Robert J. Avrech: Emmy Award winning screenwriter. Movie fanatic. Helplessly and hopelessly in love with my wife since age nine.

Judaism

Friday Photos: True Hollywood Confessions

August 9, 2019 by Robert J. Avrech 2 Comments

“I like courage. I hope I have it. I want and I try to be honest. Perhaps I don’t always succeed. But I try… I am like that.”
—Jean Harlow

Friday Photos: True Hollywood Confessions

August 2, 2019 by Robert J. Avrech 8 Comments

“Nobody’s going to tell me how to live. I go by the rules of decent behavior. The most important rule to live by is the Golden Rule. I don’t do anything to anybody I wouldn’t want done to me. I drink, but I’m not tough and rough. I don’t brawl outside of movies. I act tough in movies but that’s what I get paid to do. Despite what they say, I don’t go around in restaurants waving guns and picking fights. I live my own life and I do what I want. That’s Bogart.”
—Humphrey Bogart (b. Humphrey DeForest Bogart, New York City, 1899 – 1957)

Friday Photos: True Hollywood Confessions

July 26, 2019 by Robert J. Avrech 4 Comments

“I was always a rebel and probably could have got much farther had I changed my attitude. But when you think about it, I got pretty far without changing attitudes. I’m happy with that.”
—Veronica Lake

Friday Photos: True Hollywood Confessions

July 5, 2019 by Robert J. Avrech 6 Comments

“I didn’t want to be just another blond in the movie world, brought out to be slapped into a bathing suit, perched in a cherry tree to be photographed and then sent back to New York.”
— Jan Sterling (1921-2004). Sterling’s best role was as the hard boiled Lorraine in Billy Wildrer’s *Ace in the Hole*, 1951, in which she delivers one of the greatest lines of dialogue ever written for motion pictures: “I don’t go the church. Kneeling bags my nylons.” In contrast to her movie image as a street-wise femme fatale, Sterling was a refined and educated woman who came from a wealthy Manhattan family. She attended posh private schools, and traveled widely in South America, London and Paris.

Friday Photos: True Hollywood Confessions

May 31, 2019 by Robert J. Avrech 3 Comments

James Stewart, early 1940′s
“The great thing about the movies is you’re giving people little, tiny pieces of time that they never forget.”

I'm an Emmy Award winning screenwriter. I'm also an observant Jew, a religious Zionist, a conservative Republican, and a member of the NRA. I've been writing and producing in Hollywood for over twenty-five years. But the focus of my life is my family: my radiant wife, Karen—with whom I have been in love with since I was nine years-old—and my two daughters, who, thankfully, look like Karen. Not too long ago, we had three children. But our son, Ariel, died at the age of twenty-two from cancer. We miss him terribly. We think about him practically every minute of every day. People tell us that time heals, but Karen and I know this is not true. Time grinds away doing its terrible work. Ariel is gone. Yet absence becomes presence.

Ariel Chaim Avrech, ZT'L, May His Righteous Memory be a Blessing.

Annual Ariel Avrech
Memorial Lectures
Young Israel of Century City

NOTE: Click on video titles inside the thumbnail images, below, to open that video in YouTube

Fifteenth: June 10, 2018
Jackie Danicki: “Confessions of a Convert: A Humbling, Joyful Journey to Judaism.”

Blog Post | Audio: (94 MB)

Fourteenth: June 11, 2017
Daniel Greenfield: “Fighting Anti-Semitism and Defending Israel in the Age of BDS.”

Blog Post | Audio: (100 MB)

Thirteenth: May 22, 2016Ben Shapiro: “How You Can Save Israel”

Blog Post | Audio: (70 MB)

Twelfth: June 7, 2015
Larry Elder: “The New Black Anti-Semitism”

Blog Post | Audio: (100 MB)

Eleventh: June 8, 2014
Michael Medved: “Shifting Alliances: Why Liberals No Longer Reliably Support Israel — And Conservatives Do.”

Blog Post | Audio: (97MB)

Tenth: June 9, 2013
David Horowitz: “The War Against Judaism on the University Campus.”

Blog Post | Audio: (16MB)

Ninth: June 3, 2012
Joel B. Pollak: “The Mainstream Media’s Betrayal of Israel.”

Blog Post | Audio: (15MB)

Eighth: June 5, 2011
Yossi Klein Halevi: “What is Expected of a Survivor People: Lessons My Father Taught Me.”

Blog Post | Audio: (18MB)

Seventh: June 13, 2010
Dennis Prager: “Happiness is a Mitzvah, Not an Emotion.”

Blog Post | Audio: (80MB)

Sixth: June 21, 2009
Rabbi Steven Pruzansky: “Conformity in Jewish Life: Vice, Virtue or Affectation?”

Blog Post | Audio: (64MB)

Fifth: June 15, 2008
Rabbi Dr. Gil S. Perl: “What Was the Rosh Yeshiva Reading: Intellectual Openness in 19th Century Lithuania.”

Blog Post | Audio: (70MB)