Rabbi David Wolpe is a renown spiritual leader and scholar in the Jewish community and beyond. He is based in Los Angeles, California and holds the position of the Max Webb Senior Rabbi of Sinai Temple, a large and historic place of worship and learning. He has taught at various significant universities, appeared in multiple television series and appeared in a myriad of public debates with the likes of Christopher Hitchens. Rabbi Wolpe is in demand as a keynote speaker, lecturer and spiritual teacher in the United States and around the world, from Israel to India. He is the author of eight books including a best seller, Making Loss Matter: Creating Meaning in Difficult Times (Riverhead) and his latest, David, The Divided Heart(Yale U Press). He is a Rabbinic innovator bringing a deeper understanding to what it means to be a human being and in enhancing Jewish spirituality. In this podcast episode Rabbi Wolpe has a unique answer to the topic question - What is a Jew? - a question that persists through the ages.

Mental health has become a wider concern as the pandemic way of life has restricted human contact and promoted feelings of depression and despair.  For some time now, research has shown that turning to one’s sense of spirituality can be a powerful tool for increasing and maintaining mental health.  In certain agencies and organizations mental health services have incorporated a client’s spirituality into an effective plan for their recovery from emotional distress.  

Dr. Chris Miller discusses how this search for the benefits of spirituality at a time of stress can come from a formal religious practice or from a place where meaning, purpose and uplift can be found.  For some finding spirituality may mean regular meditation, visits to nature, or involvement in an artistic endeavor, as examples.  In recognizing the important role of spirituality in healing, the American Psychiatric Association has formed the Mental Health and Faith Community Partnership.  

Dr. Miller can be contacted by email - [email protected]

Gypsies, known as Romani people, with their long history of moving across countries and continents, fit into the modern day movement of millions struggling to find a better and more peaceful life.

Barry Fisher tells us the story of his own musical and professional legal relationship as their lawyer, a population often stereotyped, living in the realm of mystique and mystery.

We come to understand like other marginalized and abused groups, that Barry Fisher as a Lawyer, calls upon the First Amendment Rights in the United States Constitution to offer Gypsies the cornerstone of human rights protection.

Over many centuries, their music, their decor, and their fortune telling custom, is at times incorporated into mainstream cultural life even as they continue to be considered outsiders.

Barry Fisher, in addition to his long career defending Gypsies as a Lawyer on the front lines, has struggled to protect the wilderness, defend free speech, retrieve funds from Swiss banks for Holocaust Survivors and represent Asian victims of sexual slavery of wartime Japan, as a partial list of his legal successes. In 2021, he was declared the International Lawyer of the Year by the California Bar Association.

Thank you for listening and subscribing to the podcast, COMMENTARIES FROM THE EDGE - Creator/Host, Keren Goldberg

Grieving, it seems, is something we all need to learn how to approach as it is inescapable in the human experience. It is offset by the joys and beauty of life as we carry it along with us.

In these last two years, we are living in a time with grief all around us from the worldwide pandemic that persists. With guidance from Robin Kay, Ph.d, current Adjunct Faculty member at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles and former Chief Deputy as well as Acting Director of the Los Angeles County Department of Mental Health, we learn some essential information to assist in the common grieving process.

In this podcast episode Dr. Kay covers what are some misconceptions, what are the facts, the four tasks we need to accomplish in the process and finally, the ultimate goal of moving on into the future with health and happiness. A wise person said, every happy moment in our life gives us the strength for the other.

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Note to Listeners - There are a few points on this podcast recording with tech difficulties. Thank you for listening for the valuable information about the functioning of the brain. K. G.

Dr. Steven Siegel, Chair of Psychiatry in the School of Medicine and Chief Mental Health and Wellness Officer for Keck Medicine, at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, has spent years researching the brain.

Beginning with an interest in scientific research especially on schizophrenia, he decided that becoming a medical doctor would allow him to make a more significant contribution to improving people’s lives.

In this podcast episode Dr. Siegel helps us understand some of the complex biology of the brain and emphasizes the impact of early childhood experiences and stresses on our brain cells. He explains that this early childhood life affects the outcomes of the rest of our lives.

Finally, Dr. Siegel’s plea is for societies, in response to the impact of the pandemic, greatly increase funding for mental illness and mental wellness services for better communities. To contact Dr. Siegel, email [email protected]

Amie Quigley, Director of Community Programs at the First Presbyterian Church of Hollywood in California, has spent over the last decade perfecting outreach techniques and practices to those who are homeless, often mentally ill and with addictions. The centerpiece of her successes is her way of organizing agencies and service groups to coordinate their services through the Church sponsored Hollywood Healthcare Partnership. Community resources are leveraged in a concerted way to maximize results. To understand the true effectiveness of all Amie does, is to learn of her loving and respectful way of approaching everyone no matter their dire circumstances or condition. Amie Quigley is the model of a humanitarian reaching out to those individuals in the most trouble. She has lessons to teach us all and trains others to practice and organize her approach in response to the homeless.

Velina Hasu Houston, Playwright and Professor, child of a Japanese Mother and African American Father, was born on a United States Military Ship sitting in contested waters. All her life she has had that sense of fluid borders. Velina was raised in a small town in Kansas, middle America in every way, and at a young age announced that she wanted to write. Navigating through a society that more often searched to give her a fixed identity and limit her ambitions, she rejected that characterization and in spite of discouraging advice, went on to garner awards for playwriting and a Distinguished Professor designation at the University of Southern California (USC) School of Dramatic Arts. Velina discusses the many sided ways of looking at identity, how her famous play, TEA is a homage to her Mother and her life in Kansas, as a Japanese immigrant woman, and muses about what identity means today as the world changes in the 21st century.

Dr. Velina Hasu Houston’s play, TEA, is available from Dramatist’s Play Service on its website.

“Telling Untold Stories: The Latino Theatre Company of the Los Angeles Theatre Company”

Evelina Fernandez, a founding member of the Latino Theatre Company and currently an Associate Artistic Director of the Los Angeles Theatre Center located in the heart of downtown, Los Angeles, describes her path from her part in the original production of Zoot Suit which went to Broadway, to becoming a lifelong advocate for social justice in the Chicano-Mexican American-Latino communities.

Everyone has an opinion about what the United States public education classrooms need, and everyone agrees there is something terribly wrong with how young people are learning, or not learning, in America’s public education system. Robin Lithgow, a prominent educator in California, was a classroom teacher for 21 years before becoming the Director of the Arts Branch of the Los Angeles Unified School District for 14 years. She has what might seem to some both classical and radical ideas for what is desperately needed for young people to become educated.

It is clear we are living in a time when there are several threats to the functioning of our United States democracy, and having citizens who can think and calculate is obviously essential to its future. Listen to Robin Lithgow’s approach to fixing public education and along the way promoting how young people can become geniuses in our future society. Look for her upcoming book soon to be published, LEARNING THE WAY SHAKESPEARE LEARNED: Classroom Dramatics, Physical Rhetoric and a Generation of Geniuses. For Contact: [email protected]

The Pico Union Project is the name of an extraordinary community center located in a Jewish Synagogue dating back to 1909, situated in a multiethnic Los Angeles neighborhood of many refugees. The Center is a model of vibrancy that practices responding to the needs of neighbors with determination and imagination. PUP founded by Craig Taubman who worked for years in the music industry, uses his talents to bring people together from all over Los Angeles to a Center created at a time of divisiveness. To make a donation go to www.picounionproject.org or write to PUP 1153 Valencia, Los Angeles, California 90015, USA