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Jewish Journal

Connect. Inform. Inspire.

October 29, 1998

Notes From Friday Night

Leave a Comment / Old Stories, Singles /

Here’s a list of nicknames that friends have given various men in my life: Dead Dad Guy, Dead Sister Guy, Institutionalized Mother Man, Dead Dad Guy II, The Gambler and the ever-popular Mack Truck Collision Victim.

Well, everybody has a type.

Leave it to me. I’ll go to a party and find the one guy in the room who is horribly, horribly broken. If he’s deeply troubled, tragically wounded or has a “dark side” that threatens to eclipse the sun, I’ll end up with his phone number and a six-month stint in relationship hell.

Show me a birdie with a broken wing, and I’ll show you my next fractured romance.

I don’t know exactly how it happens or why, but I gather, from word of mouth and copious talk-show viewing, that it isn’t uncommon.

In my case, I knew it was bad when I’d meet someone and the first question friends would ask wouldn’t be, “What does he do?” or “Where is he from?” but, “What’s wrong with him?”

At one point, I was determined to break the pattern. I met a guy and was convinced he was the well-adjusted solution to my problem. He had the big three: job, car, apartment. He loved his parents. He had goals. He had a cat. A couple of months into the relationship, he broke down sobbing and admitted that he had seen his best friend die in a freak boating accident when he was in high school. The story was so sad, it had made several specialists in post-traumatic stress disorder break down crying.

I cried, too. Not that I was surprised. There had to be something, some deep sadness that had attracted me without my even knowing it.

To me, the most alluring thing about men who have suffered is that I think they know things I don’t. They’ve looked extreme sorrow and sometimes even death in the face and survived, and this always fascinates me. How does a psyche that’s been stretched beyond the normal range of human emotion snap back into a recognizable shape? I asked Dead Friend Guy this very question.

“It doesn’t,” he answered. “I only simulate normal human behavior.”

In his case, this process was greatly aided by daily use of drugs and alcohol, a habit that eventually drove me away and inspired me to question my own motives in choosing him.

Yes, darkness and sadness can be signs of depth and wisdom. Sometimes, however, darkness is just darkness, and sad people tend to make you feel how they feel, the way a drowning man tries to take down the lifeguard who comes to his rescue. The drowning man isn’t malicious; he just needs air.

Just recently, I ended yet another of my botched male rescue attempts. This man was funny, smart, excessively charming and a prime candidate for the full spectrum of 12-step programs. For months, my deluded thought process went a little something like this: I’m the only one who can cure him. I’ll ask him all the right questions about his painful childhood. I’ll hold his hand and listen to him the way no one else has. I’ll uncork all of his repressed pain, and he will finally be a happy person. My happy person. And he’ll be so grateful, he’ll never leave me.

It doesn’t take a genius to see the flaws in this logic. I can’t make anyone happy, and, even if I could, nothing ensures the permanence of attachment or of love.

The scariest part of all this is that I’m beginning to wonder if I attract broken people because like people find each other and I myself may be a little broken. Do broken people have some secret radar signal we send each other? Do we just smell sadness on each other and find it to be some irresistible pheromone disguised as love at first sight?

Whatever the reasons, it would clearly be an improvement to find myself with guys who get nicknames like, No Baggage Man, Good Childhood Guy, The King of Stability, Moderate Drinking Man, Charlie Fun or Old Reliable.

I guess it would be a little rude to insist that potential suitors fill out some sort of happiness-quotient questionnaire, or submit to Mike Tyson-style grilling from a team of psychiatrists.

The only answer that comes to me has that flaky feel of something you’d read on a bumper sticker that’s peeling off the back of an old van. Become the person you want to attract. If like people are drawn to each other, and I think they often are, the only way to find someone who won’t suck you into their vortex of need is to minimize your own sense of longing.

When I figure out how to do that, I’ll get back to you.

Teresa Strasser is a twentysomething contributing writer for The Jewish Journal.

