Sharon Rosen Leib is a former deputy attorney general in California’s Department of Justice, an award-winning freelance journalist and contributing writer for the Forward and the San Diego Jewish Journal.
Sharon Rosen Leib
By Sharon Rosen Leib
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News Jews built Hollywood. So why is their history erased from the Academy’s new museum?
After over a decade of delay caused by money problems, competing narrative visions and the COVID-19 pandemic, the $484 million Academy Museum of Motion Pictures in Los Angeles has finally opened to the public. The Academy heralds its new museum as the most important institution devoted to filmmaking in the world, and one visit bears…
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News Climate change tops agenda in Hazon-Pearlstone merger
In Portland this month, the daytime temperature reached 100 degrees. In Seattle, 111. Between June 26 and July 6, approximately 800 people died of heat -related causes in the Pacific Northwest. Hundreds more have died in extreme floods in Europe. No extreme heat or cold temperature event on record has come close in terms of…
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News ‘Their stories seeped into my system’: How Judy Batalion found the stories of overlooked female Polish WWII resistance fighters
(JTA) — They hid revolvers in teddy bears and dynamite in their underwear. They learned how to make lethal Molotov cocktails and fling them at German supply trains. The girls with “Aryan” features who could pass as non-Jews flirted with Nazis – plying them with wine, whiskey and pastry before shooting them dead. When the…
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Opinion Chabad of Poway Rabbi Yisroel Goldstein Deserves Jail Time
Does a rabbi who pocketed hundreds of thousands of dollars in donations meant to serve people with special needs deserve to walk free? How about a rabbi caught running a decades-long scheme whereby he accepted large tax-deductible “donations” to his shul, kicked back 90% to the donors and kept 10% for himself? Or a rabbi…
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Culture The 28-year-old studio executive who helped Hollywood survive its first pandemic
The Spanish flu pandemic hit Hollywood hard. The lethal flu strain killed approximately 650,000 U.S. citizens from 1918-19, and threatened to collapse the nascent movie industry. One year before the outbreak, my great-grandfather, pioneer producer Sol M. Wurtzel, arrived to run the original Fox Studio at Sunset Blvd. and Western Ave. Sol had personally experienced…
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Community Fighting police brutality, the Johnnie Cochran way
When Johnnie Cochran and his entourage strode into the California Attorney General’s Los Angeles Office in 1989, a buzz rippled down the hallway. We stepped away from our onerous caseloads to catch a glimpse of LA’s premiere African American attorney, famous nationwide for winning multi-million-dollar jury verdicts in police brutality cases. As a 26-year-old newbie…
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News One year later, Chabad of Poway shooting’s legacy of pain and hope
In a moving virtual ceremony last Sunday, Dr. Howard Kaye spoke of his late wife of 34 years, Lori Gilbert-Kaye. It has been one year since a gunman shot and killed Gilbert-Kaye inside Chabad of Poway, and the memorial service to mark the event was a virtual one. “Lori took every mitzvah and every kindness…
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News Letter from San Luis Obispo: COVID-19 hits “One of America’s Happiest Cities”
Way back in February, when my beloved younger brother invited my family to celebrate Passover with his wife and two kids, I politely declined. I couldn’t fathom making the 300-mile drive from San Diego after my husband and I returned from visiting our 20-year-old study abroad daughter in Australia the night before. That was then…
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