Jewish History & Culture
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Rivers of Music
Producer, songwriter and musician Larry Klein is having a good year. In a way, one could say his current success is the culmination of a process of recontextualizing his background, his experience, his talents and his interests. Two records he produced have just been released on Verve Records: “River: The Joni Letters” by jazz great […]
Let Us Travel To Iran
This fall, I am asking you to travel to Iran. Not the present-day, front-page, headline-grabbing, nuclear-developing, Holocaust-denying, Israel-hating Iran, but the Iran of just 20 or 30 years ago, as described in two newly published novels, Gina Nahai’s “Caspian Rain” (MacAdam Cage) and Dalia Sofer’s “The Septembers of Shiraz” (Ecco). Although Nahai’s novel takes place […]
Summer and the start of school
In one of his most famous works, the French poet Francois Villon asked: “Mais ou sont les neiges d’antan? (But where are the snows of yesteryear?).” I might ask the same about where this summer went. It seems like just last week my daughter was getting out of class, and now she’s about to start […]
Zsa Zsa Gabor: The Last of the Hungarian Mohicans
“I want a man with kindness and understanding. Is that too much to ask of a millionaire?” — Zsa Zsa Gabor Lately, I have been thinking about Zsa Zsa, and it makes me sad. A few years ago, she crashed her car on Sunset, and she has been wheelchair-bound since. She had been a recluse […]
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Big Fun Under the Big Top
with additional reporting by Natasha Teicholz When I heard that the circus was coming to town, I couldn’t wait to take my daughter. I’m talking about the Greatest Show on Earth, Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus, appearing in Orange County until Aug. 5. I know that Cirque du Soleil has its fans — […]
GOOD AS (Jonathan) GOLD
“The plov is great.” Jonathan Gold, the LA Weekly’s restaurant critic and the 2007 winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism, e-mailed me the above about Uzbekistan (the restaurant on La Brea, not the country), where we were planning to meet. He assumed, of course, that I knew what plov is — I didn’t then, […]