To Life and Laughs!

Leave a Comment / Old Stories / Michael Aushenker

It may not surprise anyone in our community to learn that, like the movie industry and the sciences, Jews occupy a disproportionate influence on the history of American comics. Examining the intersection of Jewish culture and the American comic strip is “Cartoon Art,” a four-month exhibit at the Skirball Cultural Center. The event, sponsored by The Comics Journal and Comic-Con International, will feature evenings with four prominent Jewish-Americans working in the comics medium — editorial cartoonist Jules Feiffer (Oct. 28); “Maus'” author Art Spiegelman (Nov. 15); “Momma” creator Mell Lazarus (Dec. 10); and “Sylvia’s” Nicole Hollander.

Unlike movies and medicine, and like baseball and jazz, the comics medium is an American-born idiom. While Jews did not create “The Yellow Kid” (R.F. Outcault’s 1895 creation widely considered to be the mother of all funnies), and George Herriman, the creator of “Krazy Kat,” was actually Greek, Jews were seminal in shaping the modern comic strip. Harry Conway Fisher, who signed his strips “Bud” Fisher, introduced the first continuously published strip, “Mutt and Jeff,” in 1907. Instantly popular, his creation was the first strip ever to run six days a week, enjoying a healthy run through the 1920s. Fisher was coronated the richest and most famous cartoonist in America in his day (raking in an unheard of $4,600 a week).

“A Rube Goldberg invention” is often used to describe some complicated and outlandish contraption. The term was coined after the legendary gag cartoonist Rube Goldberg’s strips depicting improbable and convoluted inventions as solutions to mundane problems, (although it should be noted that while Goldberg popularized this comic strip contraption gimmick, he was predated by British cartoonist W. Heath Robinson and by Clare Victor Dwiggins, whose comical gizmos ran on the same page as Goldberg’s early strip, “Mike and Ike”). The aforementioned catchphrase aside, Goldberg’s influence on the comics industry continues to be expressed today in a different context: the Reuben Award — presented each year by the National Cartoonists Society and widely recognized as the comic world’s equivalent of the Oscar — was named after Goldberg.

Jewish-flavored strips were common in the comic strip’s nascent years. Rube Goldberg’s brother Milt Gross, an esteemed cartoonist in his own right, drew a variety of popular strips, including the Yiddish-dialect cartoons, “Nize Baby.” Harry Hershfield, in response to popular ethnic strips like “Happy Hooligan” (Irish) and “The Katzenjammer Kids” (German) created “Abie The Agent,” chronicling the joke-filled exploits of car salesman Abie Kabibble in the New York business world milieu. And the 30s were dominated by two Jewish-created strips, the crime saga “Dick Tracy” (Chester Gould); and Al Capp’s hillbilly opus “Li’l Abner” (Within “Abner,” Capp actively spoofed his competition with a popular strip-within-a-strip called “Fearless Fosdick”). Prior to “Li’l Abner,” Capp had in fact ghosted Ham Fisher’s popular boxing saga “Joe Palooka” in 1933.

The cartoonists highlighted by the Skirball’s upcoming retrospective have each made their own impact on the comics industry. Since 1956, Jules Feiffer has proven that a comic could successfully double as an op-ed column and he has parlayed that gift for dialogue on display in his nationally syndicated “Feiffer” strip into scripts for the Mike Nichols-directed 1971 classic “Carnal Knowledge” and Robert Altman’s 1980 live-action film based on “Popeye the Sailor.”

Art Spiegelman was a marginal cult cartoonist at best when he hit paydirt with his Pulitzer Prize-winning “Maus” graphic novel and its sequel — his personal and highly acclaimed graphic novels grappling with his Auschwitz survivor father and, by extension, the Holocaust. In certain pretentious circles — where sophistication and eruditeness are equated with heavy subject matter — Spiegelman succeeded (even if it was for a minute) where thousands of other talented cartoonists have failed — elevating the medium to a level where it’s taken seriously. Unlike pop art’s Roy Lichtenstein, who made art out of comic book imagery which he turned into museum-caliber paintings, Spiegelman landed actual comic book pages into the museum with his Museum of Modern Art exhibition several years ago.

But by far the more important contribution Spiegelman has made to the medium (and more invisible to those outside the comics-collecting public) is his tenure as editor of the influential RAW anthologies in the early ’80s, which ushered in a new wave of cutting-edge cartoonists. RAW set the form-bending, post-modern template that has (for better and for worse) informed the course of today’s alternative cartoonists. The proof can be found in the dozens of copycat anthologies sitting on bookstore shelves, the scores of unfunny strips staining the pages of alternative newspapers everywhere, and in just about any title produced by high brow comic publishers like Fantagraphics (responsible for The Comics Journal and avant-garde comics like The Hernandez Brothers’ “Love and Rockets” and Daniel Clowes’ “Eightball”).

While some camps are eager to dismiss “Momma” for watering down a Jewish premise into broad, universal themes, one can not deny the widespread appeal of Lazarus’ work, (who preceded “Momma” with “Miss Peach,” a strip that enjoyed immense success in the 50s and 60s). Lazarus is a consummate gag cartoonist; a minimalist who has boiled his craft down to its naked essentials and can convey a joke swiftly with an economy of text and line. Love it or leave it, “Momma” succeeds in slipping a sly, sardonic mickey into the mild and milquetoast Shirley Temple that is today’s funnies pages.

