As the year ends, many of my correspondents (at least one) have been clamoring for the Tommywood Awards, a list of those defining moments in the past year — the best, the worst, the memorable. Frankly, my mind has already gone on vacation and the rest of me is soon to follow. So although I […]

Amid myriad reasons for moving to and living in Los Angeles, let me add one: this is a city where one dedicated individual can still have a major cultural impact. This came to mind recently when I made the acquaintance of Liane Weintraub, a new mother in her mid-30s. Weintraub lives in Malibu and no […]

Today, I am a nephew. Last weekend, the names of more than 3 million persons murdered in the Holocaust were posted on the Internet as part of a searchable database created by Yad Vashem in Jerusalem. Yad Vashem was established in 1950 by an act of the Knesset, the Israeli parliament, as the Holocaust Martyrs’ […]

The most memorable books I’ve read recently have been, ironically enough, three memoirs that stand out for their sensitivity, intelligence and literary quality. Jonathan Schwartz’s “All in Good Time: A Memoir” (Random House) is a particularly well-crafted, deeply felt story of childhood neglect as the child of famed Broadway and movie music composer Arthur Schwartz, […]

I have always had a soft spot for Brazil. I spent the summer after high school graduation there, and my wife and I spent our honeymoon there. I love the people, the music, the food and the spirit that Brazilians carry with them as effortlessly as they dance the samba. But I never imagined my […]

One night many, many years ago, I was at The Comedy Store on amateur night when Robin Williams walked in off the street and jumped onto the stage. For the next 45 minutes, the air inside the club turned into nitrous oxide as Williams made us all feel a bit brighter, a bit wittier, a […]

Several months after my mother died, I had to clean out her apartment in New York. The apartment had sold, the co-op board had approved the new buyers, the closing was imminent. The apartment had to be delivered empty. This was the apartment I had grown up in, where my parents had lived, where my […]

“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 […]