Jewish History & Culture
This is the Jewish History & Culture page content.
Crystal Clear (700 Sundays)
Billy Crystal has something he wants to share with you. Crystal has had a diverse and varied career, with plenty of ups and downs, as a stand-up comic, a TV performer and a movie actor. On the one hand, he starred in “When Harry Met Sally,” a movie that convinced many non-Jewish women to imagine […]
The Painted Bird - Revisited
Forty years ago this Oct. 15, Houghton Mifflin published “The Painted Bird” by Jerzy Kosinski. The book was immediately acclaimed as a must-read text on the Holocaust and the nature of human cruelty. In the years leading up to and following Kosinski’s 1991 suicide, his reputation was tarnished by a series of revelations that the […]
The Great Question (Who We Are)
THIS WEEK’S COLUMN WAS A COVER STORY IN THE JEWISH JOURNAL OF LOS ANGELES (and a pretty funny cover — so I thought I’d share it with you). We’re almost halfway through the first decade of the 21st century. Not a bad time to assess “Who We Are.” “Who We Are: On Being (and Not […]
In Search of Himself (Bruce Goldsmith's "When It Comes to Women")
The High Holidays are always a good time to reflect, and this year, as I was serially sermonized in ways both inspirational and depressing, I was asked to consider that we can always start anew — that, as the dorm posters used to say, “Today is the first day of the rest of your life.†[…]
Read More… from In Search of Himself (Bruce Goldsmith’s “When It Comes to Women”)
Who's Your Mummy?
On a day when a hot desert wind whipped through town, I found myself in a darkened chamber contemplating death and the afterlife — not my own, for a change, but rather that of the ancient Egyptians. Currently the L.A. area is hosting two world-class exhibitions of ancient Egyptian artifacts: King Tut has taken up […]
Wiesenthal The Collector
Simon Wiesenthal died last month at 96 in his sleep at his home in Vienna. This seems particularly fitting, since Wiesenthal spent the last 60 years troubling the sleep of Nazi war criminals, their henchmen, collaborators and supporters. During the Holocaust, 89 members of Wiesenthal’s extended family were murdered, including his mother who was deported […]