, bejeweled Esthers, silk-robed Ahasueruses.
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