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Shifting Sands

Leave a Comment / Old Stories /

I had only to hear Nettie Becker’s voice this past Tuesday to know how bad things look for Matt Fong.

For Jewish Republicans such as Becker, who had traveled in June with Fong to Israel on behalf of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), her party’s U.S. senatorial candidate had been a dream come true. He was defined as a moderate — pro-choice, pro-business. In his dark banker’s suits and flat, low-key voice, he is stylistically non-offensive, if not dull. Dullness was good, not only in comparison to fringe Republican right-wing candidate Darryl Issa, whom Fong defeated in the June primary, but also in contrast to Democratic incumbent Barbara Boxer, who rubs so many the wrong way.

Fong was good on Jewish issues; he was praised for standing up to the Swiss by pulling California money out of Swiss banks until they settled claims by Holocaust survivors and their heirs.

Only weeks before the Nov. 3 election, Becker’s faith in Fong seemed to be rewarded, as some polls showed a seven-point lead in the state treasurer’s favor.

But on Tuesday came despair. The Boxer-Fong race was turned on its head with published reports that Fong had given a $50,000 donation to the Rev. Lou Sheldon’s Pasadena-based Traditional Values Coalition, one of the nation’s most outspoken Christian rights action groups. Sheldon, a self-styled “lobbyist for God,” fights to end abortion and gay rights. The astounding news that Matt Fong had given money to Lou Sheldon (candidates, after all, usually receive embarrassing contributions) was immediately followed by the lame explanation from Fong’s staff that his contribution was designated for that part of the reverend’s program dealing with traditional (non-gay) marriages.

But the harm was done. Just days after the fatal shooting in Buffalo, N.Y., of an obstetrician who performs abortions, and just weeks after the murder of a young gay male in Laramie, Wyo., the political sands are shifting leftward. By Tuesday morning, you could feel support for Fong dry up. Polls showed Boxer with a narrow lead and Republican moderates moving toward Democratic gubernatorial candidate Gray Davis. Republicans such as Becker couldn’t hide their grief.

“This is not the Matt Fong I know,” said Becker, trying hard to resurrect the candidate. “I have to tell you, he takes brave stands. When he talks to non-Jewish groups, he talks about Israel. He doesn’t have to do that.”

But others were aghast.

“Ronald Reagan never looked like he was being controlled by the right wing,” one Republican observer told me. “He always looked like he controlled them.”

Before I tell you why I sympathize with Becker, I should say that I’m a big supporter of Barbara Boxer. I could no more vote against her than against my own mother. I can quibble about her style, her too-narrow agenda and her biggest offense — her inability to let people know how much she’s grown in her job (especially on Israel, for which she doesn’t get nearly enough credit) — but it doesn’t matter. I cringed with embarrassment when she bowed to demands by anti-feminists that she publicly criticize President Clinton, her relative through marriage, about Monica Lewinsky. As if Boxer should have played Cotton Mather!

But here’s the truth: She’s a pioneer, a figure of history, a woman breaking down the doors of a man’s club. It’s uncharted territory, and near impossible work. Gail Collins, writing in last Sunday’s New York Times Magazine, listed five reasons for women fading away from public office. These five — child-rearing, keeping bad male company, problems fund-raising, being too nice and too liberal — all amount to one thing: Women have yet to redefine the political game. I, for one, have to support those who are still in there, pitching.

My Republican friends tell me I’m nuts. They say, maybe rightly, that I can’t see the limitations in candidates I support. But there it is. In a time when politics has more waffles than Roscoe’s, and self-described liberals couldn’t raise a minyan, I’m in Boxer’s camp, for the old-fashioned reasons, because she believes as I do. Boxer is a liberal — pro-public schools, pro-patient rights against HMOs, and pro-choice without equivocation. The fact is she’s one of a kind, and one of my kind. And uncertain of herself as she sometimes acts, she’d never give her money to the Traditional Values Coalition. That counts for something.

Having said that, and recognizing that Fong can still bring off a victory next week, I still feel pain for my moderate Republican friends, who know that the battle is more than who gets the seat in the White House.