“Sylvia” is another story. While some have never been wild about Nicole Hollander’s idiosyncratic strip, its eccentricity and homespun disregard for cookie-cutter formula is appreciated. Where something like, say, “Cathy,” flatlines into a broad, vaguely Jewish voice, “Sylvia” is much more specific — a loose, conversational strip that wears its Jewishness on its sleeve. There’s no mistaking Sylvia’s ethnicity — her character design is pure mah jongg maven. Most fascinating of all may be the story behind “Sylvia,” which appears in our newspapers today due to sheer force of will. Hollander self-syndicates her strip, bypassing conventional comic book distributors by approaching individual newspaper markets — something roundly unheard of in the ultra-competitive mainstream comic strip market.

But then again, overcoming obstacles — even in the funnies business — is part of what being Jewish is about. And, as the Skirball series will no doubt reinforce, Jewish-American-created comic strips have earned their keep in America’s pop culture heart.

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Art as History’s Witness

Leave a Comment / Entertainment, Old Stories / Jewish Journal

Art as History’s Witness

Paintings from Terezin are on exhibit at the Jewish Federation Building

By Diane Arieff Zaga, Arts Editor

Left: “Competitors for Potatoes” by Eli Leskley. “Many [paintings] … are like ghoulishly bright cartoons in which the subject matter is anything but funny.”

It was 1942 when 29-year-old Eli Leskley, a Czech-born Jew, was sent to Theresienstadt, a fortified ghetto 50 kilometers from Prague. As a visual artist, he was assigned to the sign workshop, where he had access to paper, paint, ink, pencils and other art supplies. With what must have been a combination of remarkable courage and an overpowering need to document what transpired there, Leskley secretly painted dozens of prison-life scenes, mostly with watercolors and ink on office-sized paper taken from the workshop.

In a world where possession of contraband cigarettes was a fatal offense, the risk of discovery for the artist was great. Leskley folded and hid his paintings — many of which were sharply satirical — in the nooks and crevices of the camp, sometimes first tearing off the incriminating text that accompanied them. Some, such as “The Three Kings of the Ghetto” and “Christian Jews are Arriving,” incorporated symbols and metaphor. Others, such as “Return After Disinfection” and “Trading Soup for Bread” were more journalistic in their approach to describing life in the “model” ghetto.

Nazi propagandists may have touted Terezin as a bucolic resort for cultural elites, even prettying it up with tablecloths, flowers and classical concerts for a Red Cross visit. Of course, Leskley and his fellow prisoners knew better. Immediately prior to and after that infamous visit — an elaborately staged sham depicted by the artist in several drawings — the SS shipped thousands of inmates to Auschwitz. Terezin was a closely guarded, disease-ridden place where death — whether from punishment, starvation or the dreaded transport east — was common.

As chance would have it, both Leskley and much of his work survived. After liberation, he and his wife, Elsa, recovered many of the hidden paintings, which they took with them when they emigrated from Europe to Israel.

Now, more than 50 years later, visitors to an exhibition at the Jewish Federation Building can get a look at these drawings, a bitter, detailed vision of camp life. Most of the pictures were done when Leskley was off duty and able to work unobserved in his third-floor bunk. Many of them are like ghoulishly bright cartoons in which the subject matter is anything but funny. The effect is powerful and immediate.

The exhibition is entitled “Terezin: Then and Now.” The “then” portion includes 70 of the works Leskley produced in Terezin, along with his later re-creations of the same. The latter are companion pieces — larger, more highly colored versions of the ghetto-produced originals, done by the artist during his first decade in Israel. The wall text that accompanies Leskley’s works provides an important context for them through its informative descriptions of the physical and sociological conditions that prevailed at Terezin.

A collection of miscellaneous camp artifacts is also on display. Included are postcards, permits for packages and, most heartbreaking, the “Nesharim flag,” a hand-embroidered pennant that was sewn to mark a soccer-tournament victory for the camp’s team of young boys.

The art in the “Now” portion of the show is the result of something altogether different. In 1993, 13 young painters who were members of a master class at the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts spent five days at the former site of the Terezin camp. The art students — none of whom were Jewish — hailed from countries as far-flung as Germany and Singapore. Their trip was made under the auspices of Project Gedenkdienst, which translates as Commemorative Service. The 4-year-old program, run out of the offices of Austria’s Interior Ministry, allows young Austrians to substitute 14 months of work at Holocaust memorials for their obligatory eight months of military service. One such intern, Bernhard Schneider, created the Terezin art project, which centered around the class’s trip to the ghetto memorial.

Judging by the haunted quality in many of these paintings, all of the students seem to have been deeply affected by their visit. Their project is described at greater length in the exhibition catalog, which includes brief commentary from Simon Wiesenthal, Vaclav Havel and the group’s professor, Anton Lehmden.

As for Leskley, his art was forged in far different circumstances. As with any other “Holocaust art,” it is difficult, and perhaps pointless, to judge his work by the rules of art criticism. The strength and importance of this show are not necessarily in its sophistication or subtlety of technique but in its power as visual testimony. This is not only art for art’s sake but art for the sake of history. In this capacity, Leskley is a cleareyed and vivid witness.

“Terezin: Then and Now,” at the Jewish Federation Building, 6505 Wilshire Blvd., Los Angeles. The exhibition is on display in the Pauline Hirsh Gallery, Museum Gallery, Boardroom and select corridors. For more information, call (213) 852-3242. The Federation will also host a performance of music and poetry from Terezin on June 29 at 4 p.m.

