Dr. Jerry Bobrow remembers it well. The year was 1990. The place: The Palace, in the Auburn Hills district of Detroit.\nThere in the bleachers, among 16,000 people at the Maccabi Games, is Bobrow and his youngest son, Jonathan.
The fresh-faced teenager looks like the girl next door until she displays her swastika tattoo in an episode of \”The Teen Files,\” which continues this week on UPN. \”I think the Holocaust was a good thing,\” she says, serenely. \”[Hitler] probably should have done more.\”
Contemporary Holocaust literature for young adults seems to favor a theme: transport unaware teenagers to German-occupied Europe and, together with the characters, the readers will emerge as more sensitive, aware young adults.
This is by way of being an advance notice, a leg up, if you will.\nAt the start of the upcoming school year, the Jewish Federation will embark on a new venture, Koreh L.A., the Los Angeles Jewish Coalition for Literacy. Its staff is busy (today) setting in place a cadre of volunteers who will work with third-graders in Los Angeles\’ public schools. The goal is simple: try to help improve reading ability — literacy is the formal phrase — by concentrating one-on-one with individual schoolchildren. That\’s one volunteer assigned to work with one specific child one hour each week for the duration of the school year. Its virtue to me is that this is direct, purposive and personal; and, not to be underestimated, it is also modest in scope.
My name is Sarah — actually, it used to be Sarah, but that was before I went to Israel and experienced the best summer of my life. A summer that changed me forever.
Art may soothe the savage beast, as the saying goes, but can it get through to teen-agers?
There are more than 30,000 Jewish teen-agers in Los Angeles — how do we engage them?
My father has always revered Joe Louis. Asurprising hero, perhaps, for a man born and raised in far-awayHungary. Not the hero one might expect of a Jewish cantor, whose workall his life has been singing liturgy in synagogues. Yet, among themost vivid memories I have from my childhood in Hungary and Israel,through my teen-age years in the United States, are the stories myfather told of Joe Louis.
It\’s time that the American Jewish community wascalled to account. One of its number is languishing in the jaws ofthe criminal justice system, suffering for a mistake — a gravemistake, admittedly — to which the system has responded far, far outof proportion to the deed.
It\’s a hot summer day and 16 teen-agers are walking through YadVashem in Jerusalem with a handful of adults. The scene is acommonplace one until you look a little closer and listen morecarefully. Half of the group is speaking softly in Arabic amongthemselves and they come from villages with names like Julis and KfarYassif. The Arab and Druze teens in the group, as well as the Jewishones, are wearing long white T-shirts displaying the name of theGhetto Fighters\’ House and the word \”guide\” printed in large blockletters across the back.