Over the past decade, Jews have resisted every effort to bring them into Republican ranks. Allen Hoffenblum, a Republican pollster, tells me that Jewish Republicans still comprise no more than 15 percent of the Jewish voting population, and those are mostly male and religiously Orthodox. The rest of us remain liberal, becoming Reagan Democrats, Reardon Democrats or Rudolph Giuliani Democrats for a time, but then returning home.

In one way, that’s too bad. Jewish activists during the New Deal shaped Democratic liberalism, leavening it with empathy and the universal principle of social justice. Jews now likewise have an equally compelling ideal to bring the Republican Party: the universal principle of tolerance. The greatest threat posed by the Christian right is their misguided notion that only they know about God, only they speak the language of spirit.

As moderate Jewish Republicans struggle to stabilize their party, I wish them well.

Marlene Adler Marks is senior columnist of The Jewish Journal. Her e-mail address is wmnsvoice@aol.com

Shifting Sands Read More »

NoisesWithin–Grumbles Without

Leave a Comment / Old Stories /

The question in regard to Lillian Hellman is not so much, What is her place in the American theater? Rather, it’s, Is she even entitled to one?

Since she burst into prominence in 1934 with “The Children’s Hour” and then consolidated her position five years later with “The Little Foxes,” she has had to counter criticisms about turning out “melodramas” disguised as social or political tracts. She has even been castigated for writing “well-made plays,” as if that was a particularly odious thing for a modern playwright to do.

Hellman, a hellcat who was one of the few leftist writers of the 1950s to tell the House Un-American Activities Committee where to stuff it, has always given as good as she got. Back in the early 1940s, she wrote: “I think the word melodrama, in our time, has come to be used in an almost illiterate manner. By definition, it is a violent, dramatic piece with a happy ending. But I think we can add that it uses its violence for no purpose, to point no moral, to say nothing, in say-nothing’s worst sense…. But when violence is actually the needed stuff of the work and comes toward a large enough end, it has been, and always will be, in the good writer’s field.”

If “The Little Foxes” needs any justification, Hellman’s 1942 credo persuasively provides it. The fact is the play is as shapely and contoured as a Queen Anne table and, in the present revival by A Noise Within, just as sturdy. Sound craftsmanship may not have the glamour one associates with the rough masterworks of Marlowe, Shakespeare and Jonson, but there is a lot to be said for a dramatist who knows how to assemble a mechanism, push a button and, without faltering or conking out, enable it to deftly circumambulate a stage for 2 1/2 hours.

Hellman is microscopically examining the venality of a Southern family concerned with making a killing in cotton manufacturing in Alabama. But the family and the geographical location are incidental. These are the shifts and lurches of American capitalism dedicated to acquiring profit and using whatever amoral means that may be necessary. The play draws a disturbing parallel between human amorality and the profit motive.

Its arch villainess, only because her hunger for luxury is somewhat greater than others in her family, is, of course, Regina Hubbard — the role that made Tallulah Bankhead famous and to which her coarse and guttural deviousness was perfectly suited. Deborah Strang has all of Tallulah’s Medea-like vindictiveness and is riveting throughout, as is the entire cast in what turns out to be one of A Noise Within’s most accomplished productions. The directors are Julia Rodriguez and Geoff Elliott.

Hellman, admittedly with Dashiell Hammett’s help and her own obsessive desire to make a mark, produced some high-grade pulp fiction for the stage. The question arising from her work (and it’s as relevant to Hammett’s work as it is to Hellman’s) is, Can cunningly assembled fabrications rise to the level of art? Whatever the answer to that question may be, there is no question they can rise to the level of first-class entertainment. Maybe that’s high enough.