More About Terezin

Film Several short films about the Theresienstadt Ghetto have been made over the years, ranging from four-minute shorts to hour-long productions. They include a film of interviews conducted with survivors at an Israeli kibbutz and the infamous Nazi propaganda film “The Führer Grants the Jews a City.” The Jewish Federation Council of Greater Los Angeles has gathered videotapes of all the Terezin-themed films known to date and is screening them for visitors in its Museum Gallery on Sundays, at 2 p.m., and Thursdays, at 3 p.m. Call (213) 852-3242 for a complete program and confirmed schedule.

Books Here is a short list of recommended books about Terezin. While some are widely available elsewhere, all of them may be found in the Federation’s Martyrs’ Memorial Library and Jewish Community Library, or may be purchased from the museum book store. Call the number above for a more extensive bibliography.

* Bor, Josef, “The Terezin Requiem.” New York, Borzoi Books, Knopf, 1963. Translated from the Czech.

* De Silva, Cara, ed., “In Memory’s Kitchen.” New Jersey, Jason Aronson, 1996. Translated by Bianca Steiner Brown, forward by Michael Berenbaum.

* Karas, Joza, “Music in Terezin, 1941-1945.” Paperback edition, Stuyvesant, N.Y., Pendragon Press, 1990.

* Schwertfeger, Ruth, “Women of Theresienstadt: Voices from a Concentration Camp.” Oxford, England, Berg, 1989.

* Volavkova, Hana, ed., “I Never Saw Another Butterfly: Children’s Drawings and Poems from Terezin Concentration Camp, 1942-1944.” New York, Shocken Books and U.S. National Holocaust Museum, 1993. Expanded second edition with a forward by Chaim Potok and afterword by Vaclav Havel.

— D.A.Z.

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The Adoption Challenge

Leave a Comment / Old Stories / Naomi Pfefferman

Ellen Sloan met her husband-to-be, Will Hoffman, at an Ivy League cocktail party on Nov. 13, 1992. Sloan, then 36 and never married, attended the party because “I had heard it was a good place to meet smart guys,” she says, with a laugh.

She was a successful financial planner with an MBA from USC; he was a 44-year-old attorney with a law degree from the University of Pennsylvania. Each had postponed marriage and family in favor of education and career. So when they wed, in May 1994, “our biological clocks were ticking,” Sloan says. “Starting a family was our priority.”

But even after spending $30,000 on grueling infertility procedures, the children did not come. The determined, prospective parents then set their sights on adoption, though not without trepidation. “My friends had two American children placed with them, who were later taken away by the birth mothers,” Sloan says. “Emotionally, I knew we couldn’t handle that.”

Thus, the couple decided early on to adopt a foreign-born orphan; they chose China because that country consistently provides healthy babies in a timely fashion. The parents-to-be flew to the southeastern Chinese province of Guang Dong in October 1996. They made their way to the orphanage in Jiang Men, where, in the clean, spartan lobby, a petite 7-month-old baby, wearing oversized pink fuzzy pajamas, was placed in Ellen’s arms. Her name was Jiang Xiao Gui, or Little Precious from Jiang Men. At the Jewish baby-naming ceremony back in Santa Monica, the parents renamed her Katy, or Chaya in Hebrew, amid prayers in Chinese and Hebrew. Sloan is now co-chair of the Los Angeles branch of Families With Children From China.

Sloan and Hoffman are part of a new trend among Jewish and interfaith couples in Los Angeles and around the country: Facing a dearth of Caucasian infants available for adoption, families are choosing children of color, both here and abroad. Though there are no formal statistics about the number of cross-cultural adoptions, either in the Jewish or general communities, the phenomenon is real, sources say.

At the University of Judaism’s mikvah over the past three years, at least a dozen Chinese babies have been converted to Judaism, says Rabbi Edward Tenenbaum, chair of the Conservative movement’s local conversion beit din. The group, Pact, An Adoption Alliance, for adoptive families of children of color, has “a Jewish contingent of about 20 percent,” says co-founder Beth Hall. The Stephen S. Wise Temple Adoption Support Center, meanwhile, is starting two new groups, one for parents of foreign-born orphans, the other for parents of Asian and black children.

The cross-cultural adoption trend effectively began with the influx of Korean orphans into this country after the Korean War — though the numbers remained relatively small until the late-1980s, when the paucity of white infants forced prospective parents to look elsewhere.

Today, Jews transracially adopt at about the same rate as the general population, sources say. Dr. Howard Altstein, an adoption expert at the University of Maryland School of Social Work, recently conducted a groundbreaking study of 204 Jewish families. More than half of the adopted children were foreign-born, mostly from China, Korea and Latin America. Like Sloan and Hoffman, most of the parents were well-educated and upper-middle-class.

When Jewish couples adopt a child who is black or Asian, the baby is most often Chinese, paralleling the national trend, sources say. Both Jewish and non-Jewish Caucasians are more likely to select an Asian child than an African-American orphan, a response to the higher level of racism against blacks in society.

“The first thing a number of Jewish couples ask is, ‘Can we adopt a child from Israel?'” says Jindal, the intercountry adoption worker for Vista Del Mar Child and Family Services, a beneficiary agency of the Jewish Federation of Greater Los Angeles. Jindal informs the prospective parents that Israel does not allow foreign adoptions. A number also inquire about Eastern Europe, particularly Russia, because many Jewish families have roots there; many reconsider when they learn that the children are older and can in some cases suffer from attachment disorder or developmental delays because of the substandard orphanages. For many, China is more attractive than Latin America because the system is less expensive and less complicated.

