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Buford Furrow's worst nightmare
It's not just the Jews at the JCC who got to him -- it's the way they mix up the American melting pot.
By Joan Walsh
[08/14/99]

Sleeping with children
In the middle of the night, the smell, feel and touch of a small child soothes a restless mother.
By Dulcie Leimbach
[08/13/99]

Furrow's people
At a compound in Idaho, Nazis explain that they're not about hate -- they just love their own kind.
By Amy Benfer
[08/12/99]

"All the Wrong Men and One Perfect Boy"
Online confession queen Spike Gillespie dishes on bad boys and reveals her true love -- her son.
By Katie Allison Granju
[08/11/99]

Ketchup and Convertibles
My stepdaughters insisted on camping with ketchup, Pepsi and showers. I'd rather be opening a bottle of white wine with the women in the red Mustang convertible.
By Karen Ackland
[08/10/99]

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Fortunately, I didn't have to look too far for help. At the time we lived in Silver Lake, a hip enclave in Los Angeles rife with co-ops and nursery schools and mommy groups. After calling around, I found a class at the Hollywood-Los Feliz Jewish Community Center. The center was conveniently located just down the hill from where we lived. But I had another, more specific reason for choosing this JCC: My husband is Jewish, and I wanted my son to explore that side of his heritage.

On my first visit to the center, I was appalled. The place hardly seemed the ideal environment for young children: a decaying two-story brick building with a concrete playground and a sandbox full of gritty dirt. There wasn't even a patch of grass, for God's sake. The school was on Fountain Avenue, a frantically busy street off Sunset near the eastern fringes of Hollywood. You had to practically take your child's life in your hands just to negotiate a turn into the parking lot. I also wasn't impressed by the neighborhood, with its liquor store, auto body shop, video rental place and odd mix of falling-down rental units with overgrown yards.

Also Today Buford Furrow's worst nightmare It's not just the Jews at the JCC who got to him -- it's the way they mix up the American melting pot.

I was all for bohemian. In fact, we'd chosen our Silver Lake neighborhood, with its mix of gays, Latinos, artists and young families like ourselves, precisely because of its liberal flavor. But I also wanted my son to be safe. This felt iffy.

In retrospect, these things all seem so silly, so typical of a first-time mother. They revealed absolutely nothing about the quality of the center or the incredible teachers who worked there. By the end of our first session, my misgivings had vanished. Over the next two years, the Jewish Community Center became a beloved place in our lives, a weekly ritual that my son and I looked forward to just as we did our weekly trips to Myrna's Yogurt Shop or Hard Times Pizza. When we moved to just outside Pasadena two years later, I still took my daughter to classes at the JCC in our old neighborhood.

The Jewish Community Center embodied my ideas of education and faith: loving, inclusive, engaging. Even though I'd brought my son there because he was in part Jewish, we'd have been just as welcome if we were Catholic. Most of the parents were of various faiths; some didn't go to church or temple at all. None of that mattered. At the end of the day, all that mattered was the vision we shared for our children: to have them learn and to play in a safe and loving place. What we got was that and more -- a sense of community. This idea of connection and rootedness is precisely why so many parents who weren't Jewish found the JCC appealing, particularly those of us who'd been shaped by the social movements of the '70s.

Next page | Buford Furrow's "wake-up call" should wake us up