Rumors of anti-Semitic laws in Iran have disturbed local Iranian Jews who have been increasingly concerned for the safety of roughly 25,000 Jews still living in Iran since Ahmadinejad denied the existence of the Holocaust and called for Israel to \”wiped off the map\” late last year.
The Haggadah tells us \”you were strangers in the land of Egypt.\” Here is the interesting thing — because we were strangers, we are supposed to learn not how the Israelites should have acted, but — how the Egyptians should have acted. We are supposed to learn how not to oppress others. Don\’t treat others the way we were treated.
Moshe Hammer\’s pieces look like quirkier, black-ink versions of medieval illuminated manuscripts. The Hebrew letters dance and morph into images based on his intensive studies of commentaries on the sefarim. Apparently, Hammer was feverishly working on such drawings when he took one of his late-night walks to clear artist\’s block in July 2004. He had trekked miles from his Fairfax area apartment when the truck hit him at the intersection of Santa Monica Boulevard and Western Avenue, killing him instantly, according to a coroner\’s report.
Freud famously called dreams \”the royal road to knowledge of the unconscious.\” And his own dreams and their analysis revealed to him a whirl of conflicts around his Jewish identity.
\”Keeping Up With the Steins\” proves that you don\’t have to be Jewish to make a funny, insider Jewish film, or that if you grow up in the Bronx or went to school in North Hollywood, you become a Jew by osmosis.
In anticipation of Easter, a slightly modified version of \”The Passion of the Christ,\” the film by actor and director Mel Gibson, and screenwriter Benedict Fitzgerald, has been re-released. The second coming if you will. This re-cut version is widely available in a DVD gift format.
Here\’s a verse that should be written in Psalms: \”He who is lenient about Purim is a truly unhappy person.\” Or, as one rabbi put it: \”Who doesn\’t enjoy a bacchanalian feast where it\’s a mitzvah to get drunk?\”
I expected to be dealing with an empty nest when my daughter started college. I projected my availability to friends who had yielded my attention during my childrearing years. I dragged writing projects onto my computer\’s desktop to await the plane ride from NYU to the rest of my life. Instead, the levees broke in my hometown. I spent the next three months as a relief worker with the Red Cross and the New Orleans Jewish agencies in service to those displaced and/or traumatized by Katrina.
As frequent targets of anti-Semitic cartoons — many of them in the Arab press — Jews on one hand sympathized with the Muslim outrage over depictions of the Islamic prophet Mohammed, which is considered by Muslims to be blasphemous.
But Jews joined many others in expressing shock at the level of violence the controversy sparked.
Let\’s face it. Every marriage between two Jews is an intermarriage. I\’m not talking about the obvious ones, like a marriage between an Orthodox Jew and a Jew-by-birth who is not at all religious. Clearly if one spouse davens three times a day and the other spouse uses Mapquest to find her way to synagogue on Yom Kippur, a silver anniversary is not in their future. I\’m talking about the rest of us.
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