Once the choice is made about where to adopt, and the $15,000 to $20,000 is paid for the process, come even more difficult questions of identity and acceptance. Color differences between parents and adopted children “brings up, time and again, that this is not your biological child,” says Dr. Lina Kaplan, who runs the Stephen S. Wise group for parents of foreign-born orphans.

“The racial difference is right there in your face, both literally and metaphorically. The concept of whether or not to disclose to your child that he or she is adopted is not even an issue. And you will have to deal, in an ongoing fashion, with the public, community response to your family.”

How do parents help the child forge a Jewish identity? The first step is converting him or her to Judaism, says Rabbi Elliot Dorff, of the University of Judaism. “Being Jewish is not a matter of race.”

According to Jewish law, male children must be ritually circumcised, and both genders immersed in the mikvah. Upon reaching bar or bat mitzvah age, the child may decline the conversion.

After the conversion, the challenge is in helping with the formation of a cohesive self-identity by incorporating elements of his or her birth culture into Jewish family life, experts say.

Prospective parents should begin educating themselves about their child’s culture before they even retain custody, Kaplan suggests. Read books about Latin American history, for example, or Chinese folk tales, he says. Live in a racially diverse area; hire a Latino pediatrician; find mentors who are the same race as your child, says Gail Steinberg, a Pact co-founder and the mother of three children of color.

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One Woman’s Crusade

Leave a Comment / Old Stories / Eric Silver

Getting to see Aida Suleiman is like playing chess with a temperamental computer. The first time I tried, she stood me up at the last minute because she had to deal with an emergency at a home for battered wives.

The 34-year-old Arab feminist is perpetually on the move: lobbying the parliamentary women’s rights committee; coaching Druze peasant women to stand up for themselves; lecturing Arab high school students on sexual equality; campaigning for minority rights.

Finally, we agreed to meet outside Mary’s Well, a Christian holy site being refurbished for the millennium in Nazareth, hometown to Joseph, Mary, Jesus and 56,000 Israeli Arab citizens. From there, we drove up a steep lane to her office in an old stone house overlooking the gray-green Galilean hills.

Suleiman, a buxom, restless ex-journalist with deep-set eyes and sunglasses perched on her dark, wayward hair, is busy 12 hours a day combating the routine abuse suffered by hundreds of her sisters in Israel’s Arab minority community. She worries that she is neglecting her own daughters, aged 10 and 7, but hopes they will understand.

Our interview is constantly interrupted by calls on her desk and mobile phones. She deals with them briskly, switching seamlessly from Arabic to Hebrew to English and back, often in the same sentence.

For the past four years, the Haifa University graduate has been director of Women Against Violence, a self-help coalition she founded with six other Arab feminists. “Women kept complaining about violence,” she says. “All kinds of violence — husbands beating wives, parents beating daughters.”

Increasingly, Suleiman is focusing on “family-honor” crimes. Last year, nine Israeli Arab women were recorded killed by fathers or brothers for “disgracing” their families. Activists believe many more such murders were never reported. So far this year, five family-honor victims are confirmed to have died.

“Men do not disgrace the family honor, whatever they do,” Suleiman says. “They can be thieves; they can be murderers; they can be drug addicts. The family will always support them. But if it is a woman, she is disgracing the family honor. It is the men who decide.”

A 22-year-old woman was killed by her brother because she complained to the police that her father was beating his younger children. The father was sent to prison. The brother cut her throat for bringing disgrace on them all.

A woman can’t always tell when she is offending and when she isn’t. Catch-22 rules. Any behavior by a woman that is not approved by the men of the family disgraces them — from refusing to marry the man the parents choose, all the way to having sexual relations outside marriage.

The state tends to tolerate the killings as a private affair of more interest to anthropologists than the law. The courts prefer to convict for manslaughter rather than murder. The killer gets 10 years and is released after seven.

Now the women are fighting back. An offshoot of Women Against Violence, Al Badil (Arabic for “alternative”), has set up two safe houses, one for battered women and children, another for young single women in distress. Since 1993, the first has sheltered 400 mothers and 550 children; the second, 485 women, aged 15 to 25. A women’s hot line, offering legal and psychological counseling 24 hours a day, has answered 333 calls in the past year alone.

Al Badil mobilizes local government social workers. The shelters take care of the women; the social workers talk to the families. As well as a haven, the shelters help the women come to terms with their traumas and chart a future.

“We don’t decide for her,” Suleiman says. “We make her aware of the options, the negative and positive sides of each solution.”

On the other side of the barricade, some men get more violent when the social workers come calling. Some begin to think again. Most of the single women go back to their families. So far, none has been killed. Of the married women, 80 percent return to their husbands. Some are abused even more than before.

Suleiman is haunted by the case last year of a 35-year-old mother of three, who stayed in a shelter for 12 months and divorced her husband. All the reports from the social workers suggested that she was no longer in danger. The woman was eager to restart her life.

“We advised her to go back gradually,” Suleiman says. “She visited her family first for a couple of hours, then a bit longer each time. Eventually, she came back and said she was sure she could go back without danger. She rented a house near her family. Two weeks later, she was killed.” Her ex-husband was questioned but has not been charged.

