Luke Ford | No sacred cows.

Zell Disses L.A. Times

Posted on August 27, 2007 by Luke Ford

After apparent Tribune Company owner-to-be Sam Zell visited the L.A. Times a week or so ago, Publisher-for-Now David Hiller sent a memo to the paper’s staff describing Zell as a "[h]igh energy straight-talking business owner" who "[b]elieves Los Angeles Times is very important and ‘has a great future’." Kf hears Zell was rather more critical than that. In his talk to the assembled staffers, he said he found the paper "pretty bland." He pissed on the business section. He ran down the importance of foreign coverage as opposed to local news. Asked whether front-page ads compromised the integrity of the paper, he called that idea a "crock of shit." He made a big point of saying the paper had to print what readers wanted to read, not what LAT editors wanted them to read–an idea that’s pretty much in complete conflict with the existing DNA of the Times (which deemed L.A. mayor Hahn’s divorce while he was in office not worth discussing, and reported Lindsay Lohan’s arrest, after she mowed down some bushes in Beverly Hills, on page B3). All in all, Zell studded his spiel with bad omens for the paper’s entrenched twits. … P.S.: Whose account is more accurate–Hiller’s or mine? There’s an easy way to find out, since a video of Zell’s talk was posted on the Times‘ internal network. Hiller could release it.

Posted in Los Angeles Times | Comments Off

Andy Rooney Blasted For Racist Comment

Posted on August 27, 2007 by Luke Ford

From the New York Times:

“I know all about Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig, but today’s baseball stars are all guys named Rodriguez to me,” Mr. Rooney wrote in the second paragraph of the column, which appeared in The Stamford Times of Stamford, Conn. “They’re apparently very good but they haven’t caught my interest.”

I don’t see anything wrong in what Rooney wrote. There’s no shame in being more interested in people of your ethnic group. White people rarely watch black TV dramas and comedies. There’s no shame in that. Aside from a handful of stars such as Denzel Washington, films with black leads don’t attrack much of a non-black audience. There’s no shame in blacks preferring to see films with black leads and whites preferring to see films with white leads.

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Charges Of Embezzlement Against Save-A-Heart Foundation

Posted on August 26, 2007 by Luke Ford

I received this letter:

At this time people are focusing on the problems with Drew Medical Center. Accusations are being flung towards any person who has ever had any association with Drew Medical.
Did you know that a similar problem is quietly occurring a Cedars Sinai?
Did you know that one woman by herself has embezzled as much as $1 million from the Save-A-Heart Foundation — a non-profit organization?
Did you know that she wrote checks to herself and her husband to cover their gambling debts and their hidden lifestyle?
Did you know that no one ever overlooked her books or had a qualified CPA review the account?
Did you know that this money could have been used to educate more heart surgeons instead of paying for a high-flying gambling drinking lifestyle?
Did you know that the highest parts of Cedars Sinai know about this?
Did you know that almost all of the board of directors have quit because of this and because they do not have D&O insurance?
Did you know that this woman took the check book home every night?
Did you know that she would not let anyone review her books?
Did you know that a member of the board of directors quit when he could not get an independent party to review the books?

My email to the Save-A-Heart foundation was not answered.

I’ve been encouraged to interview Laurie Hauser and her husband Cesar Veliz to learn more about this story. Also, a "Dr. Charuzi."

A source writes:

Dear Luke, I know Dr. Yizhar Charuzi (He is an Israeli). He is a very well known and well respected Cardiologist who is heading Save a Heart in California. I know some of the board members: Dr Ivor Geft from BJ gives weekly Torah Shiur as well. Dr. Dr. Steven Tabak (former President of BJ) Dr. Asher Kimchi (Israeli, davens at BJ) They are board members at Save a Heart. All respected cardiologist at Cidars Sinai.

There is no doubt in my mind that none of them knew about the embezzlement. They are honorable doctors saving lives on a daily basis. I know them all and vouch for them personally. They all got involved to help Yizhar bring Israeli Cardiologist to Cedars and train them in the newest techniques of heart surgery. I have known some of the trainees as well. I also know some of the regular donors of this worthy organization. If someone embezzled surely they knew nothing of it. The woman who did this has to be held accountable for this horrible crime. The organization needs to keep doing its important work and the above doctors are fault free and should be commended for their kindness and Chessed.

