Steve Leder knows things. As the senior Rabbi at Wilshire Boulevard Temple, the 155-year-old Los Angeles congregation that is home to some 2400 families (including mine), where Leder has served for 30 years, when his phone rings, it is often not good news. He has had to comfort, support, minister to and officiate at hundreds […]

For those of us who came of age in the second half of the 20th Century, it was dogma that the greatest artist of the 20th Century was Pablo Picasso – he was everywhere, at the forefront of transformative artistic movements such as Cubism and he worked in almost every possible medium, in some cases […]

In “This Close to Happy” (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), Daphne Merkin, novelist (‘Enchantment’) and essayist (‘Dreaming of Hitler’ and ‘The Fame Lunches’) has written a compelling chronicle of her traumatized childhood and an adult life marked by repeated bouts of severe depression. Although it would be easy to characterize Merkin’s memoir as part of an […]

In his latest book, “”The Genius of Judaism” (Random House), Bernard-Henri Levy revisits much of his early and recent public intellectual life to reveal that much of what he has done, where he has traveled to, and why he does it, is animated by his Jewishness. As a proud French Jew, Levy makes the case […]

David Hockney who turned 80 on July 9, is being celebrated by major exhibitions traveling the globe. The Tate Modern held its comprehensive exhibit about Hockney’s work from February 9 through May 29th which is now at The Pompidou Center in Paris (June 21-Oct 23) before ending its run at New York’s Metropolitan Museum (November […]

The following is excerpted from the introduction to “Being There:Journalism 1978–2000” By Tom Teicholz (Rare Bird Books, a Vireo Book). Here’s how my journalism career began: I was in my first year at Columbia Law School and was working as a Democratic Party volunteer, election night November 1977. There was a special election and, for […]

You never know where you might find a new museum these days. I was recently down in Orange, California visiting Chapman University when I came upon The Hilbert Museum of California Art which bills itself as “California’s newest Art Museum.” Take that with a grain of salt as new Art museums seem to be opening […]

CES, the beast with 200,000 attendees and more than 30,000 exhibitors that sprawls across Las Vegas, taking over the entire North Center and South Halls of the Las Vegas Convention Center and spills over to the Westgate, the Sands Expo halls, and the Venetian Hotel, as well as the Aria’s conference center, continues even in […]

Photographers don’t have eyes in the back of their heads. Janet Sternburg does.” -Wim Wenders on Janet Sternburg’s photographs. ‘Overspilling World’ (Distanz $55) collects the photographs of Janet Sternburg, poet, playwright, documentary filmmaker and producer, and memoirist. What is striking about Sternburg’s work, is not that she does all these different disciplines so well, but […]

“Hineni, hineni I’m ready, my Lord” With these words that Abraham, the biblical patriarch spoke when God called upon him, Cohen begins, “You want it darker,” the title tune of his final album, Released a few weeks before Cohen’s untimely death in Los Angeles on November 7, 2016 at age 82, Cohen’s nine new songs […]