“She was a mature woman,” Suleiman says. “All the same, you start to blame yourself. She was a woman we knew for a whole year. She became part of us. You start to check. Did I do everything I could? Could we have saved her? Then you realize you have done your best. You give them the maximum, but you can’t guarantee.”

Walking around Nazareth, Suleiman is teased by Arab men, who accuse her of wearing the trousers in her middle-class household. Her husband, Jerys, is a building engineer. “Even if I do wear trousers,” she says, “he doesn’t wear skirts.” But male chauvinist hostility has never gone further.

“I haven’t been attacked,” she says. “I haven’t been threatened, or even abused for what I am doing. We are all women who are involved in our society, in politics, in education, in minority rights, in the peace struggle. We are respected for what we have done in other fields.”

Despite her political identification with the West Bank and Gaza Palestinians, Suleiman also acknowledges the impact of living in the Jewish state.

“Our experience,” she says, “is different from that of other Palestinians and the rest of the Arab world. We cannot deny that Israeli laws on issues of domestic violence are some of the most advanced in the world.

“That influences our lives, although these laws were not originally meant for us. The Jewish legislators were not worried about us, but we are benefiting from the laws, and we are using them.”

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Politics

OU Voters Guide

With congressional elections just three weeks away, the Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations of America is issuing its first-ever guide for voters around the country.

But unlike guides distributed by groups such as the Christian Coalition, the OU booklet will not rate incumbents and challengers; instead, the guide simply lays out the group’s top domestic and international issues.

“We’re not interested in providing scorecards,” said Nathan Diament, head of the group’s Institute for Public Affairs. “We see this as a basic tool for helping our constituents focus on the issues that are important to us — and for informing candidates about what issues our community thinks are critical.”

The guide indicates support for implementation of a resolution calling on the administration to move the U.S. Embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, and for congressional letters opposing U.S. pressure on the Netanyahu government.

The OU also gives the nod to candidates who support school voucher plans and a scheme for “education savings accounts” that will help parents pay for private-school tuition. Both are opposed by more liberal Jewish groups.

At least 8,000 copies of the guide will be distributed by synagogues around the country, and the document will be available on the OU’s web site.

Meanwhile, the Christian Coalition is taking a more aggressive approach to the upcoming congressional elections. The group’s “Blueprint for Victory” lays out a $2.7 million plan for voter registration and a “get-out-the-Christian vote” effort.

In 1996, the Federal Election Commission filed suit, charging that the group, despite its claim to be a nonpartisan educational organization, was operating as a partisan Republican advocate. At the center of that controversy was the group’s detailed voters guides. — James Besser

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A Committed Life

Leave a Comment / Old Stories / Judy Gruen

For as long as she can remember, Dr. Beth Karlan has been driven to answer one elusive question: what is the difference between a normal cell and a cancerous cell? While the question is common among medical researchers, Karlan’s progress in discovering at least a partial answer has been both heartening and a continuing stimulus to continue the search.

As the director of the Gilda Radner Ovarian Cancer Program at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, Karlan is heavily involved in both biological research and clinical care. The author of more than 100 research articles, abstracts, book chapters and reviews, Karlan began conducting ovarian cancer research at Cedars in 1987. By the time she was 34, in 1991, she had already been named as the director of the new Radner Program, named for comedienne Gilda Radner, who died of ovarian cancer and who was treated for the disease at Cedars. In addition, Karlan is also director of Cedars’ Division of Gynecologic Oncology and associate professor in the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology at the UCLA School of Medicine.

Ovarian cancer kills more women than all other gynecologic cancers combined, and the five-year survival rate has remained approximately 30 percent for more than 30 years — this despite major advances in surgical and chemotherapeutic techniques. Only one in four cases of ovarian cancer is diagnosed early enough to offer a good chance at being cured. Because the disease usually has no symptoms until it has metastasized throughout the abdomen, early diagnosis has been tough to achieve.

“We began the program with the hopes of finding better ways to diagnose this cancer at an earlier stage and to improve the chances for survival,” Karlan said. To that end, the program conducts laboratory research, clinical trials, educational symposia for the public and medical communities, screenings for women at increased risk due to family histories of cancer, and cutting-edge cancer care for patients. Although the program’s focus is not on the “Jewish link” to ovarian cancer, Karlan and her colleagues, including researchers at the University of Toronto, are involved in a project to try to determine just how often a particular gene — the BRCA1 gene — is abnormal in women of Ashkenazi Jewish descent who have already developed ovarian cancer. The carrier frequency of both the BRCA1 and BRCA2 gene is 10 times greater among Ashkenazi women than in the general population, Karlan said. This means that 2.5 percent of Jewish women carry a mutation of either gene, as opposed to a likelihood of only .25 percent in the general population. This does not mean that every woman who has the abnormal gene will develop ovarian cancer. “You can have the mutation but not the disease,” Karlan explained, “because the gene has what we call 91 incomplete penetrance. In other diseases, such as Tay-Sachs, the likelihood of getting the disease once the mutation is present is nearly 100 percent.”

