Lifestyles

Zoom! Zoom! You’re the Sisterhood President

The installing officer was at home in Florida.  The incoming president was in Oregon.  And the other members of the outgoing and incoming boards of the Tifereth Israel Synagogue’s Sisterhood were right here in San Diego.  Welcome to what the Sisterhood members called their very first “Zoomstallation.” [Our Shtetl San Diego County column by Donald H. Harrison]

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Donald H. Harrison, Jewish Religion, Judaism, Lifestyles, Middle East, San Diego County, USA

My mother’s and Frank Sinatra’s address books

She did it her way By Oliver B. Pollak RICHMOND, California — The June/July 2020 issue of The Wall Street Journal Magazine contains a fascinating story by Will Friedwald with photography by Henry Leutwyler — “Sinatra’s Little Brown Book.” The article heralds Leutwyler’s just published Hi There!, a collection of 69 photographs of the address

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International, Jewish History, Lifestyles, Music, Dance, and Visual Arts, Oliver Pollak, Theatre, Film & Broadcast, USA

Finding a stronger desire to live

PEN America Prison and Justice Writing Programs, in conjunction with Haymarket Books, created a podcast featuring the literary and visual arts of prison inmates currently doing time. The virtual presentation included the music of Kenyatta Emmanuel, himself an ex-con, whose work has been heard from Sing Sing to Carnegie Hall. [Eric George Tauber]

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Eric George Tauber, Lifestyles, San Diego County, Theatre, Film & Broadcast, USA

Introspective JFS panel considers racism

Jewish Family Service of San Diego on Tuesday sponsored an internet panel discussion posing thorny questions about the Jewish community and race relations.  The panel brought together Rabbi Yael Ridberg of Congregation Dor Hadash; Micah Parzen, the executive director of the San Diego Museum of Man, and Kelly Greenberg Young, education director for the San Diego regional office of the Anti-Defamation League.  The moderator was Nate Looney, an African-American Jew who is Avodah’s recruiter of Jews of Color. [Our Shtetl San Diego County column by Donald H. Harrison]

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Donald H. Harrison, Jewish History, Lifestyles, San Diego County, Science, Medicine, & Education, USA

How to Recant Your Can’t

Notice how so many people are “re-ing” these days? They’re rewiring, rebooting, reorganizing, renewing, refreshing, reaffirming, reassessing, and readjusting. I suggest it’s time to recant. Yes, recant your can’t. “Why can’t things ever go right, just once in my life?” “I’m such a ________.” “I’ll never be as good as ___________.” “Why do things never go my way?” “Why can’t I ever succeed, just once?” “What’s the point of trying? I’ll fail again. I’m cursed!” [Michael R. Mantell, Ph.D]

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Lifestyles, Michael Mantell

Stress is of our own making

President John F. Kennedy once observed, “The time to repair the roof is when the sun is shining.” Stress begins in the brain, in the way we think about our life. We are experts in creating our own stress. We aren’t expert in preventing, reversing or treating our own creation. This emotional education column may turn that around for you. [Michael R. Mantell, Ph.D]

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Lifestyles, Michael Mantell

Anti-Semitism and psychiatry

One of the distinct pleasures I’ve found that serving as a contributing author for San Diego Jewish World brings, is the opportunity to review material related to psychology and mental health. When I was asked to review Anti-Semitism and Psychiatry edited by H. Steven Moffic, John R. Peteet, Ahmed Hankir and Mary V. Seeman and published by Springer this year, I welcomed the prospect. [Michael R. Mantell, Ph.D]

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Books, Poetry & Short Stories, Jewish History, Lifestyles, Michael Mantell, Science, Medicine, & Education

Wilderness weariness

There is no escaping the wild, chaotic terrain of the wilderness of life. Resisting the notion that life is fickle, fighting the uncertainty of the wilds of natural life, demanding predictability and expectedness in an otherwise disordered and often confused civilization, are futile. Many seem to believe that we live in an empty, befuddling and often frightening wasteland, one made even more worrisome by COVID-19. [Michael R. Mantell, Ph.D]

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Lifestyles, Michael Mantell

The Great Trait Debate

The question for you is, do YOU know your whole person, your personality traits, that you can draw on to help you live healthier, better? After all, if you are seeking the best in contemporary health care, you’d be wise to seek integrated medical health providers that treat all of you, that understand how your personality traits impact your attitudes and drive you toward a healthy lifestyle – or toward an unhealthy lifestyle. Let’s define “personality” as found in David C. Funder’s The Personality Puzzle “as an individual’s characteristic patterns of thought, emotion, and behavior, together with the psychological mechanisms—hidden or not—behind those patterns” [Michael R. Mantell, Ph.D]

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Lifestyles, Michael Mantell

How to Make COVID-19 Lemonade

You’ve heard the goody two-shoes saying, “When life hands you lemons, make lemonade.” It was initially used by writer Elbert Hubbard in a 1915 obituary he wrote about actor Marshall Pinckney Wilder, when he said, “He picked up the lemons that Fate had sent him and started a lemonade-stand.” Many attribute Dale Carnegie in his 1948 book, How to Stop Worrying and Start Living with using the phrase, “If You Have a Lemon, Make a Lemonade.” And note that Carnegie credited Julius Rosenwald. Regardless, you get the point. [Michael R. Mantell, Ph.D]

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Books, Poetry & Short Stories, Lifestyles, Michael Mantell

Like Moses and the Israelites, we are in wilderness

The wilderness. To some it may seem freewheeling, perhaps even disorganized, chaotic and confusing. In this week’s parasha, Bamidbar, always read on the Shabbat prior to Shavuot, we learn about not just any wilderness, but the wilderness of Sinai, through which we embark on a forty-year passage with a very specific goal, the Promised Land. To help organize and provide focus to people in the midst of a vast expanse of open land, the parasha tells us of Hashem’s command to Moshe to take a census, not just to count (some of) the people, but perhaps more importantly to help assure that people know they count and for us to remember that every human being has an important contribution to make. [Michael R. Mantell, Ph.D]

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Jewish Religion, Lifestyles, Michael Mantell