The other item in A Noise Within’s current season is Shakespeare’s “Much Ado About Nothing.” I find that productions at A Noise Within invariably impose a double standard which does not pertain elsewhere. The company is a splendid incongruity in the purlieus of Los Angeles. In eight years, it has managed to maintain a consistently stimulating repertoire with a core group of actors, some of whom have grown — others who haven’t. The presence of a committed classical company in Glendale not only warms the cockles of one’s heart but fires one’s hopes that one day it may turn into something theatrically significant in addition to being simply culturally worthy.

But on occasion, a certain niggling candor forces me to tear the veil of optimistic aspiration from my eyes and confront the company’s efforts without illusion, and I experienced just such an impulse in regard to their “Much Ado.”

Sabin Epstein’s production is as straight as a billiard cue, although nothing like as smooth. It is Shakespeare ladled out from a large tureen in which particles of Molière, Jonson, Wycherley, Congreve, Dickens, Chekhov, Coward and Shaw bubblingly intermingle. A Noise Within provides an Automat of classics rather than servings of haute cuisine in a five-star restaurant — but, almost always, there is a blue-plate special that justifies the repast.

In “Much Ado,” it is Mark Bramhall’s grisly, long-in-the-tooth Benedict — a performance sparked by comic zest, playful mood swings and perfect control of Shakespearean text. Bramhall, being slightly superannuated for Benedict, suggests that his habitual raillery against marriage is beginning to wear thin in a man who is secretly tiring of the bachelor life. And there is also Alan Blumenfeld’s Dogberry, the pompous, malapropian constable whose moral vigilance could easily qualify him as Kenneth Starr’s sergeant-at-arms. Blumenfeld is like an uninhibited “stand-up” doing his act in the middle of the reading room of the British Museum. It is a performance that swings and soars with comic hyperbole in a context which otherwise seems to militate against effusiveness. But surrounding these two distinctive performances is a charmless and remorselessly sardonic Beatrice from Jenna Cole, a gormless and wooden Leanato from Tim Halligan, and half a dozen other portrayals that float like debris around a fragile life raft which contains only a few lucky survivors.

So again, one pads down the winding stairwells of the monumental Masonic mausoleum that houses A Noise Within, thankful they are there, persevering, prospering, their heart in the right place and their goals diligently pursued, but silently wishing that they forsake the beaten path and come to realize that a classic is not a free ride into the realms of high art, but a treacherous summit which has to be reached with skill, insight and ingenuity as well as high ambition.

Charles Marowitz is theater critic for The Jewish Journal

NoisesWithin–Grumbles Without Read More »

Jews, Propositions and Voting Attrition

Leave a Comment / Old Stories /

For the first time in several elections, there are no state propositions on the November ballot that are clearly rousing Jewish communal organizations. Yet, at an open forum last week at Stephen S. Wise Temple, close to 200 people showed up to listen to experts discuss the initiatives. Several audience members took notes and marked their sample ballots as they listened to the speakers. The most controversial ballot measures — Proposition 5 (tribal gaming), Proposition 8 (public schools, class-reduction size), Proposition 9 (electric utilities) and Proposition 10 (tobacco surcharges for early childhood development programs) — featured pro and con discussions.

Co-sponsored by the American Jewish Congress, the Anti-Defamation League, the Jewish Community Relations Committee of the Jewish Federation, the University of Judaism and Stephen S. Wise, the discussion led to no major fireworks, as have previous election forums, when Propositions 209, 227 and 187 galvanized the Jewish community with the hot-button issues of affirmative action, bilingual education and immigration.

“The beauty of having something like a [Proposition] 209 or a 187 on the ballot was that it got people out to vote,” said Tamar Galatzan, ADL Western States associate counsel. Although Jews have traditionally turned out to vote in higher numbers than many other groups, Galatzan said she worries about voter attrition, even in the Jewish community. “I have a friend that I went to law school with who has never registered to vote,” she said. “Yet, if you look at what has been in the headlines in the last few months — hate crimes, religious freedom issues — you realize the importance of voting.”

