Human Interest

WASHINGTON (JTA) -- The founder of the "birther movement" sought Republican Jewish support for her candidacy for California secretary of state.

Orly Taitz attended the Republican Jewish Coalition's California division's annual "summer bash" last weekend.

Taitz has earned notoriety for heading the movement based on the false assertion that President Obama was not born in the United States. She has been censured in court while representing troops who refuse to take orders from the "de facto" president, as she calls Obama.

I remember my first visit to San Francisco’s Mission District.

It was in the mid-1990s, and while the commercial boulevards teemed with shoppers and families by day, much of the area felt run-down and seedy.

Two seemingly unrelated events that occurred recently made me think about how related they actually were. One was the death of the great Bible scholar Moshe Greenberg in Israel last month; the other was the publication of a new biography of the prominent American Zionist leader Abba Hillel Silver. Greenberg was born in 1928 and made aliyah in 1970; Silver was born in 1893, and though he helped found the State of Israel, he never settled there. Greenberg probably knew of Silver’s activities, but it’s unlikely the two ever met.

 Candlelighting, Readings:

Shabbat candles: 8:05 p.m.

Torah: Numbers 13:1-15:41 

Haftara: Joshua 2:1-24

Between the lines of the Bible, we glimpse the difficulties — even tragedy — of Moses, the greatest prophet in history who nevertheless sees himself losing the fealty of the Hebrew nation, failing to direct the people toward the very goal of their Exodus; the conquest of and settlement of the Land of Israel. Where has he gone wrong, and why?

 Just moments after the Israeli navy boarded the Turkish Mavi Marmara ship in the Mediterranean en route to Gaza, an explosive battle of another kind was playing out on the Facebook and Twitter fronts. 

The phrases “Gaza flotilla” and “#freedomflotilla” were among the three highest “trending topics” on Twitter on Monday morning, Eastern Standard Time. By Tuesday morning, “flotilla” still remained among the top 10. 

After suffering with Alzheimer’s for seven years, Gloria Kestenbaum’s father took a turn for the worse. Following a hip replacement at Maimonides Medical Center, he lapsed into unconsciousness on the operating table. For Kestenbaum and her family, the next step was fraught with uncertainty.

If you don’t think that human identity is evanescent, multilayered, poly-vocal and downright confused, you probably won’t get “The Monayer Family,” a triptych of short videos by Dor Guez currently on display at the Jewish Museum.

Guez is a provocative, gifted artist who works in a variety of disciplines and media, focusing his attention on issues of multiculturalism, ethnicity and personal identity; appropriately, his own identity is as contested and complex as it is possible to imagine. The work, unsurprisingly, is the same.