Travel and Food

By Natasha Josefowitz LA JOLLA, California — Tell me the story of your life, and I will tell you how healthy you are most likely to be in the next few years. No, it’s not a joke. There are two ways to tell your story: one is with a positive spin—emphasizing the good things that happened […]

By Eva Trieger SOLANA BEACH, California —  Siobhan Sullivan, director of the Theater School at North Coast Rep Theater, kept a keen eye on two clusters of teens, as they ran lines, rehearsing for Neil Simon’s Brighton Beach Memoirs. The set for our interview was an outdoor courtyard across the parking lot from the theater.  Though

By Laurie Baron SAN DIEGO — Winner of the Toronto Film Festival’s Award for Best Canadian film, Felix and Meira retells what in the hands of a less subtle director than Maxime Giroux could easily degenerate into a tawdry and trite story of a Chasidic Jewish woman trapped in her faith and marriage and falling

With assists from Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis

By Laurie Baron SAN DIEGO─ Most of Jeb Bush’s foreign policy advisors are the same pundits his brother relied upon to formulate American diplomacy.  With the wisdom of hindsight, we now know they should just be called cons rather than neo-cons. * Benjamin Netanyahu has appointed Rabbi Eli Ben-Dahan as the head of the Israeli

Grandpa’s Mountain: Letters from a Border Kibbutz in Israel by Arieh Larkey, Gefen Publishing House, 2015 By Sheila Orysiek SAN DIEGO — After accidentally finding his grandfather’s address in Israel, a twelve-year-old boy in America decided to write.  He hoped to establish a relationship and find the warmth and understanding that he felt was lacking in

By Dan Bloom CHIAYI CITY, Taiwan — Karl Taro Greenfeld is the son of a Hollywood screenwriter and a Japanese novelist and was blessed with the writer genes he inherited from both his parents. Born in Japan in 1964, Greenfeld grew up in Los Angeles in the 1970s and graduated from Sarah Lawrence College in