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 and not-yet-famous Robert Rauschenberg, who […]

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 Anthony Hopkins and Nicole Kidman. […]

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 Zade. Zade Dirani, 26, is […]

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 of relaxing from the stress […]

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 the Holocaust. It is worth […]

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 the author of short stories […]

A few weeks ago, the Paris-based world music ensemble Les Yeux Noirs performed at Royce Hall as part of UCLA Live. Led by brothers Olivier and Eric Slabiak, violin virtuosos who are the Paris-born grandchildren of Polish Jewish immigrants, Les Yeux Noirs played improvisations on Russian, Yiddish, Romanian and Roma songs, as well as their […]

“When is a dirty bathroom a broken window?” This is the question that opens Michael Levine’s recently published business tome, “Broken Windows, Broken Business” (Warner Business Books). Levine is a successful Hollywood publicist. I am indebted to him forever for one of my most memorable Tommywood moments — a séance with Hollywood’s evergreen legend, Robert […]

Before me sat a poet, flanked on each side by his muses. Was this Orpheus himself? His lyre was missing, and he looked off in the distance. Were the muses there to inspire him, or perhaps, to inspire me? No, this was not just another late night of hanging out with Mary Kate and Ashley […]

“After 9/11, all I did was sit around and be scared,” Albert Brooks told me recently. “After a year and a half,” Brooks now says, “I just got tired of it.” He wondered, “Why isn’t this being processed? Do we never mention it?” Looking at what Hollywood was releasing to the public, he concluded that […]