SEPTEMBER 4 UPDATE:

The Jewish Journal’s Brad A. Greenberg reports (without noting I broke this story nine days ago):

Los Angeles police last week began looking into the possible embezzlement of more than $700,000 from the Save A Heart Foundation, a nonprofit affiliated with Cedars-Sinai Medical Center that offers paid fellowships to Israeli cardiologists who want to study under specialists at the Westside hospital.
A Save A Heart Foundation board member raised concerns about financial irregularities in May 2006, after the foundation’s longtime administrative assistant began an extended sick leave. Cedars officials were notified, and the hospital’s internal auditing department began an investigation, identifying between $700,000 and $900,000 worth of questionable expenditures by the administrative assistant, according to hospital spokesman Rich Elbaum.
This past March, Cedars officials met with the board of Save A Heart and, Elbaum said, "recommended that they obtain separate counsel, notified them of their obligation to report as a nonprofit organization missing funds to the state attorney general and urged them to report it to the police as well."
But the foundation did not contact the Los Angeles Police Department until Aug. 30, the same day The Journal called asking about the alleged bilking. The press secretary for California Attorney General Jerry Brown said Save A Heart has not filed documents and disclosures that are required of all nonprofits since 2005. The foundation was recently sent a notice of delinquency.

According to Greenberg’s story, the LAPD only got involved four days after I broke this story.

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A Jewish Voice At YearlyKos

Posted on August 26, 2007 by Luke Ford

Mik Moore writes for The Jewish Week:

…Yet, when liberal bloggers — denizens of that noisy, cranky, high-intensity region of the Internet where individuals air their personal views, analyses, musings and, at times, reporting — held their major conference earlier this month, Jewish groups were nowhere to be seen.
…[T]he Jewish community has not figured out what to do about the new forms of communications, networking and organizing represented by blogs and various Web 2.0 tools. Although there were some people at YearlyKos who came only for the politics, I think the overwhelming majority were bloggers or otherwise engaged in online communication or community building. Note that this absence extended to the Jewish blogosphere. The blog I edit, jspot.org, is one of a small handful of Jewish blogs with credibility and relationships outside of the Jewish blogging community.
One of the inherent challenges that blogging presents to more established organizations is the premium the forum places on candor, independence and individuality. Traditional Jewish organizations typically have one spokesperson and the message is tightly controlled, as vividly demonstrated by the recent dismissal of the New England regional director of the Anti-Defamation League for acknowledging the Armenian genocide. If these groups are interested in entering this world as members of the online community, this will have to change.
The openness and unpredictability of blogs has already tested the Jewish community’s understanding of the medium. Because blogs and other online forums are open to all users, on rare occasions visitors to the sites write anonymous comments that are racist, sexist, anti-Semitic or otherwise inappropriate. Partisans have sought to use these comments to negatively characterize Web-based groups like MoveOn.org or blogs like DailyKos, and by implication any candidates who accept their support. Thus far, nonpartisan Jewish groups have not taken the bait, but they will be tested repeatedly as the election season gets closer.

I post to Mik’s blog:

"Mik, I was fascinated to find out that this "is one of a small handful of Jewish blogs with credibility and relationships outside of the Jewish blogging community."

How interesting. Pray tell to whom do you have credibility and with whom do you have relationships? How do you measure your credibility and relationships vis-a-vis other Jewish blogs? Do you have more than the blogs at JewishPress.com or JewishJournal.com? More than canonist.com and the other blogs on the Jewish blogads network? When judging by media mentions, the number of sites that link to yours, and your Google page rank, you are not exactly leading the pack in the Jewish blogosphere.

James comments on Jspot: "The bigger issue is that DailyKos has become a sounding board for anti-Semites. It regularly tolerates anti-Zionist themes that push the boundaries of acceptable civil conversation into anti-Semitism. Even if none of the regular contributors are anti-Semitic, their clear anti-Zionism creates a refuge for anti-Semites in anti-Zionist clothing. The anti-Zionism alone is enough to explain why there is no Jewish representation at YearlyKos. The forays into anti-Semitism make DailyKos and, by extension, YearlyKos off-limits to any major Jewish organization."

