Frank Gehry Honored

“Welcome to the house of Hebrew University in Beverly Hills,” said Hebrew University President Menahem Ben-Sasson at the opening of the Jan. 16 American Friends of Hebrew University (AFHU) dinner gala honoring architect Frank Gehry.

“It is modest,” he said under the ornate flowering chandelier of the Beverly Hills Hotel ballroom.

Modesty was hardly the evening’s theme. The dinner is one of the university’s biggest fundraising events of the year, attracting a starry bunch of Los Angeles’ wealthiest philanthropists and Israel supporters, who ponied up $700,000 of their recession-era pennies for “the Harvard of the Middle East.” Among those who attended were Edythe and Eli Broad, Jamie McCourt and Richard Ziman.

Ben-Sasson appealed to the crowd not by might, but by intellect. “[Israel] is a winning team because we haven’t got any other choice,” he said. Invoking the semantics of combat, he said, Israel has to win “with whatever we’ve got in between our ears: brain.”

To prove his point, he drew an unlikely parallel between Hebrew University and the Jewish human rights organization the Simon Wiesenthal Center — and he wasn’t afraid to reference the recent news of Frank Gehry’s withdrawal from designing a Museum of Tolerance in Jerusalem.

“Frank, I know you wanted a house of tolerance in Jerusalem,” he said. “We have it; Hebrew University is a house of tolerance in Jerusalem where you find Christians, Muslims and Jews in the same classroom.”

Attorney Patricia Glaser, who recently made headlines defending the embattled talk show host Conan O’Brien against NBC Universal, introduced her liberal alter-ego, Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz, before he addressed the crowd.

“I was not a big fan of Alan Dershowitz,” Glaser said, “until I read ‘The Case for Israel.’” That account fit in line with Glaser’s openly conservative politics.

Dershowitz talked about Israel’s historic focus on intellectual and cultural matters, evinced by its investment — even before statehood — in a national university system. But he also addressed the role of the university as a double-edged sword, calling universities Israel’s “best friend and greatest enemy.” Because on the one hand, he said, Israel owes much of its political, medical and technological advancement to universities, but these same institutions have also become hotbeds for some of the world’s most virulent anti-Semitic speech.

Pianist Herbie Hancock performed some somber melodies before Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger got up to present Gehry with the Scopus Prize.

“Anything for the Jewish people,” the governor said of his surprise appearance. “Anything they want.”

Gehry mumbled through an off-the-cuff acceptance speech, first crediting his “hot” attorney, Glaser, for arranging the honor.

“I’m a big believer in Israel and Israelis,” Gehry said, listing Jewish memories from his youth like studying Talmud with his grandfather. “I grew up with the dream of Israel.”

The following day, AFHU put on its Annual Leadership Educational Forum, featuring Los Angeles film critic Kenneth Turan on the Israeli film industry and other leading academics in a variety of disciplines.