Gebürtig, Austria\’s entry into the competition for Best Foreign Film in the upcoming Oscar race, is a clever and mostly engaging movie that goes after the big questions: Is the Holocaust best told as documentary or fiction?
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.
\”Girl Meets God: On the Path to Spiritual Life\” by Lauren Winner (Algonquin Books, $23.95).
Lauren Winner\’s spiritual memoir, \”Girl Meets God,\” is a passionate and thoroughly engaging account of a continuing spiritual journey within two profoundly different faiths.
Winner, the child of a Reform Jewish father and a \”lapsed Southern Baptist\” mother, was raised as a Jew in the South. Told she was not really Jewish, since Jewish law dictates that Judaism passes through the blood of the mother, she chose to convert to Orthodox Judaism at the end of high school, following her parents\’ divorce. By the end of her senior year at college, she decided that while in graduate school in England she would convert again, this time to evangelical Christianity.
This week\’s Torah portion, Shemot, finds us studying the Book of Exodus for the first time this year. Probing the text, I began to think about the Hebrew word tevah (ark) that is found only twice in the Torah — in parshat Noah and in this one.
Every week I go on two walks that I absolutely treasure. Each Sunday, my husband and I walk through a different section of Los Angeles. We have no destination, but our purpose is to exercise. We could choose other forms of exercise. We could be on a treadmill, moving in place without moving in space. Yet this is not as gratifying as walking outside. The walks along the beach or in the hills around the city create another dimension of being.
Excerpted from \”Common Prayers: Faith, Family and a Christian\’s Journey Through the Jewish Year\” by Harvey Cox. (Houghton Mifflin, $24).
Against the Dying of the Light: A Father\’s Journey through Loss\” by Leonard Fein (Jewish Lights Publishing, $19.95)
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