There are, in fact, entire textbooks and medical conferences centered on the issue of “Jewish genetic diseases.” “The fact that Jews have remained a relatively confined segment of the population has allowed certain recessive genes to become expressed, such as the cancer genes,” said Karlan, who graduated magna cum laude from Harvard-Radcliffe College and earned her medical degree from Harvard Medical School. In cystic fibrosis, Karlan noted, one of the most common mutations of the gene responsible for the disease is frequently found among Ashkenazi Jews, while other mutations of the cystic fibrosis gene are found in the general population. Gaucher’s disease and APC, a form of colon cancer, also tend to strike Jews with a frequency out of proportion to their numbers. (Karlan noted that the issue of “Jewish genetic diseases” is extremely touchy to many in the Jewish community, who fear that any discussion of such a phenomenon can become fodder for anti-Semites making claims of Jewish genetic inferiority.)

Currently, Dr. Karlan is focusing her research on understanding the genetic alterations that define the pattern of growth and biology of ovarian cancer. Her laboratory has been performing pre-clinical studies on p53 gene therapy. P53 is a tumor suppresser gene, which is the most frequently altered gene involved in all human cancers. “We are actively enrolling women with refractory ovarian cancer to participate in a p53 gene therapy clinical trial at the same time that we are studying the effectiveness of this therapy in mice,” Karlan said.

Efforts to identify ways to reduce the risk of developing ovarian cancer remain at the forefront for Dr. Karlan and her colleagues. Much is already known. For example, women’s birth control and reproductive patterns clearly have an impact — but it’s less clear how. Dr. Karlan noted that studies have shown that birth control pills taken over a number of years before menopause significantly reduces the risk of developing ovarian and uterine cancers. “It’s a linear relationship,” Karlan said. “Each year a woman takes the pill, it further reduces her risk.” However, multiple pregnancies also reduce the risk of ovarian cancer, as well as bilateral tubal ligation, which reduces the ovarian cancer risk by two-thirds.

Karlan’s work at Cedars is only slightly more consuming than her commitments while not wearing a white lab coat. Married to Dr. Scott Karlan, a general surgeon at Cedars, Karlan is also a mother committed to spending time with her son, Matthew, and daughter, Jocelyn, going to little league games, rollerblading by the beach, planning her son’s bar mitzvah, and “spending time as a family.” Her day begins at 5 a.m., when she works out at home before packing lunches for her kids and signing notes for the backpacks. “It’s the only time I get a little peace to myself,” she said. “I use that time to process what needs to get done that day.”

Karlan, who was recently named “Mother of the Year” by Cedars-Sinai Medical Center’s Helping Hand of Los Angeles, also lectures at numerous professional meetings and has been a visiting professor at the Mayo Clinic, Johns Hopkins University, the MD Anderson Cancer Institute, Stanford and UCLA. “I pack in a lot of frequent flier miles, but can use them to enjoy vacations with my family,” Karlan said. In fact, last January Karlan, who was invited to speak at an international cancer symposium in Tel Aviv, took her husband, children and mother (who had never been to Israel) along for the trip.

Karlan would love to try to expand the number of scientists focusing on ovarian cancer at Cedars, “so that we can advance the field more quickly and reach out to more people. If we had even half the amount of money for ovarian cancer as we have for breast cancer, we could make much greater forward strides,” she said. But an even bigger goal is to enjoy all aspects of her life: “I want to be there for my kids, for my husband, and still maintain the level of excellence professionally that I have come t o expect from myself.”

And, one day, perhaps, to develop a cure for ovarian cancer — a silent and deadly killer.

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A School With a Mid-Eastern Flair

Leave a Comment / Old Stories / Beverly Gray

The Eretz Alliance School may be small, but its lineage is long and distinguished. Eretz Alliance, which occupies a brand-new campus in Tarzana, opened this fall with 36 students enrolled in its nursery school and kindergarten classes. Ultimately the $7 million building will house students through the fifth grade. An adjoining middle school is now on the drawing board.

One attraction of the new school is its relatively low tuition. The cost to kindergarten parents is $4,800, all-inclusive. No membership fees or building fund donations are required. This is partly because Eretz Alliance gets support from the Alliance Israelite Universelle, an international network that has championed Jewish education for almost 140 years.

The Alliance Israelite was founded in Paris in 1860. Its first goal was to provide educational opportunities for Jews suffering from political oppression. To this end, it established prestigious school systems throughout North Africa and the Middle East. At one time, a large number of Iran’s political and economic leaders, Jews and non-Jews alike, were products of Alliance schools. Today there are 65 Alliance schools in such far-flung locales as Morocco, Tunisia, Spain, Belgium, Israel and France. Alliance also helps underwrite both the Touro College of Jewish Studies in Moscow and the Anne Frank School in Budapest. Though Alliance schools have long existed in Canada, the Tarzana school is the first to surface in the United States.

The other partner in this venture is the Eretz Cultural Center, spiritual home base for many of L.A’s Iranian Jews. The center was founded in 1980 by Iranian Americans, who first built a synagogue, then a Hebrew school and an early childhood center. Finally, wanting a day school for their children, they dedicated part of their property to this purpose, erecting a 20,000 square foot state-of-the-art facility. The link with Alliance Israelite is a natural one, because many older members of the Iranian community attended Alliance schools in their homeland. One such is Dr. Joseph Hakimi who by day serves as the director of Judaic Studies and the Middle School at Sinai Akiba Academy.

Though most of its current students come from Iranian households, Eretz Alliance emphatically calls itself a “community school,” which welcomes Jewish children of all backgrounds. School Director Batsheva Spector, a veteran educator with advanced degrees to her credit, was born in Israel and reared in the United States. She concedes that there’s a Middle Eastern flavor to the school, because of its Iranian connection: “They definitely have a dream. This is their dream.”