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Two Orthodox students shot with pellet gun;

Posted on August 26, 2007 by Luke Ford

Brad A. Greenberg reports:

Two Orthodox Jews were shot with a pellet gun Thursday night at Alta Vista Boulevard and Waring Avenue in the Melrose area in an incident that Los Angeles police have labeled a hate crime. No one had been apprehended as of Friday afternoon.
The incident occurred at about 10 p.m., when a black Lexus carrying two African-American men slowed as it approached two yeshiva students, police said. The passenger allegedly made a few anti-Semitic remarks, and then the driver fired several shots from a pellet gun, LAPD Officer April Harding said.
One of the students was hit in the neck, the other on the jacket, but neither was injured.

Posted in Jews, Los Angeles | Comments Off

Ehud Havazelet’s First Novel – ‘Bearing The Body’

Posted on August 26, 2007 by Luke Ford

Francine Prose writes in the New York Times:

His central character, Nathan Mirsky, receives a letter from his brother, eats dinner, gets drunk, smokes pot and then rapes his sympathetic, appealing girlfriend. I mention this to warn readers who might feel that this series of events would prevent them from ever sympathizing with such a character — and from not just enjoying but marveling at a novel in which such a thing could happen, and so soon. But readers who stay with this rewarding book will also have been put on notice by this scene, made aware that Havazelet is a writer who takes huge risks, who challenges us — and himself — to love those who are the most unlovable, the most deeply and humanly flawed.
Though the narrative skips nimbly across a range of divergent points of view, the dominant one is that of Nathan Mirsky. Completing his medical education in the emergency room of a Boston hospital, Nathan spends his precious spare time seeing a therapist for a battery of problems, including a marijuana-and-alcohol habit and an even more destructive sexual addiction. The plot is set in motion when Nathan receives a letter from his unstable, charismatic, drug-dependent older brother, Daniel, a former ’60s radical. The characteristically gnomic, lyrical and hyper-charged letter is, it turns out, posthumous. At some point between its sending and receipt, Daniel has been murdered in San Francisco, possibly in the course of a narcotics transaction.

Here’s my interview with Ehud Havazelet.

From Publishers Weekly:

Starred Review. The past wrecks the male members of the Mirsky family differently in story writer Havazelet’s haunting debut novel, his first book since 1998’s Like Never Before. Growing up in early 1970s Queens, Nathan Mirsky idolizes his older brother, Daniel, a student antiwar activist at Columbia University, but after Daniel moves to the West Coast and begins a downward spiral into addiction, the brothers grow apart. Twenty years later, Nathan, a medical resident in Boston, receives a letter from Daniel mailed the same day Daniel was murdered. Their father, Sol, a widower and Holocaust survivor compiling an archive of Holocaust stories, accompanies Nathan to San Francisco to learn more about Daniel’s death. There they meet Daniel’s lover, Abby, and her six-year-old son, Ben (who isn’t Daniel’s). The story reveals less about Daniel’s death than about the accumulated grievances and regrets that comprise his, as well as his father’s, legacies. Havazelet treats painful subjects—the death of an infant, concentration camp scenes—with wrenching understatement, and his depictions of Nathan’s therapy sessions provide insight and levity. The novel ends on a surprisingly optimistic note, but what lingers are its portraits of people bearing the weight of their family history.

Posted in Author Interviews, Book Reviews | Comments Off

Rabbi Weil’s Gift

Posted on August 25, 2007 by Luke Ford

A lot of rabbis are socially awkward, but Rabbi Steven Weil has a gift for making you feel important.

I went to Beth Jacob regularly in the summer of 2001. Rabbi Weil was always quick with a smile, a shabbat shalom, a handshake. He knew names.

I remember his brief aside that made me feel like a million bucks. "You’ve already heard this speech," he said to me once. Other times he said, "If you’re a writer," and nod his head at me.

For seven of the past eight weeks, Rabbi Weil has given up his pulpit on Saturday morning. Today Congressman Brad Sherman warned about Iran’s threat to Israel.

