Travel and Food

LOS ANGELES — Whiplash is a misleading name for this film. It conjures up deadly car chases and crashes and someone paralyzed for the rest of his life. But the actual film is a far cry from that kind of theme. Whiplash is a popular jazz piece written by Hank Levy, a composer/saxophonist who wrote

By Dan Bloom CHIAYI CITY, Taiwan — Michael Lederer is an American novelist living in Berlin and he often travels around Europe by train: trains to Poland, trains to France, trains to Italy. When news reached me theother day that Germany’s Deutsche Bahn railway company had decided to end the sleeper service between Berlin and

The Rise and Decline of Civilizations: Lessons for the Jewish People by Shalom Salomon Wald, Academic Studies Press, Boston and Jerusalem;  ISBN 978-1-61811-377-1 ©2014, $33.00, p. 372, plus appendices, bibliography, notes, and index By Fred Reiss, Ed.D. WINCHESTER, California — Physical scientists think that the world can be explained by theories and their concomitant mathematical equations.

By Sheila Orysiek SAN DIEGO — In the late 1800’s, a man who lived in a shtetel (small town) near Kiev (Russia) wrote a story about his milkman, Tevya. It was an unlikely story written in an unlikely language. At that time Jewish writers wrote either in Hebrew or the language of the country within

By Natasha Josefowitz, Ph.D. LA JOLLA, California–You often say to a friend, “You are a sister to me,” or “You’re the brother I never had.” And you are indeed blessed if you have a true friend, one who knows your foibles, your hopes, fear and aspirations and loves you not only because of who you

By Dan Bloom CHIAYI CITY, Taiwan —  From Aaron Sorkin at his two HBO series hits The West Wing and the just-concluded The Newsroom to poet and literary critic Wayne Koestenbaum, the seldom-used (but now increasingly spoken and printed) word “ensorcelled” has been making the rounds. Danielle Berrin at the Jewish Journal in Los Angeles likes the

By Dan Bloom CHIAYI CITY, Taiwan — Wolf Mankowitz was a British novelist, playwright, screenwriter and film producer, and while he was born in the East End of London into a lower middle class family of Jewish immigrants from Russia, he rose to fame later in life as a producer of some James Bond movies

By Sheila Orysiek SAN DIEGO — Thank goodness for an author like Joel L. Kraemer!  His book Maimonides, the Life and World of one of Civilization’s Greatest Minds,” (Doubleday Publishers, 2008) is not the heavy dense tome one would normally expect when delving into the life and work of this towering legend of a man.

By Dan Bloom CHIAYI CITY, Taiwan –I’ve lived in a few countries overseas in my life, and one of the places that has made a big impression on me was Italy. Several things happened there that I remember to this day, even though they happened over 40 years ago. And with Christmas Day just around