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Walk Like A Mom/Rockstar (Susanna Hoffs)
•"Hannah Montana," a Disney Channel program I watch on occasion with my daughter, features a 14-year-old girl with a secret identity: she's actually a rock star. This is an absurd fantasy. In real life, the rock star at my daughter's school is a mom. Although she leads a double life,… -
Hate the Game, Love The Player (Michael Tolkin and "The Return of The Player")
•The fall season is upon us, with new books, movies and TV programs all vying for our attention as palliatives to the news of war, terrorism and melting ice caps. Even as the days get shorter and our own day of judgment looms imminent, we wonder: Is there a hero… -
Kaplan's Collage
•Here's Marty Kaplan blogging on Huffington Post about suggested treatments for Mel Gibson's "problem": "'Jew Like Me' is another strategy. Walk a mile in my shoes. Gain 10 pounds at my table. Wait two hours after lunch before swimming. Laugh that ironic meta-laugh right along with us when Jon Stewart… -
The Mad Adventures of Gerard Oury
•"The King of popular comedy is dead," proclaimed Le Figaro after Gerard Oury, one of France's most successful directors (if not its most successful) died on Thursday, July 20, at his home in St. Tropez. I know Oury's work because as a teenager I went with my mother to New… -
Life vs. Death
•In college, I wrote the same literature essay over and over again. Regardless of the novel, its plot or its country of origin, I found that I could always work up four pages on the subject of "Life vs. Death." My ideas on this subject were not particularly original. In… -
A Little Respect (for Jewish journalism)
•For the 20th anniversary issue of The Jewish Journal of Los Angeles, it was suggested that I write a column about Jewish journalism. Herewith the result: Jewish journalism is a much-maligned enterprise -- it cries out like the late Rodney Dangerfield for respect. No one really admits to reading a… -
Schimmel's Summer School (Paul Schimmel & MOCA)
•Paul Schimmel, the Museum of Contemporary Art"s (MOCA) chief curator, wants us to spend our summer looking back -- 50 or so years to around the time of his birth, and to the city where he grew up, New York, to focus on the remarkable work of a young, poor… -
Great Scott: Scott Steindorff's Excellent Adventure in Hollywood
•Scott Steindorff is a happy man. A successful movie and TV producer, his NBC series, "Las Vegas," just got picked up for another season; he won a Golden Globe for the HBO miniseries, "Empire Falls," starring Paul Newman, and produced the feature film of Philip Roth's "The Human Stain" with… -
Zade's Road
•How does an idea come to life? How is it that someone has an idea -- an idea that he or she believes will help change the world -- and it actually takes flight? I'm not sure anyone really knows how that process occurs, only that it does. Just ask… -
A Graham of Rock
•Here's a strange coincidence: Both my doctor and my rabbi share the same leisure pursuit: They are passionate about attending rock concerts. U2, The Stones, Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen -- If they perform, my good doctors of the body and the soul will attend. They both say it's their way… -
Remembering Rudolf Vrba's 5 per cent
•On April 7, 1944, Rudolf Vrba escaped from Auschwitz, one of very few to do so; he died recently at age 81, a professor of pharmacology at the University of Vancouver, British Columbia. Vrba once said that he spent 95 percent of his life on science and 5 percent on… -
Grossman's Fate
•The recent publication of "A Writer at War: Vasily Grossman With the Red Army, 1941-1945" (Pantheon) brings attention to a writer who deserves to be better known and whose personal story illuminates the tragic dimension of Russian Jewry during the Communist era. Grossman (1905-1964) was a journalist as well as…