“See Jane shlep, Shlep, Jane shlep, Shlep, shlep, shlep.” This is not your parent’s primer. This is “Yiddish With Dick and Jane,” a new parody by Ellis Weiner and Barbara Davilman, who will be reading their work this Sunday, Sept. 19 at the Skirball Cultural Center. The story of how Dick and Jane came to […]

One hundred years ago, Einstein was a Zurich Polytechnic teaching graduate who couldn’t land a job in academe. Instead, he got a position as a patent clerk in Bern, Switzerland. Not the most challenging job, but it gave him time to think. Einstein liked to conduct what he called “thought experiments,” one of which asked: […]

Reading “The Collected Stories of Isaac Babel” (W. Norton & Co., 2002) in paperback, edited by Babel’s daughter, Nathalie, got me thinking about Jewish gangsters and tough guys. Babel was born in Odessa in 1894. He wrote of Odessa’s Jewish underworld and its gangsters in sparkling prose. Fifty years before Mario Puzo gave us “The […]

Put down your “Da Vinci Code.” Set aside your “South Beach Diet.” Let your kaballah red string drop off your wrist. I’m here to alert you to the next pop cultural phenom: a 12th-century philosopher popularly known as the Rambam. Just a few weeks ago, I attended the “Aloud” reading series at the Los Angeles […]

Tommywood was expecting a Hollywood moment. Publicity guru extraordinaire Michael Levine had arranged for me to meet legendary Producer Robert Evans at his longtime lair, Woodland, the former home of Greta Garbo. I turned north of Sunset Boulevard and, like William Holden, wondered what I was getting myself into. It’s not that I didn’t appreciate […]

It’s Sunday night and a half-dozen people are onstage at McCabe’s Guitar Shop in Santa Monica. Jumpin’ Jim Beloff and his wife, Leapin’ Liz, are leading the sold-out crowd as they strum their ukuleles and sing “Farewell.” This is the climax to Uketopia, Beloff’s annual celebration of that four-stringed wonder: the ukulele. It is an […]

Among the allergens being released this June is a remake of “Around the World in 80 Days,” the Jules Verne novel that launched a thousand travel articles. Perhaps Jackie Chan will inhabit the role of Passepartout in a fashion that surpasses the achievements of Cantinflas, “the world’s greatest comedian,” according to Charlie Chaplin, a person […]

Earlier this month I attended the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation research benefit for stem-cell research. Although James Taylor’s five-song set and Nancy Reagan’s acceptance speech were each memorable and moving, what I found myself thinking about most that evening was Eric Lax’s new book “The Mold in Dr. Florey’s Coat” (Henry Holt & Company, $25), […]

The last episode of “Friends” airs May 6, and while we may all express a collective sigh of relief at the end of more than a year of shameless hype and exploitation, it doesn’t mean that we can’t stop to reflect on this moment in American cultural history. Or that we don’t care about whether […]

Jewish history has tradition of escaping and escapism It’s Sunday and I’m rushing over to my local comic book store, Hi De Ho, in Santa Monica to buy issue No. 1 of “The Amazing Adventures of the Escapist.” If the name is familiar, it’s not because you used to collect “The Escapist” in your youth, […]