Whether you\’re trying to capture a wedding, b\’nai mitzvah or 50th anniversary celebration, the day will come and go whether you\’re ready for it or not. Unless you\’re prepared, the opportunity to capture family history can easily slip through your fingers.
\”I have a warped idea about my worth, my abilities as an artist, my intelligence,\” Jessica Shokrian says in her video installation at the Skirball Cultural Center. \”For much of my life, I\’ve been extremely concerned with how I look and how I think I look to other people. It\’s definitely been a sad obsession.\”
Spain\’s Toledo contains — along with spires, damascene jewelry and scrumptious marzipan — a treasure trove of Jewish memories.
With a mixture of elation and nostalgia, filmmaker Steven Spielberg last week formally turned over his Shoah Foundation, with 52,000 videotaped testimonies of Holocaust survivors and witnesses, to the University of Southern California.
Any slaughterhouse, whether kosher or nonkosher, is by definition a disconcerting, blood-filled and gruesome place. Torah law, however, is most insistent about not inflicting needless pain on animals and in emphasizing humane treatment of all living creatures.
Eight-year-old Sruli Slodowitz from Pico-Robertson likes dressing up as his favorite hero; no, it is not Batman, Superman or even Harry Potter — but Agent Emes, \”an ordinary kid with an extraordinary mission\” who is the 11-year-old protagonist in a new mystery adventure video series for Jewish children.
A few weeks ago, three students at Milken Community Jewish High School in Los Angeles were expelled for making a sexually explicit video of themselves that was eventually seen by members of the student community. Many parents and teachers in the Jewish community have expressed confusion at how educated Jewish students at a school like Milken did what they did.
But to think that what happened at Milken is isolated to the particulars of the parent-child relationships of the families involved is myopic — and too easy. To be sure, such behavior is not widespread in our children\’s communities. But we can be relatively certain that for every incident brought to light, many more are hidden in the shadows.
Madonna doesn\’t like to explain her music videos, but in her newest one, \”Die Another Day\” (the title track for the soon-to-be-released James Bond movie), while wearing a dirty, white tank top she sneeringly sings to the camera, \”Analyze this, Analyze this.\” So we will.
Somewhere in America, a few high school students made a porno video, \”by accident\” they said, starring themselves. Whatever it was, a couple of kids were fooling around, and someone else had a camera. They showed the tape in the locker room and what followed was, of course, a big scandal. Somewhere else in America, there was an eighth-grade party, mom or dad took pictures, and when the photos came back from the lab, you could see two partygoers having oral sex near the shrubbery in the background of one of the shots. What upset the parents most was that the students weren\’t even trying to hide.
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