Category: Science and Health

One year, at the intense and highly competitive quiz night at the conference for the Association for Jewish Studies (we academic types really know how to party), I wrote the wrong answer to the literary softball question: “Who wrote ‘To be a Jew in the 20th Century’?” The answer was Muriel Rukeyser. (My office is […]

On November 4, 1979, Iranian student supporters of Ayatollah Khomeini stormed the United States embassy in Tehran and took 52 American hostages, whom they held for 444 days. As part of U.S.’ response, On November 27, President Jimmy Carter issued executive order 12172, under which no Iranian would be allowed entry into the U.S. and […]

From the start, odds were against Vika Bekker becoming a committed Jew. Growing up in a non-religious home in Buffalo Grove, a small town a half-hour outside of Chicago, she became attracted to Judaism in high school – through NCSY. Her fledgling interest never wavered. Later when she planned to transfer from the University of […]

After the devastating fires that ravaged Los Angeles County in January, Jewish organizations all around town have stepped up to provide free shopping experiences for fire victims. Having collected thousands of items, they are now trying to get the word out to all fire victims. The Journal spoke with three organizations and a restaurant that […]

Mayan Eden is an Israeli-American woman running a business in the real-estate industry and someone who at a young age, is on a quest to “shape her philanthropic future” by forging deeper Arab-Israeli ties. But how did she get here? Although Mayan was born in Israel and raised in New York in a religious Jewish […]

Newly re-elected President Donald Trump shocked the world this week with a radically alternative vision of the Middle East. Four years away from the Oval Office apparently resulted in the kind of original thinking that would never have occurred to all those think tank “experts” running on empty. They prefer doing the same thing over […]

The top 10 shows in television history are all Super Bowls. When I worked in the ad business, this was our Academy Awards, our Judgment Day. Advertisers would spend millions to buy 30 seconds and then went nuts to produce a clever commercial that everyone would talk about. But just as Pepsi and Doritos can […]

In some ways, Rabbi Yaakov Peer, the founder/director of the Chabad Persian Youth Center in the heart of Pico-Robertson has spent important parts of his life traveling. In 1973 — five years before the Iranian Revolution — when he was nine, Rabbi Peer’s parents made the life-changing decision to move to Israel. He grew up […]