LOS ANGELES – Iran’s nuclear ambitions are a security threat to the entire world, two of the top female politicians in the United States and Israel told more than 1,800 delegates in attendance at the opening session of the 94th annual Hadassah convention.

Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), the speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, and Knesset Speaker Dalia Itzik of the Kadima Party on Sunday joined in warning Western leaders not to underestimate the seriousness of the Iranian threat as they did Hitler in the years before World War II.

Carl & Rob Reiner honored by Israel Film Festival

If I ever get the Nobel Prize, the headline is going to say ‘Meathead wins Nobel Prize,’" suggests actor-turned-director Rob Reiner, harking back to his role as Archie Bunker’s son-in-law during the 1970s run of "All in the Family."

"I’m very proud of that appellation," he adds. "The show was an enormous success, also in Israel, by the way."

The throwaway line is part of a three-way phone interview with Reiner and his father, Carl Reiner, ranging across their Bronx roots, presidential politics, Jewish identity, the future of Jewish humor, and the Ten Commandments.

Is there more to this film than a bunch of Adam Sandler jokes?

At 60, when even the more virile tend to slow down, Israel has replaced Italy as the native habitat of the sex stud.

That’s the uplifting message from "You Don’t Mess With the Zohan," starring Adam Sandler in the title role of an Israeli super commando-turned-New York hairstylist.

Co-script writer Robert Smigel says, "I wrote the Israeli characters as horn dogs," roughly translated as really, REALLY horny persons of either gender.

The film’s Zohan Dvir is Israel’s super counter-terrorist agent who can leap tall buildings, swim faster than a motor boat, bend opponents into pretzels, save burning buildings by spraying hummus on the fire, and wipe out Hamas with his bare hands.

Zohan is also a great disco-dancer, skilled chef, muscle man (shot on Tel Aviv beaches), and a nice Jewish boy who loves his parents.
 

Through the eyes of a U.S. Jewish student in 1948

SAN FRANCISCO – It’s about 6 p.m. on May 14, 1948, and a friend and I are leaving a UNESCO conference here to catch the train back to Berkeley.

From the corner of our eyes we catch the newspaper headlines: "U.S. RECOGNIZES ISRAEL" screams the Examiner, in type usually reserved for the latest axe murder or Hollywood divorce.

Israel. We slowly formulate the name on our tongue, roll it around, test its flavor for the first time.

We buy up every paper on the newsstand — the San Francisco Chronicle, the News, the Examiner, and the Oakland Tribune — an expenditure that would become a daily habit.

State-of-the-art Szyk Haggadah out in limited edition

The life of Charlton Heston was marked by certain ironies.

Heston, who died on Saturday at the age of 84, was an ardent civil rights activist, a Hollywood star who marched with the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. on Washington in 1963, but who became the embodiment of right-wing bluster as the president of the National Rifle Association.

He was born and raised as an archetypical WASP in the Midwest and gained his greatest fame portraying towering Jewish characters, Moses and Judah Ben Hur.

Even while reviled by most American Jews as an arch-conservative, he was a close and loyal friend of many liberal Jews.

The simplest innovations sometimes lead to the greatest rewards, as Rachel Andres learned this week when she was named the 2008 recipient of the $100,000 Charles Bronfman Prize.

The annual prize is awarded to a person or team of people younger than 50 whose Jewish values spark humanitarian efforts that help improve the world.

Andres in her work provides succor to some of the most helpless and brutalized people in the world — 10,000 refugee families, mostly fatherless, who have escaped the massacres in Darfur.

Disappointed but not downcast, Israeli filmmakers and their supporters vowed to come back strong next year after the country’s entry "Beaufort" lost out in the Oscar race for best foreign-language film.

"We have shown that Israel can make very good movies and we will prove it again next time," Eli Eltonyo, one of "Beaufort’s" actors, told a cheering crowd of some 350 attending an Oscar party Sunday at the Hollywood night club Avalon.

LOS ANGELES – Joseph Cedar, the Orthodox director of the Oscar-nominated Israeli film "Beaufort," has resolved a thorny Shabbat dilemma.

Traditionally, on the day before the awards ceremony, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences holds a high-profile public symposium for the five finalists vying for the Oscar for best foreign-language film. This year the symposium is slated for Saturday morning Feb. 23 — posing a major problem for Cedar.

LOS ANGELES – A prominent Orthodox rabbi has broken a taboo by publicly advocating that his community consider a possible division of Jerusalem to achieve a lasting peace with the Palestinians.

Rabbi Yosef Kanefsky of B’nai David Judea wrote in Friday’s Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles that the "worst-case scenario" of returning the Western Wall and the Temple Mount to Arab control would be horrifying and unfathomable to him.

"At the same time, though, to insist that the [Israeli] government not talk about Jerusalem at all (including, the possibility, for example, of Palestinian sovereignty over Arab neighborhoods) is to insist that Israel come to the negotiating table telling a dishonest story — a story in which our side has made no mistakes and no miscalculations, a story in which there is no moral ambiguity in the way we have chosen to rule people we conquered, a story in which we don’t owe anything to anyone," Kanefsky wrote.