Jews

Yom Kippur, the holiest and most somber day of the Jewish calendar, is a time for repentance, traditionally reserved for fasting and intense prayer. But scores of Iranian American Jews in Los Angeles, many of whom congregate in just a handful of synagogues across the city, aren't just looking for forgiveness on the Day of Atonement. They're looking for love. Facing enormous pressure from their families to marry within the community, many of these young people -- and their matchmaking relatives -- say they use the day to scope out potential romantic interests and tap into vast social networks to get the scoop on prospective candidates.

Early on in 2007's comedy hit "Knocked Up," Seth Rogen and a bunch of buddies, nearly all of them Jewish, are hanging at a nightclub when Rogen announces that he's just seen "Munich," the Steven Spielberg film about an Israeli assassination squad. "That movie with Eric Bana kicking . . . ," Rogen says. "For every movie with Jews, we're the ones getting killed, 'Munich' flips it on its ear. . . . If any of us get [lucky] tonight, it's because of Eric Bana."

During his life and now in death, Tuvia Bielski was many things to many people: a courageous and resourceful leader who helped save more than 1,200 Jews from falling into the hands of the Nazis; a humble man whose monumental achievements have inspired at least two books and the new feature film "Defiance," starring Daniel Craig. But for many years, Sharon Rennert knew Bielski by a simple, affectionate moniker: "grandfather."

Gregory Cochran has always been drawn to puzzles. This one had been gnawing at him for several years: Why are European Jews prone to so many deadly genetic diseases? Tay-Sachs disease. Canavan disease. More than a dozen more. It offended Cochran's sense of logic. Natural selection, the self-taught genetics buff knew, should flush dangerous DNA from the gene pool. Perhaps the mutations causing these diseases had some other, beneficial purpose. But what?

Two great disciples of Mohandas Gandhi -- Archbishop Desmond Tutu and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. -- absorbed the moral and strategic power of his nonviolence credo and courageously applied it to change history in South Africa and the United States. Today, in a world still challenged by violent conflict, wars and terrorism, many look to Gandhi's vision as the prototype to solve these challenges. But Gandhi was not always right. Tutu, a longtime critic of Israel, recently again unloaded on the Jewish state.

For decades, three Italian Renaissance paintings have hung on the walls of Hearst Castle without betraying their grim history. But on Friday, state parks officials will formally acknowledge the artworks' past, turning them over to the heirs of a Jewish couple who were forced by the Nazis to liquidate their Berlin art gallery in 1935.

In his 89 years, Sol Berger has gone by many names. He started life in Poland as Salomon Berger, then became Jan Jerzowski. Then he was Ivan Marianowicz Jerzowski, then Shlomo Harari, then Sol. During World War II and its aftermath, the names kept him safe, protected him from the concentration camps and eventually allowed him to seek refuge in the United States.

Ten years ago, when Quentin Tarantino first sat down to write his own WWII extravaganza, "Inglourious Basterds," a film he referred to as his "men on a mission" saga, he needed to come up with two story staples: a cool group of renegades and a mission. For his rough-edged warriors, he quickly settled on Jewish soldiers -- not the most obvious choice, given the legacy of Jerry Seinfeld and Woody Allen -- and for his mission, nothing less than revising history in his update of such war film staples as "The Dirty Dozen" and "The Guns of Navarone," "Where Eagles Dare" and "The Great Escape."

Controversy has erupted at UC Santa Barbara over a professor's decision to send his students an e-mail in which he compared graphic images of Jews in the Holocaust to pictures of Palestinians caught up in Israel's recent Gaza offensive. The e-mail by tenured sociology professor William I. Robinson has triggered a campus investigation and drawn accusations of anti-Semitism from two national Jewish groups, even as many students and faculty members have voiced support for him.

The Vatican stood firm Tuesday on a decision to rehabilitate a Holocaust-denying bishop, even as Jewish leaders warned that the move will set back decades of Roman Catholic overtures to mend strained relations between the two faiths. The Vatican joined Jews and fellow Catholics in condemning the British bishop's assertions that no Jews died in Nazi gas chambers.