Comedian and web phenomenon Eric Schwartz, aka Smooth-e, just dropped his latest song parody “Honika Electronica” and our friends at JConnectLA and Brandeis (BCI) are taking it live. Celebrate the triumph of light over darkness at the only Chanukah party featuring the comedic stylings of Smooth-e, a live set by JConnectLA’s very own DJ Eric Rosen, a Texas Dreidle Tournament, and sushi/drink specials all night long.
In the spirit of the holiday season, Honika Electronica will benefit our Fed Up With Hunger initiative, so you can feel good about having fun!
Details:
Saturday, December 12
10pm – 2am. Doors open @ 9
A Cow Jumped Over the Moon
421 N. Rodeo Drive
(Rodeo Collection – Garden Level)
Beverly Hills, CA 90210
$10 presale. Buy tickets >> $15 @ the door ($5 off door price with 2 cans of kosher food)
One People, One Book traditionally engages more than 500 people from every movement of Judaism in a year-long study of a single book. This year, the Board of Rabbis of Southern California chose to introduce the community to two books – works by defining Jewish poets, Yehuda Amichai and Zelda.
From Psalms to slams, poetry tells the story of our people. To honor the work of ancient and modern Jewish poets, the Board of Rabbis kicked off One People, One Book 5770 with the Def Jew Poetry Slam on Nov. 10 at University Synagogue in Brentwood. The event brought together Jews from across denominational and generational lines and featured original spoken word pieces and classic Jewish poems performed as they’ve never been heard before.
Watch a few of our favorite performances beyond the jump…
Jews, Christians, Muslims… we have a lot in common. In fact, we have much more in common that we don’t have in common. But because people and societies are often defined by their differences (as a young kid growing up in a small town that was less than two-percent Jewish, my non-Jewish neighbor was shocked to learn I really, actually, truly did NOT have horns), we usually tend to dwell on those differences, rather than celebrate our commonalities, let alone discuss them.
But that’s exactly what happened recently at the Glazer Institute at Pepperdine University. Hundreds of Angelenos from myriad faiths turned out to attend a cool one-day conference, bringing together prominent faith leaders from around the community. The event was called “Finding Common Ground: Reconciliation Among the Children of Abraham.”
Imam Jihad Turk, the Director of Religious Affairs at the Islamic Center of Southern California, was on hand, as was Rabbi David Wolpe, #1 Pulpit Rabbi in America, according to Newsweek magazine, though we’ve yet to see Wolpe in a t-shirt exclaiming as much (if Newsweek named me #1 anything, I’d definitely get a few tees made).
Soon after accepting the Fed Up With Hunger leadership position, Ron Galperin went on KNBC to win over the hearts and minds of Los Angeles community members. Watch him in action:
Choreographer Barak Marshall is making his way back to L.A., following two back-to-back performances of “Rooster,” his new work recently performed as part of the Tel Aviv Dance Festival at Tel Aviv’s Opera House. The cast includes opera signer Lilia Gerzova, his mother, dancer Margalit Oved and the Suzanne Dellal dancers, including two from the L.A. Jewish Federation’s L.A.-Tel Aviv Partnership choreography master class this past summer.
“It was really great,” said Marshall. “The master class is a very intensive screening opportunity and it allowed me to work out certain pieces over a period of time.”
The master class that Marshall has long been a part of is Bridge – Choreographic Dialogues, an exchange program through the Jewish Federation’s Los Angeles-Tel Aviv Partnership, bringing choreographers from Los Angeles to Israel and Israeli choreographers to UCLA – in the spring — to conduct two-week intensive workshops in each city. Now in its third year, the aim of the two-week master class is to foster a connection between dancers and choreographers in Los Angeles and Israel and to understand the role of dance in Israeli society.
Bridge is a joint project of the Partnership, in cooperation with the Suzanne Dellal Centre, the UCLA Center for Intercultural Performance and Department of World Arts and Cultures, with the support of the dance department of Israel’s Ministry of Culture and Sport and the U.S. Embassy.
This past summer’s workshops brought from UCLA hip-hop teacher Jackie Lopez, also known as Miss Funk in the high energy world of hip-hop and choreographer Sheetal Ghandi, who had already been to the workshop before at the invitation of Marshall.
Lopez taught ‘house’ hip-hop in the workshop, an energetic fusion of salsa, mambo, rumba and jazz, while Indian choreographer Sheetal Gandhi was teaching her students Kathak, a classical North Indian form of dance.
But it was two of Marshall’s students that made it into Rooster, A series of overlapping myths and stories about the Middle East experience. According to Marshall in an interview with Ayelet Dekel, the literary influences in the work are powerfully balanced with his intensely physical choreography, nurtured in a rich cultural context. Marshall told Dekel that he is thankful that he was raised with an appreciation for the richness and resources of his own Mizrahi culture, and is getting his dancers to “move ethnic.”
Patt Morrison is a superstar columnist, author, and radio personality. Her show on KPCC 89.3 is a live two-hour public affairs program known for its innovative discussions of local politics and culture, and for its presentation of national and world news as it affects Southern California.
Show Notes L.A. is in the midst of a hunger crisis, with over 1.25 million people in LA County, mostly children and the elderly, struggling to get enough to eat. As part of their “Blueprint to End Hunger”, the Jewish Federation and its Fed Up With Hunger partners are calling on elected officials to declare Los Angeles a “hunger-free community.” Patt talks with them about their three part plan to eradicate hunger, how LA county can help and whether ending hunger is an economically feasible goal given the city’s dire financial straits.
