UCLA Chinese-Hebrew Café

Good food, language learning, and community building!

Taste of Torah: Two Jews, three opinions? More like one Bible, four opinions!

  One of the most perplexing questions that a student of Tanakh can ask is derived from two verses of this week’s Parsha. God appears to Moses, after the Egyptians refuse to let the Jews go and opens up with…

The Plasco Building: A Reflection

Panic struck the people of Tehran, Iran on January 19, 2017 as they watched the city’s beloved, 17-story Plasco Building collapse to the ground. The incident is believed to have been caused by a fire that started in the morning…

Separating a Person from their work: What do we do with Carlebach’s music?

One of the more obscure ‘secrets’ of the Jewish community involves the legacy of Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach. Anyone who has been to a Friday night prayer service has almost certainly sung some of the many tunes composed by Carlebach. Many…

Our Imperfect Memory

From Fall 2016 Print Edition, “Transitions” Imagine you were to enter a time machine and travel ten years into the past. To avoid drastically altering the course of history, you would, of course, be sure to keep yourself hidden and…

From Conservative Jew to JLIC President

From Fall 2016 Print Edition, “Transitions” I was raised in a Conservative Jewish household. My family and I attended services on a rather regular basis at our local synagogue, Congregation Beth Am of San Diego, and had Shabbat dinners on…

From Dealing to Teaching

From Fall 2016 Print Edition, “Transitions” “How does a professional drug dealer end up with a PhD, teaching at UCLA? Israeli-born, Professor Adi Jaffe went from selling drugs to a well-respected statistics professor in the UCLA psychology department.”  According to…

Pluralism and the Jewish Community

From Fall 2016 Print Edition, “Transitions” In our era, different societies and communities worldwide advocate pluralism heavily. Pluralism is a uniquely modern idea, in which a society allows — or even encourages — the coexistence of more than one system…

The End of Nietzsche: God Is Not Dead, But Undead

From Fall 2016 Print Edition, “Transitions”  “God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him.” Friedrich Nietzsche is most memorialized in popular philosophy by this catchy, contentious extract from The Gay Science, published in 1882. For all of…

The Changing Middle East and its Implications for Israel

From Fall 2016 Print Edition, “Transitions” If you’ve been following the news in the Middle East, you have probably noticed a popular trend in the region — instability. Since the 2010 eruption of the Arab spring in Tunisia, political unrest…