Where Sesame and Arab Streets Meet
Jewish Journal of Los Angeles
As college students settle into this semester’s final exams, and seniors contemplate graduation, far too many have squandered their studies for death dirges like this:
As college students settle into this semester’s final exams, and seniors contemplate graduation, far too many have squandered their studies for death dirges like this:
No sooner had the name of the actor who will inherit the iconic role as the next James Bond been announced, Bond’s obligatory evil nemesis was simultaneously revealed—but in a most unexpected way.
The good news: Israel’s air defense systems—Iron Dome, David’s Sling, Arrow, and its vaunted fighter pilots—assisted by the United States, Jordan, England, France and Saudi Arabia, performed brilliantly in intercepting the 300 projectiles (100 of which were ballistic missiles) that Iran launched against Israel on Saturday. Except for an Israeli-Arab child seriously wounded by shrapnel, the nation didn’t suffer a scratch.
A United Nations fact-finding mission, charged with investigating Israel’s war against Hamas, concluded in a widely disseminated and exploited report that the Israeli Defense Forces deliberately target Palestinian civilians.Jewish
THROUGHOUT the 20th century, the America depicted in Hollywood Westerns and projected onto screens around the world was one of self-reliance and independent thought. A cowboy saddled up alone and ventured off with beans and a blanket. The solitary life of riding a horse for days on end left a lot of time for contemplation—keeping an open mind on the open range.
Beware the Ides of March. Not that Ides! This past Ides of March—give or take a few days. The infamy of that earlier Ides lives on, 2,068 years later, with a similar drama of betrayal, and one not without biblical significance. Today, however, it’s not Julius Caesar asking, “Et tu, Brute?” but the nation-state of Israel, a large knife lodged in its back, wondering, “Et tu, Bide?”
The tale I am about to tell started out as a feel-good movie of the week and ended up as a two-hanky tearjerker of bitterness and betrayal. From solidarity to the nearly unsalvageable, within a matter of decades.
Five months ago, Hamas deliberately broke a ceasefire with Israel, resuming a war that began nearly the moment Israel abandoned the enclave back in 2005. A familiar reprise took shape over five wars: Hamas instigated hostilities; Israel retaliated, resulting in many Palestinian casualties of war; Hamas claimed victory in the battle for public opinion.
“The Ally,” a new play by Itmar Moses, is running Off-Broadway at The Public Theater through March 24. It is an excellent piece of dramatic storytelling that commands one’s full attention.
With the NFL football season over and the Kansas City Chiefs crowned champions (and Taylor Swift anointed the People’s Princess), March Madness not yet begun, and the Oscars still a week away, Americans can be forgiven binge-watching the sideshow that is the country’s evolving presidential race.
It was just a matter of time. Once Israel’s War Cabinet said “go” on Oct. 8, the day after the bloodiest and most grotesque attack on the Jewish homeland in its history, the timer on this latest war with Hamas started.
Here’s my recommendation to actress and disability activist Selma Blair: Fire your agent and publicist, immediately. You have received awful, but predictable, advice from your handlers. Straight out of the woke playbook of a spineless, soulless entertainment industry.
Welcome to Gotham. If you look up into the gloomy sky, you will notice the Bat Signal. Yes, it’s meant for the Caped Crusader, and not the Wuhan Lab.
On Jan. 22, twenty-four soldiers of the Israeli Defense Forces were killed in a single day — 21 in a detonated building in northern Gaza, and three more in combat in the south. That’s the largest death toll of military personnel since the ground invasion into Gaza began, bringing the total loss of Israeli warriors to 220.
In its short history as a modern state, Israel has been a Cinderella story where the glass slipper doesn’t quite fit without arch supports.
If you’re a Jew looking for sympathy in these sucker-punch days of hyper-antisemitism, find a way to transport yourself back to the early 1990s, a time when Holocaust memory—“Schindler’s List”; the opening of the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C.; and observances of Yom HaShoah across America—was afforded largely universal respect.
The world feels like it’s on fire, with flames spreading in diverse directions.
It was in 1908 when New York City began the annual tradition of ushering in the New Year with the celebratory dropping of the ball in Times Square.
The year is coming to an end, but the fighting in Gaza will not.
For a people that purportedly invented, and now control, Hollywood, Jews are awful at making demands—as Jews.