Posted in R. Steven Weil | Comments Off

A Friend Of Mine Was Raped By Passaic Social Worker Jonathan Berkowitz

Posted on August 25, 2007 by Luke Ford

Jewish Survivors posts:

WARNING: It could be dangerous to date Jonathan Berkowitz (AKA: Yochanan Berkowitz, Yohanatan Berkowitz, Jonathan Yochanan Berkowitz)
If you know of any single women in Passaic, NJ make sure they are aware that they could become the next victim of a sex crime if they date Berkowitz!
There have been several complaints made against Yochanan Berkowitz over the last few years of being sexually inappropriate on dates. There has also been one allegation of date rape. I’ve been told by a reliable source that the rabbonim of both Passaic and Monsey feel that Yochanan is ok to be dating, even though he has never under gone a evaluation by a mental health professional who specializes in evaluating alleged sex offenders.
Berkowitz’s past alleged victims seem to be young, beautiful women who are going through some sort of personal crisis.

From The Awareness Center:

There have been numerous allegations that Jonathan Berkowitz has been sexually inappropriate with women he has dated, which includes a case of alleged date rape back in 2004. The alleged survivor filed a police report, went through a rape exam at a local hospital and attempted to pursue this matter with the criminal court system.
A Grand Jury reviewed the matter and considered the evidence involved. As a result of its review, the Grand Jury did not find probable cause for the return of an indictment. Therefore, criminal prosecution was not pursued on this case.
Over the last several years The Awareness Center has also received several phone calls from various women regarding Yochanan Berkowitz’s behavior while dating. Many have described his behavior as being sexually inappropriate for an orthodox man. A common theme has been for Jonathan Berkowitz to present himself as a psychologist to potential dates, and to ask several women at the same time to date him exlusively.

Berkowitz’s rebbe is Avraham Braun, the principal of Ohr Somayech in Monsey. Rabbi Braun says Berkowitz is OK. Braun also supervised the notorious child molester-rabbi-psychiatrist Alan Horowitz in 1983 at Ohr Somayach.

According to the Awareness Center:

Alan Horowitz was first convicted back in 1983 in Maryland of performing an unnatural sexual act on the 12-year-old boy who was his patient and his eight year-old little brother. At the time Horowitz was sentenced to five-year probation.

The probation agreement included allowing Alan Horowitz to move to New York so that he could live study Torah at Ohr Somayach, Monsey, NY. He was court ordered to live on campus. Ohr Somayach is a Yeshiva serving young male students.
Dr. Horowitz was also court ordered to be in counseling under the care of Dr. Joseph F. Chambers (Maryland) and Dr. Rabbi Issac Twersky (Monsey, NY). As like many others who thirst in learning Torah, Alan Horowitz ultimately ending up studying abroad in Israel.
Alan Horowitz twice violated his probation from the sentencing in 1983. There is no documentation of how he violated it the first time, yet the second time was in November 1985, was when he made aliyah and moved to Israel. He returned to the United States in November, 1990 when he learned new charges were being investigated relating to him allegedly molesting children in the West Bank (Israel).
Past newspaper accounts stated Rabbi Alan Horowitz picked Schenectady in hopes of securing a rabbinical appointment. Apparently each time Horowitz moved he changed his name, using the alias Shneor Altar in Israel, Alan Horowitz in New York and Mike Sonkin in Iowa.

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Shalhevet Parody Has School Up In Arms

Posted on August 25, 2007 by Luke Ford

Two graduates of Shalhevet (Modern Orthodox Los Angeles day school), including one editor of the school newspaper "The Boiling Point" released a vicious parody last week called "The Rolling Joint" or something like it. It accused one teacher of child molestation.

I can’t find it online. Please help.

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Karen Armstrong’s Fantasy Lover

Posted on August 24, 2007 by Luke Ford

Robert J. Avrech writes:

Regarding Armstrong, a Seraphic Friend, an author with a keen knowledge of both the history of religion and current events put it this way: “She’s an ex-nun. Was married to Christ. She needs another fantasy lover. Muhammed is much more macho. And since he’s a fantasy, can do no wrong. So macho Muhammed has replaced Jesus as her fantasy husband.”

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