Hank Rosenfeld
By Hank Rosenfeld
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Israel News Everybody Loved Murray
So many friends wanted to speak at Jan Murray’s July 6 funeral, held in Culver City, Calif., that the rabbi warned mourners, “Just to remind you, Shabbos begins tomorrow night.” The comedian and television host, who died July 2 at the age of 89, was remembered as a giant, “20 feet tall,” and as the…
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News Life and Laughs At the Oasis
When Irving Brecher did his stand-up act for a room of retired physicians at Beverly Hills’s Cedars-Sinai Medical Center it didn’t go so well. “They smiled,” 91-year-old Brecher recalled, “but didn’t want to use up their energy laughing.” But like anyone with a vaudevillian’s instincts, Brecher was able to use the debacle to his advantage….
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News Using Krusty’s Bar Mitzvah To Animate Religious Lessons
Two and a half dozen 20-somethings inched forward in their seats as Rabbi Brian Schuldenfrei turned on a television set one recent evening in Los Angeles’s Sinai Temple. Suddenly the Upper Traub room of the huge synagogue on Wilshire Boulevard was immersed in a classic episode of “The Simpsons.” In “Like Father, Like Clown,” Krusty…
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News Comedy Giants Gather To Mourn One of Hollywood’s Great Clowns
The Encyclopedia of Jewish Humor includes 14 pages of jokes on death, so when Buddy Hackett passed away in Malibu at age 79 last week, the chapel at Hillside Memorial in Culver City was packed with every comedy icon that hadn’t booked a Fourth of July gig out of town. Sid Caesar sat up front…
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News Where Music Aficionados Debate Who’s the Elvis of the Cantorial World
Fairfax is the best avenue in Los Angeles, containing within one miracle mile Little Ethiopia and the Peterson Auto Museum, the L.A. County Museum of Art and a farmers market. Cross Beverly Boulevard and you come upon Russian nightclubs and Israeli cafes. But lately creeping into this “one size feeds all” marketplace are a chain…
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