Friday, February 25, 2011

Reflections On LimmudLA 2011 At Costa Mesa Hilton

Luke Ford writes:

2010 LimmudLA 2009 LimmudLA 2008 LimmudLA

Last year, I was so exhausted going into the conference that I didn’t get as much out of it as I would’ve liked.

This year, a week before the show, I wrote down a note to “Take speed at LimmudLA.”

I meant sudafed, which I took for a couple of months last fall for nasal congestion. It’s legal speed and I kept a supply in the drawer, shlepped them to LimmudLA, and every morning over the weekend, popped a couple and then went for a 30-minute walk looking for sunshine.

I felt good all conference!

Jonah Lowenfeld reports:

In his hour-long talk, Lawton said that for most of the second half of the 20th century, America and Israel had dominated the discourse about the future of Judaism and ignored European Jewry. Israel put forward a “nationalization” model for Judaism—the religion would be taken care of by central authorities—while America pushed its highly individualistic model in which any practice, no matter how unusual, could be called Jewish, and no authority had the right to call someone’s Jewishness into question.