Jewish History & Culture
This is the Jewish History & Culture page content.
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 […]
Missing New Orleans
I’ve always kept a mental list of places about to disappear, such as the ruins of Angor Wat in Cambodia. Never — ever — was New Orleans on that list. My first visit to New Orleans was as a college student, driving 36 hours straight from Vermont to attend Mardi Gras. I kept returning — […]
More than "Just Legal"
On Monday, Sept. 19, at 9 p.m., the WB will premiere “Just Legal.†Produced by Jerry Bruckheimer, the current home-run king of TV, this is no “C.S.I.†clone, but rather a one-hour drama with occasional comic moments that is about the beauty, the promise, the reality and the heartbreak that is the American legal system. […]
A Nobel Approach to Hungarians
By this point in the summer, I know that my devoted Tommywood readers are all wondering the same thing — be they sitting by the pool at the Sociéte des Bains de Mer in Monte Carlo, on their yachts sailing off the coast of Turkey or schvitzing in their New York apartments or Los Angeles […]
A Read on Life (novels by Zweibel and Rosen)
Lately, I’ve been thinking about two novels I recently enjoyed: “The Other Shulman†by Alan Zweibel (Villard, $23.95), and “Joy Comes in the Morning†by Jonathan Rosen (Picador, $14). The two novels are strikingly different: One deals with confronting a marriage of long standing; the other is about getting married. One is comic with serious […]
Read More… from A Read on Life (novels by Zweibel and Rosen)