But English is the language of choice for all teachers and staff. Instruction may make use of Alliance-supplied materials and methods, but it is based on California’s state educational frameworks. Spector also promises a strong focus on Israel, and Hebrew as a living language. In keeping with the Alliance tradition, many on the current board hope that one day upper-graders will have the option of studying French as well.

The board’s Executive Director Michael Rad is an example of Iranian enthusiasm for this project, and for Jewish education in general. When his own children attended first Kadima Academy and then Milken Community High School, Rad became active on the school board at each institution. But because he worships at the Eretz Cultural Center, he felt compelled to take on the burdens of the new school as well. Of himself and the other current board members, he says, “We call ourselves the pioneers, until the board is run by the parents.”

Ayala Farnoush was born in Iran, where her parents once attended Alliance schools. Now she’s the office manager at Eretz Alliance, and her son is a kindergartner. Farnoush speaks of her community’s pride in the pristine facility: “We were expecting it to be built for a couple of years. We were so excited.” Her son may not know that he’s making history, but he’s happy to be a student there. Says Farnoush, “Every morning he asks me if he goes to school today.”

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ADL’s ‘Dream’ Team Sweeps into L.A. Schools

Leave a Comment / Old Stories / Michael Aushenker

An Asian-American Fairfax High School student asks Ethiopian-born Taktu (Rachel) Yasu how long it took her to learn English. An African-American classmate wants to know if she encountered racism in her native Israel. Another African-American senior inquires if there are any Jews left in Ethiopia. After two weeks touring schools in the L.A. Unified School District and meeting students face to face, Yasu is used to these questions by now.

Yasu is one of eight students visiting from Israel under the auspices of the Anti-Defamation League’s (ADL) “Children of the Dream” program. The ADL views the Ethiopian-Israelis as the natural choice to increase understanding between Jews and other ethnic groups, particularly African-Americans.

“Children of the Dream” began in L.A. six years ago and has since expanded to cities nationwide, including Detroit and Washington D.C.

The visit to schools like Fairfax High is only Phase I of the ADL’s program. Phase II will send a cross-section of American students of various ethnicities to Israel to become better acquainted with the environment within which the Ethiopian-Israelis thrive, and Phase III will create a structure where local Jewish students will get together with local students of color on a monthly basis to work together on a community project. The aim is to create dialogue and defuse the impulses that create racial hatred and anti-Semitism.

Accompanying the Ethiopian students from class to class is Phyllis Gerably, assistant director of ADL’s Israel office in Jerusalem, who herself made aliyah years ago, from her native Santa Barbara to Israel, where she now lives with her family.

In Jeff Jolna’s British History honors class, the Fairfax High seniors listened with rapt attention as Yasu, 21, told the class about her personal ordeal, fleeing at age 5 with her family from her native Ethiopia — which refused to let its Jews leave the country — and walking for two months to Sudan, where Ethiopian Jews were housed in refugee camps. Yasu recounted how the Mossad, as part of Operation Moses, helped shuttle the Ethiopian Jews covertly into Europe — through Rome and Paris — before delivering them to safety in Israel.

The Fairfax students mingled with Yasu and her friend, 18-year-old Twodaj (Ahuva) Ayelin, as they swapped questions regarding tastes in music and entertainment. Several boys even invited them out to lunch and a basketball game.

“It’s sad that we don’t have a deeper connection with Africa… ” said Fairfax student Helena Perry, 16. “As African-Americans, we lack that advantage. I don’t even know which tribe I’m from,” said Perry, who believes that slavery helped disconnect black Americans from their African heritage.

An interesting by-product of the cultural exchange came about when Jolna encouraged his own students to introduce themselves. Through humor, Jolna, a gregarious New Yorker of Russian-Jewish origin, created an atmosphere of acceptance between his class and the visitors as he asked his predominantly minority students to share their cultural background with the Ethiopians. From this exercise, Yasu learned that many of the students sitting before her — at face value African-Americans and Latinos — were, in fact, multicultural in ethnicity. One boy’s parents originated from El Salvador and Turkey, while several African-American students were part Italian, Irish or Native American in heritage, and a Latina girl said she was half Hawaiian. When one of his students told the class that her parents each hailed from North and South Korea, Jolna jokingly inquired, “Do they get along?”

In addition to Fairfax High, the Ethiopian teens and twentysomethings made stops at eight other high schools: Venice, Bravo Magnet, Jefferson, L.A.C.E.S., Downtown Business Magnet, Kennedy, Jordan and Hamilton, where the visiting students sang with the high school’s gospel choir. Said Yasu of the L.A. students she has met over the last two weeks, “They are very curious… They all want to know how they treat us [in Israel]. That is the main question.”

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60th anniversary of Kristallnacht

Leave a Comment / Old Stories, United States / Arthur Stern

November 1998 will mark the 60th anniversary of Kristallnacht. Sixty years have passed since the beginning of one of human history’s darkest moments and even now we find ourselves still pursuing justice for the victims of the Holocaust.

Last week Gov. Pete Wilson signed into law Senate Bill 1530 authored by Tom Hayden (D-Santa Monica). The bill calls upon the California Department of Insurance to investigate and assist Holocaust survivors in obtaining unpaid insurance claims. Under this measure, insurers that refuse to pay valid claims would face the loss of their license to do business in California. We applaud Sen. Hayden for bringing this important issue before the people of California and the governor for seeing the importance of the issue.

