With this issue, the Journal launches a new feature, Educator Q & A. We will be featuring regular interviews with teachers, school administrators and others involved in public, private and Jewish education in the greater Los Angeles area.
Seventy elementary, high school and middle school teachers, principals, counselors and psychologists gathered Jan. 18 at the Museum of the Holocaust for the first of four sessions in the Anti-Defamation League\’s (ADL) 18th Annual Teacher-Training Workshop on the Holocaust, titled \”Women in the Holocaust: Resisters to Perpetrators.\”
Vienna\’s Holocaust Memorial in the inner city\’s Judenplatz was unveiled in a simple but moving ceremony last Wednesday.
A prayer and study center honoring Jewish life has opened near the place that for more than half a century has been the paramount symbol of Jewish death.
David Lehrer may be overstating his case only slightly when he says that most Westsiders are unaware of what goes on \”6 inches below the 10 freeway and 6 inches east of the Golden State.\”
It all began when Times columnist Al Martinez wrote a column about the events at the Pacific Palisades high school. For those of you unfamiliar with the brouhaha, a number of students took it upon themselves to publish an underground paper for no other purpose than to attack some teachers they disliked. In the course of five issues, they accused their targets of being prostitutes and pedophiles. When they promised to print the addresses and phone numbers of the teachers in an upcoming edition, the administration finally stepped in. They suspended 10 students, as I understand it, and transferred the two ringleaders.In his piece, Martinez accused the grown-ups of over-reacting. He felt that a case could be made for both sides, and wrote that, as usual, the truth was to be found someplace between the two opposing factions.Having known Martinez for a few years, I felt justified in writing him a \”Dear Al\” letter, addressed to his home. In it, I suggested that the students (and their parents) had gotten off lightly. The combination of blatant lies and obvious malice would make them all quite vulnerable to lawsuits, the laws of libel being what they are.
Dr. Gary J. Schiller is an associate professor at UCLA, so perhaps it is not surprising that the new chairman of the Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust puts education and research at the top of his agenda.Schiller\’s accession also marks a generational change.
Changing the way a nation and a people think about themselves is not an easy job. But Yoram Hazony and his Jerusalem and Washington, D.C.-based Shalem Center is attempting to do just that for Israel and the Jews.
In a huge tent on the Universal Studios lot, crammed with computer gear and large television screens, Steven Spielberg last week unveiled his high-tech master plan to transmit and preserve the living testimony of Holocaust survivors for this and future generations.
Could there be a more fitting way to open an evening of Catholic-Jewish dialogue than by singing a gospel rendition of \”The Storm Is Passing Over\”?
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