Guests:
Andrew Cushnir, associate executive vice president of the Jewish Federation
Zev Yaroslavsky, LA County Supervisor
Are Jews better off in a more religious or secular America? Is Israel better off with a more religious or secular America? Radio personality Dennis Prager, a renowned author and ethics expert, provided his unique perspective on this compelling and sometimes controversial topic at this Ben-Gurion Society program.
The Federation hosted an evening at the Brentwood Theatre on the Veterans Administration campus honoring Col. Jack Jacobs (ret.) and Tibor “Ted” Rubin, the only two living Jewish recipients of the Congressional Medal of Honor.
Real Estate & Construction professionals took part in a trip to New York and met with top-level real estate & finance executives and renowned Jewish leaders throughout the city and took part in activities ranging from a United Nations private briefing and special access tour to a Shabbat service in the Big Apple.
Most people dread visits to the dentist, but not this particular group of teenagers from Tel Aviv’s Bialik-Rogozin School, where the L.A. Federation is involved in intervention programs with Israeli philathropists. Sitting in the hallway of their school one morning a few weeks ago, they were waiting to have their teeth checked by Dr. Jordan Goldstein, a Tel Aviv dentist who recently initiated the Smiling Teeth project.
The idea is this: Jordan, an Israeli, had a cousin, Diana Sacks, who passed away without leaving any immediate family. He wanted to find a way to commemorate her name and her work as a teacher of young children. Her brother, David Sacks, is Senior Development Director, Major Gifts at the L.A. Federation, and made contact for Jordan with the L.A. Federation’s Israel office. We suggested that Jordan use his professional skills and provide the usually prohibitively expensive dental care for children at the Rogozin school, with its large population of kids from refugee families.
Jordan loved the idea and initially thought he would provide ongoing dental care for ten kids. He was especially interested in performing cosmetic repairs for those with the most conspicuous problems because he believes it is critical for adolescent self-esteem.
After meeting around 50 of them on that first morning, he has now committed to helping 14 kids with their dental care. Originally from Turkey, Darfur, the Congo and several other countries, their dental problems included an ongoing toothache, chipped teeth, cavities and discoloration.
Back in L.A., David Sacks is helping his cousin cover the children’s transportation costs to and from Dr. Goldstein’s clinic in north Tel Aviv. Dr. Goldstein is also looking for fellow Israeli dentists to help provide dental care for additional Rogozin kids, as well as for funding for more materials.
It takes a certain kind of group to get keyed up about the elderly. But the social workers, judges, lawyers and non-profit directors visiting Israel as a delegation of the Jewish Federation’s Tel Aviv-Los Angeles Partnership’s Health & Human Services Committee were here to share ideas, practices, strategies and critical thinking with their Israeli colleagues.
On one particular day of the five-day trip, they were at the Jerusalem headquarters of Yad Sarah — a country-wide network of volunteers aiding disabled, elderly, and housebound people aimed at making home care possible – and were peppering their guide with a litany of questions about the organization’s equipment lending system and other organizational solutions. For the Los Angelenos in the group, the Yad Sarah facility was the kind of model they want to emulate back in L.A.
Yad Sarah was just one stop on the crowded itinerary of this group of two dozen professionals and lay leaders. All active in the issue of elder abuse, the participants sped around Israel, moving from Tel Aviv to Haifa and Jerusalem, and meeting with professional counterparts in the municipalities of all three cities, as well as getting afternoon tours of Tel Aviv, Zichron Yaakov and Jerusalem’s Old City.
But elder abuse was the main topic of conversation.
“It’s really an emerging issue,” said Robin Allen, deputy district attorney for the City of Los Angeles, and assigned to the Elder Abuse Section for the last four years. “Los Angeles is one of the only American cities with an Elder Abuse Section, but it’s an issue that needs to be more broadly represented.”
It’s a similar story in Israel’s major cities as well. And as this particular working group discovered, there is lots of room for cooperation.
The participants found they could work together on different issues, particularly with regard to mediation for the elderly, building a training network for homecare workers and creating healthcare literacy.
For Rhea Glassman-Plosker, the health and human services committee coordinator for the TA-LA Partnership, the best comment came from one of the participants, who loved attending a conference in which they were given a tour of the country by the organizers. “She realized that it is just as important to show us the country as it is to talk about the content,” she said. “She called it an adult Birthright.”
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Jews, Christians, Muslims… we have a lot in common. In fact, we have much more in common that we don’t have in common. But because people and societies are often defined by their differences (as a young kid growing up in a small town that was less than two-percent Jewish, my non-Jewish neighbor was shocked to learn I really, actually, truly did NOT have horns), we usually tend to dwell on those differences, rather than celebrate our commonalities, let alone discuss them.
This past summer’s workshops brought from UCLA hip-hop teacher Jackie Lopez, also known as Miss Funk in the high energy world of hip-hop and choreographer Sheetal Ghandi, who had already been to the workshop before at the invitation of Marshall.
Patt Morrison is a superstar columnist, author, and radio personality. Her show on KPCC 89.3 is a live two-hour public affairs program known for its innovative discussions of local politics and culture, and for its presentation of national and world news as it affects Southern California.
Most people dread visits to the dentist, but not this particular group of teenagers from Tel Aviv’s 
