JoelNothman.com

Vegas brings day to night
All night
Vegas brings night to day
Every day

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So on Thursday I woke up in the sweltering heat of LA. And fell back to sleep again. I got up a while later and — well, I just spent the last minute trying to remember what I did for breakfast, and then realised it was a fast day, and so I had none — wandered down the street to find a public telephone to call a rabbi to find out whether he could find me somewhere for lunch. He said he’d get back to me on the phone I still don’t have yet, so I gave him Ilana’s number. (more…)

Don’t get the impression I’ll always be blogging this regularly. But where I’m staying in LA there just seems to be a strong wireless internet signal from some neighbour.

And that, of course, means I should tell you about where I’m staying. It’s a small building owned by 82-year old Sylvia K who dances, goes to shiurim (Jewish classes), keeps a guest house, and is the grandmother of Ilana who is showing me around the city. I have closet, kitchen and basically anything else i need to get by, and am a short walk from numerous kosher restaurants. (more…)

Travelling east from Sydney over the Pacific, there was a stunning orange-red-green spectrum of light on the horizon. But the woman behind me was insisting it was sunset- but if it’s happening as we go east, it’s got to be sunrise, right? IMO it didn’t look like a sunset, but of course after it followed night, and then day. So I’m just a little confused, and probably a little more tired than I’d hoped to be. Hopefully adrenalin will keep me going through the day.

Finally I arrived about half an hour early in LAX. Now I’m standing around waiting for my bag to appear…

And then once through customs I hope to be off to a neighbourhood near Beverly Hills where I’m told there is an exquisite array of kosher restaurants, and a bus to Santa Monica beach. Sounds like a nice way to start!

So I’ve got a few things sorted out in the last hours before I leave Sydney. One is that a cancellation has meant I have a place in Montreal to stay at: Hillel. There are a lot of good reasons not to stay there, such as cost and being happy to make my own food, but in the end it saves a lot of hassle just taking this option. So, it seems, I will.

And then there’s the voltage. I suddenly realised that I hadn’t checked that the things I was bringing would be safe running at the low voltage produced by US powerpoints. All is well. I will be able to charge my computer, camera and shaver without a problem—except that I only have a double, not triple, adaptor.

The other thing I was looking at was playing around with Google Maps to see where I’d be staying for a couple of nights in LA, and how I’d get there from LAX airport. My friend and host there, Ilana K, had suggested that I could taxi in- but I didn’t mind taking a scenic route, even if it might take a little longer, so I started looking for a bus from the airport. I found a Big Blue Bus (line 3) that may take me as far as Santa Monica, and I’d been told there was a bus between Santa Monica Beach and where I’d be in Beverlywood.

In the end, it seems Ilana might be able to come and get me from the airport, which would be great. Even if I don’t get my sneak preview of Santa Monica on the way in, it’ll mean I can drop my bags and relax.

And, if I’m lucky, I might have finished packing before I leave for the airport. The plane flies at 1:45pm… =)

People tell me they’re not into the blog thing. But they’re well into the email thing—after all, it pretty much comes direct to you and so is much easier to access.

So at my guess people just aren’t using blogs properly. The key to the modern blog is that they can be read as a web page, as an email, or in just about any other collected format. This is due to something called RSS feeds. An RSS feed collects together a summary of a site, such as news from the Jerusalem Post, or posts from my blog, or comments on my blog.

So instead of me having to send out annoying mass emails along my travels, what you need is an RSS reader or aggregator. There are literally hundreds of these around. (more…)

In high school english we were always taught to look for the techniques that the author used to give a particular literary effect. The Tanakh and other ancient texts should not at all be seen as an exception.

It was around this time last year that I contacted my Classical Hebrew teacher, Shani Berrin, to point out some nice alliteration and wordplays used in the parsha of Chukat-Balak, read this weekend in synagogues across the diaspora. (more…)

I’ve got the photo gallery up and running at http://www.joelnothman.com/photos. Okay, so it doesn’t have much there yet, not even my old galleries. Still, check it out!

I wrote my first letter to the AJN last week. It seems they weren’t interested in publishing it. After a couple of weeks of response to some articles on the short welcome that was extended to the Russian migrants to the Australian Jewish community, the AJN published a seemingly unrelated “glossy magazine”. This was my response:

It was nice to see that the glossy Wedding supplement (AJN 29/6) included its token Russian couple.

But since we’re talking marginalised, it would seem Sephardim don’t get married!

The famed Moroccan wedding feast; the colorful Yemenite henna party; the joyous shabbat chatan were all left unmentioned. Our beautiful Oriental women didn’t grace its pages- not even in the abundant advertisements!

While we are being inclusive and welcoming, why not give those photos a little colour?

I think it’s worth pointing out that our community, while diverse, is very easily dominated by the (granted, majority) European population, whether via South Africa or not. I don’t know whether it’s because the sephardim are so integrated or because they are so different that they are forgotten…

Cheesecake is a regular feature of my birthday celebrations, which happen to coincide annually with Shavuot. I’m not generally a big fan of cheese, but when it comes to cheesecakes, I can get quite picky. My mum’s recipe — secretly shared with her mother and no other — makes the best birthday cake in town. Fluffy and lemony, its delicate surface adorns a crumbly shortbread base.

Some years ago, I struck up an argument with Tanya as to whose cheesecake recipe was better. With an ego that’s probably too big for my own good, I didn’t dare back down from my position.

Finally, some six years later, the Nothman jury is out after Tanya appeared at my place with a full-size yellow beast, nicely browned, with only one crack down the cheesy centre (we weren’t judging on style). (more…)