If you\’re a single 24-year-old gal looking to meet a preferably Jewish single guy in Los Angeles, you\’d think a good pick-up line might include the words \”I work for The Jewish Journal.\” After all, what better way to convey to the guy-of-interest that you\’re a fellow MOT? But you\’d be wrong.
When I started moonlighting for a Jewish weekly in the late 1950s, I often encountered sneers that implied that if I were any good, why wasn\’t I working for a \”real\” newspaper?
\”I never think of food as something that\’s stationary,\” Nathan said on a recent book tour stop in Los Angeles. \”Things change, neighborhoods change, food changes, we get new ingredients, people get ideas. And when you come to a country you adapt what you knew to that country.\”
Perhaps what\’s at issue is my own life: I\’m a word person. For more than 20 years I\’ve made my living by writing and editing. Getting the words right is what I labor to achieve, all day every day. It\’s a struggle that often leaves me in despair.
Often pictured in Christian iconography as solitary figures, lost in a unique and incommunicable holiness, Rice\’s \”holy family\” of Jesus, Mary and Joseph, by contrast, is part of a large, boisterous, affectionate Jewish clan, living a full, observant Jewish life together, full of rituals and prayers and the rhythm of the holy day feasts.
Schlitt spent the past five years transforming a midlife crisis, a professionally disastrous trip to India, and his burning and failed ambition to make a movie about that disaster into a one-man show called, \”Mike\’s Incredible Indian Adventure.\”
As she wrote \”In Her Shoes,\” Jennifer Weiner wanted to work through an obvious, but puzzling, conundrum: How can people who grew up in the same house wind up radically different individuals?
While some admirers have envisioned Wiesenthal as a Jewish John Wayne or James Bond, the diminutive Kingsley, who has played numerous Jewish characters in his film career, including Meyer Lansky in \”Bugsy\” and Fagin in the current \”Oliver Twist,\” depicts him as a much more modest man, frail after the camps, dedicated to his work, not given to swagger or seduction.
One week, I would ambitiously attempt to devour the entire \”Box Car Children\” series; another I would host a Judy Blume marathon and vigilantly try to sneak the purportedly trashy \”Deenie\” home in between my \”Sheila the Great\” and \”Blubber.\”
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