SB 1530 is an important first step. Unfortunately, Gov. Wilson vetoed Assembly Bill 1715 (written by Wally Knox), legislation that would have required the establishment of an insurance policy registry by those insurance companies that handled the bulk of European insurance business between 1920 and 1945.

Additionally, AB 1715 would have revoked the license of any insurance company (or its subsidiary) operating in California if this essential information was not made publicly available. Because so many years have passed since the Holocaust and so many insurance policies were lost (or even discarded by heirs who believed them worthless), the creation of such a registry and its widespread availability is absolutely necessary for beneficiaries and their heirs to determine that their families indeed had obtained personal and/or business insurance policies that have remained unclaimed.

Here’s what we ask of insurance companies: Show us your lists of names of insurance policy holders and beneficiaries! Make them available on the Internet, publish them in the newspapers and demonstrate that your corporations believe in justice!

There are some people who know their parents or grandparents had insurance policies. Some may even have documentation. Sen. Hayden’s legislation will assist these people, but the vast majority of survivors and heirs, now 50 years after the war’s end, do not know if such policies even existed and, if so, who the beneficiaries were. The European insurance companies, which wrote those policies in pre-war years, do have that documentation. Now they can right a wrong by publishing the names of policyholders and beneficiaries!

In California, the Italian Generali Insurance Co. and the Equitable Insurance Co. (a subsidiary of the French AXA Insurance Co.) have been involved in lobbying the state Legislature in connection with wartime insurance policies. It is time for them and for others, such as the German Allianz A.G. (who operates in California via its Fireman’s Fund subsidiary), the Swiss Zurich, Baloise and Winterthur insurance companies to come clean and make public the names of those who had policies with them or their subsidiaries. Then justice will be served, the wrongs of the past made right. Insurance companies, show us your lists! Let justice prevail.

Arthur Stern is the chair of the Commission on World Jewry. Michael Hirschfeld is executive director of the Jewish Community Relations Committee.

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Monica Lewinsky is Jewish

Leave a Comment / Old Stories / Jewish Journal

The New York Times devoted 1,500 words last Sunday to a biographical profile of Monica Lewinsky, the 24-year-old woman who allegedly had an 18-month affair with President Clinton and who has been accused of lying about it under oath.

The New York Times’ reporters are nothing if not thorough. We learned just about everything about young Monica.

But nowhere was there a word indicating that she was Jewish.

Perhaps that is as it should be. There was no mention of Linda Tripp’s religious background or Kenneth W. Starr’s either. That Monica Lewinsky is Jewish clearly has no resonance in the mainstream media. The implication of that astonishing fact seems fairly straightforward: To be Jewish is simply to be American. Beyond the fringe world of Internet hate groups, most of which consist of marginal men and women in our society who have regaled fellow chat room users with references to her religion, there is no ethnic imputation, no stereotyped past or present. Monica Lewinsky, for many Americans, is just another young woman from a privileged, upper-middle-class family. Beverly Hills and Brentwood conjure up more associations than her Jewishness.

And that is the way it should be.

But, of course, we know that she is Jewish; that her parents are members of Sinai Temple; that she was a bat mitzvah there some 11 years ago; that there were relatively few strong affiliations with Jewish organizations here; but, nevertheless, a good number of friends who were Jewish, including her father’s attorney, William Ginsburg, a medical malpractice specialist who now represents her.

And so the question — so what? — hangs above us in some unstated way. To The New York Times and most of its readers, that she was Jewish remains largely beside the point. We are way past those days of the old anti-Semitic canard about the Jewish Temptress. And for that, if nothing else, we should be grateful.

But what about us, the Jewish community of Los Angeles? Are we, too, so thoroughly part and parcel of this wider America that her Jewishness is only an incidental sidebar, a curiosity that merely causes a blink of recognition and a guess at her genealogy?

We know that Fred Goldman turned to his fellow Jews in Los Angeles for support during the O.J. Simpson trial, after his son, Ron Goldman, was murdered along with Nicole Brown Simpson. Indeed, his havurah, a study group, became a rock that helped sustain him throughout those gray days of despair.

To be sure, there is no comparison between a father’s unrelieved grief in the face of his son’s killing and the charges that confront Lewinsky. But do we stand apart with most other media consumers, reading with fascination, and not a little incredulity, the next unfolding chapter of the story? Is Monica Lewinsky, for us, as she is for The New York Times, simply another young American woman wrapped in a startling series of tawdry episodes involving the president of the United States?

Or is she, by reason of birth and background, part of what we assume to be family, a member of the tribe? Someone who may or may not have acted foolishly and improperly, may or may not have broken the law, but someone we recognize, embarrassment aside, without exchanging a word?

And if so, without judging whether she behaved well or badly, within the bounds of the law or outside of it, do we offer a hand, a shoulder, a word, even a murmur of friendly encouragement? Do we extend just a show of personal acknowledgment and a joining of hands, a nod that says we all rise and fall together no matter what direction our journeys have taken us? — Gene Lichtenstein, Editor-in-Chief

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Jewish Journal

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Jewish Journal

October 22, 1998

To Life and Laughs!

Art as History’s Witness

The Adoption Challenge

One Woman’s Crusade

Politics

OU Voters Guide

A Committed Life

A School With a Mid-Eastern Flair

ADL’s ‘Dream’ Team Sweeps into L.A. Schools

60th anniversary of Kristallnacht

Monica Lewinsky is Jewish

Jewish Journal