By Diana Brement, JTNews Columnist You might say Janet Varon has stayed the course as she navigated her career. The founder and director of NoHLA, Northwest Health Law Advocates (www.nohla.org), has always worked, through legal and legislative means, to right societal wrongs. Growing up in Riverdale, the Bronx, she attendedContinue Reading
By Diana Brement , JTNews Columnist 1 As you read this, Ariel Vardy is on his way to a seriously big adventure. The recent Skyline High School grad from Sammamish will spend a gap year — a non-academic year between high school and college — as a fellow of theContinue Reading
By Diana Brement, JTNews Columnist Earlier this year, Kurtis Carsch, 18, became a finalist in the Intel Science Talent Search (Intel STS), which seeks out and recognizes pre-college contributions to science by students and their schools. Initially he was one of 300 competitors selected from 1,839, and went on toContinue Reading
By Diana Brement , JTNews Columnist “I enjoy connecting people to one another,” says Lynn Chapman, explaining one reason she became a local coordinator for the Council on International Education Exchange’s (CIEE) high school program, matching Seattle-area host families with overseas students. “The reason [these programs] exist is for diplomacy,”Continue Reading
By Diana Brement , JTNews Columnist After 26 years in Seattle, Leslie Fried has moved to Anchorage to be curator of the Alaska Jewish Museum. Founded in 2004, the museum is just now becoming a physical reality. An inaugural exhibit opens this November in a small building in a largerContinue Reading
By , If you didn’t know it already, the crossword puzzle that appears in this newspaper also appears in life size on the wall at Capitol Hill’s Eltana bagel café in Seattle. The Eltana version is a weekly moveable sculpture (to match your moveable feast), made of white crossword tilesContinue Reading
By Diana Brement , JTNews Columnist She was born and raised on the wet side, but Seattle native Josey Fast is now enjoying life on the dry side of the Cascade curtain as the owner of the only commercial art gallery in the Yakima Valley. The Franklin High and WesternContinue Reading
By Diana Brement, JTNews Columnist Brett Alkan found a kidney donor through Facebook and it appears he is on the, ahem, cutting edge of a trend (sorry!). The day after I interviewed the future transplant recipient, NPR aired a story on trends in organ donation. These include adding donation statusContinue Reading
By Diana Brement, JTNews Columnist When I asked Hilary Stern how she was inspired to work for Casa Latina, the immigrant aid organization, she offered “the Jewish answer,” explaining, “my grandparents were immigrants and…if they hadn’t made that decision, my life would have been completely different. I’ve really benefitted fromContinue Reading
By Diana Brement , JTNews Columnist This past August found Henry Butler turning 90, and this past Purim found him pouring shots of schnapps, whiskey and other spirits at Temple Beth Am in Seattle. An active member of the congregation since the late 1950s, he’s handled that particular job forContinue Reading
By Diana Brement, JTNews Columnist I easily spotted Carolyn Bernhard’s mass of gray curls on the TV monitor at my gym early last month. She and other volunteers from Prevention WINS were making an appearance on “New Day,” a Seattle daytime talk show on KING-5 TV. (Conversely, Carolyn wanted toContinue Reading
By Diana Brement, JTNews Columnist Recently named one of New York University’s 15 most influential students, Chelsea Garbell was nominated primarily for her work with Bridges, a Jewish-Muslim dialogue group sponsored by the Bronfman Center at the school and an official school club (www.bridges.bronfmancenter.org). The Seattle Hebrew Academy and NorthwestContinue Reading
By Diana Brement, JTNews Columnist I arrived at Seattle’s Frye Art Museum to interview Frieda Sondland, finding her in the lobby getting the rock-star treatment from a handful of admirers. Frieda has received much notice, including a feature in the Seattle Times, for being a citizen curator of one ofContinue Reading
By Diana Brement, JTNews Columnist Nineteenth and 20th-century Yiddish and Russian literature and drama is her field, but UW Professor Barbara Henry is not Jewish. Yiddish was in the water where she grew up in New Jersey, she explains. She loved klezmer as a child and “wanted to know whatContinue Reading
By Diana Brement , JTNews Columnist Jamie Peha gets to do what she loves best — work with food and wine. Jamie started Peha Promotions, her food and beverage marketing and PR business, seven years ago. This former hospitality major at WSU managed restaurants for 20 years before becoming marketingContinue Reading
By Diana Brement , JTNews Columnist Even though her performance career in ballet didn’t last very long, Marjorie Thompson still feels the influence of her early years dancing with the New York City Ballet, “when George Balanchine was artistic director,” she says. “I was there at the right time,” reflectsContinue Reading
By Diana Brement , JTNews Columnist It’s always great when families get along, and more so when blended families do. Stepbrothers Raphi Schuster and Daniel Kaplan are doubly, maybe quadruply, blessed: They enjoy the support of an array of parents and stepparents, and shared interests in sports, school, synagogue andContinue Reading
By Diana Brement , JTNews Columnist Kenny and Marleen Alhadeff are always happy to be honored, as they were Nov. 18, receiving the Outstanding Family Philanthropists award from the Association of Fundraising Professionals, Washington Chapter, for their work with the Foundation for Early Learning. On accepting the award, Kenny stressedContinue Reading
By Diana Brement, JTNews Columnist Columbus, Ohio native Brenda Luper (“go Buckeyes!”) was a relatively new arrival in the Seattle area in 2007 when she learned her mom had pancreatic cancer. “We had no idea what that meant,” she says. Sadly, her mother died four months later and “we spentContinue Reading
By Diana Brement, JTNews Columnist About two months ago my family and I visited Whitman College in Walla Walla. We arrived Friday afternoon and headed to the student union to buy challah from Challah For Hunger (which we wrote about in April) before our tour. Later, we joined about 30Continue Reading
