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Dancing Queen (Liane Weintraub and Dance in LA)
Amid myriad reasons for moving to and living in Los Angeles, let me add one: this is a city where one dedicated individual can still have a major cultural impact. This came to mind recently when I made the acquaintance of Liane Weintraub, a new mother in her mid-30s. Weintraub lives in Malibu and no one could blame her for enjoying the life she is fortunate enough to lead. Instead, she has taken on a different challenge. In a short… -
Becoming a Nephew (The Yad Vashem online database)
Today, I am a nephew. Last weekend, the names of more than 3 million persons murdered in the Holocaust were posted on the Internet as part of a searchable database created by Yad Vashem in Jerusalem. Yad Vashem was established in 1950 by an act of the Knesset, the Israeli parliament, as the Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance authority. From its very inception, it has taken on the task of being a repository for the names and memory of the… -
Literary Journeys (Memoirs by Jonathan Schwartz, Nessa Rapoport and Stefan Zweig)
The most memorable books I’ve read recently have been, ironically enough, three memoirs that stand out for their sensitivity, intelligence and literary quality. Jonathan Schwartz’s “All in Good Time: A Memoir†(Random House) is a particularly well-crafted, deeply felt story of childhood neglect as the child of famed Broadway and movie music composer Arthur Schwartz, and his own rake’s progress surrounded by music as a radio DJ and cabaret performer. In retrospect, it seems like I spent every night of… -
Visiting History (The cemeteries of LA)
I have always had a soft spot for Brazil. I spent the summer after high school graduation there, and my wife and I spent our honeymoon there. I love the people, the music, the food and the spirit that Brazilians carry with them as effortlessly as they dance the samba. But I never imagined my affection for Brazil had a historic basis and a Jewish link. I mention this because it turns out that the first Jews in America, who… -
Listening to Lenny (Lenny Bruce)
One night many, many years ago, I was at The Comedy Store on amateur night when Robin Williams walked in off the street and jumped onto the stage. For the next 45 minutes, the air inside the club turned into nitrous oxide as Williams made us all feel a bit brighter, a bit wittier, a bit more manically high just for being able to keep up with him. It felt like being inside a comic mind that was both unhinged… -
Cleaning House
Several months after my mother died, I had to clean out her apartment in New York. The apartment had sold, the co-op board had approved the new buyers, the closing was imminent. The apartment had to be delivered empty. This was the apartment I had grown up in, where my parents had lived, where my father had died more than seven years ago. My parents were from the Old World, and the apartment reflected that. The rooms were dark, filled… -
See Jane Shlep (Yiddish with Dick and Jane)
"See Jane shlep, Shlep, Jane shlep, Shlep, shlep, shlep." This is not your parent’s primer. This is "Yiddish With Dick and Jane," a new parody by Ellis Weiner and Barbara Davilman, who will be reading their work this Sunday, Sept. 19 at the Skirball Cultural Center. The story of how Dick and Jane came to be flavoring their speech with Yiddish began innocently enough two summers ago, when Weiner and Davilman found themselves in Laguna with three hours to kill… -
Einstein in California
One hundred years ago, Einstein was a Zurich Polytechnic teaching graduate who couldn’t land a job in academe. Instead, he got a position as a patent clerk in Bern, Switzerland. Not the most challenging job, but it gave him time to think. Einstein liked to conduct what he called "thought experiments," one of which asked: "What would a beam of light look like if you could race besides it?" During the course of 1905, what has come to be called… -
Tough Guys (Isaac Babel)
Reading "The Collected Stories of Isaac Babel" (W. Norton & Co., 2002) in paperback, edited by Babel’s daughter, Nathalie, got me thinking about Jewish gangsters and tough guys. Babel was born in Odessa in 1894. He wrote of Odessa’s Jewish underworld and its gangsters in sparkling prose. Fifty years before Mario Puzo gave us "The Godfather," Babel offered up Benya Krik. Benya, Babel tells us, had "gangster chic" — a century before Tupac took the stage. Babel’s Odessa was home… -
Rambamalama (The Rambam, Rabbi Leder and Julie Salamon)
Put down your "Da Vinci Code." Set aside your "South Beach Diet." Let your kaballah red string drop off your wrist. I’m here to alert you to the next pop cultural phenom: a 12th-century philosopher popularly known as the Rambam. Just a few weeks ago, I attended the "Aloud" reading series at the Los Angeles Central Library to hear a conversation between Julie Salamon and Steven Leder. Salamon, a culture reporter for The New York Times, is the author of… -
The Kid Still Stays in the Picture (Robert Evans)
Tommywood was expecting a Hollywood moment. Publicity guru extraordinaire Michael Levine had arranged for me to meet legendary Producer Robert Evans at his longtime lair, Woodland, the former home of Greta Garbo. I turned north of Sunset Boulevard and, like William Holden, wondered what I was getting myself into. It’s not that I didn’t appreciate Evans’ accomplishments. Evans, the former head of production at Paramount, was responsible for "Love Story," "The Godfather" and "Chinatown" among many other classic films. He… -
Playing in Uketopia (Jim Beloff and the ukelele)
It’s Sunday night and a half-dozen people are onstage at McCabe’s Guitar Shop in Santa Monica. Jumpin’ Jim Beloff and his wife, Leapin’ Liz, are leading the sold-out crowd as they strum their ukuleles and sing "Farewell." This is the climax to Uketopia, Beloff’s annual celebration of that four-stringed wonder: the ukulele. It is an evening in which almost a dozen performers, from 20s to 90s, including the self-declared "Mr. Ukulele," Charles "Soybean" Sawyer, Fred Sokolow and "King Kukulele," played…