The growing disaffection of Jewish voters doesn’t seem to extend to the elderly, however. Howard Celnik, activities director at the Jewish Home for the Aging in Reseda, estimates that two-thirds of JHA’s 700 residents, whose average age is 90, vote. Those who don’t often are incapable of doing so, he said. The voting booths at JHA are on the premises and are open to voters in surrounding neighborhoods. “They have flags and balloons that say, ‘Did you vote today?'” Celnik said. “It’s a very exciting time for [JHA residents] because they have the ability to demonstrate control over their environment. They take voting very seriously here.”

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Senior Years Bring Special Legal Concerns

Leave a Comment / Old Stories /

When Julian Diamond was a boy, seltzer water was the traditional dinner drink at his family’s table. The bubbly stuff came in old-fashioned glass bottles (called siphons), complete with chrome-plated pewter nozzle tops, inner glass tubes and decorative labels with distributors’ names etched into the glass.

“Seltzer always seemed to be there,” says the 73-year-old owner of North Hollywood’s A-1 Seltzer & Beverage Co. “We drank it all the time. Jewish holidays or not, it didn’t make a difference.”

Today, Diamond supplies “quite a few” Fairfax-area customers and Jewish families throughout L.A. and adjacent areas with the clear liquid that’s been called “Jewish wine” in those wonderful, nostalgic bottles that resemble miniature fire extinguishers.

They come six to a wooden crate, and Diamond — a slight man with silver hair — still does the heavy lifting himself.

He arrives from his bottling plant by Volvo station wagon or Dodge van (depending on the day’s delivery load), picks up the empties and may even stop to chat — a touch of personal service that apparently has not fizzled out.

Diamond has delivery help from four other employees, including son-in-law Kevin Tomlinson. And Diamond’s wife, Ethel, has served as secretary and bookkeeper for the last 47 years. They are the third and fourth generations of a family home-delivery business that started in England and moved to Los Angeles just after the turn of the century.

In the first half of the 20th century, Diamond remembers, there were at least 500 bottling companies in the area. The 1920s and 1930s were the industry’s heyday. By mid-century, however, just a handful of seltzer bottling companies remained here, including Arrowhead, Sparkletts and Shasta.

Why the slump in sales? Diamond cites the introduction of carbon dioxide tanks in bars, which eliminated the need for siphon bottles. And in the 1950s disposable bottles and mixed sodas became popular.

Of course, seltzer-drinking never really went out of style. “Almost everyone from Brooklyn and the East Coast knows about seltzer — especially the Jewish people,” says Diamond. “And they all seem to know what an egg cream is.”

It is, indeed, a New York delicacy that does not call for eggs or cream. You simply mix chocolate syrup with milk in a glass, squirt in cold seltzer and stir quickly to create a foamy head.

Diamond is busiest during the Jewish holidays, and mainly at Passover when, he says, you need a little burp during the seder. Since seltzer is purified carbonated water — salt-, sugar- and calorie-free — Diamond figures it is the key to long life: His mother is still a seltzer drinker at 104.

Senior Years Bring Special Legal Concerns Read More »

Politics

Leave a Comment / Old Stories /

The mud being slung in the San Fernando Valley’s most closely watched congressional race has a distinctive blue-and-white tinge. Their positions on issues from abortion to Social Security having failed to ignite much interest, the candidates for the 24th District seat have instead turned to scuffling over Israel.

Democratic incumbent Brad Sherman successfully hit a nerve with his accusation that challenger Randy Hoffman’s Magellan Systems has somehow endangered Israeli security by selling navigational equipment to Saudi Arabia.

Hoffman, the Republican candidate, was both a founder and the president of Magellan Systems Corporation, which manufacturers hand-held satellite communications equipment. During Operation Desert Storm, the U.S. military used a product known as the Magellan GPS (Global Positioning Satellite) to help coordinate maneuvers. Gen. Colin Powell, in a letter written to Hoffman in August (more than seven years after the Gulf War), lauded GPS receivers as “one of the most important pieces of equipment in the war.”

But Sherman, a member of the House International Relations Committee, contends that Magellan’s sale of its equipment (including nonmilitary GPS) to Saudi Arabia does nothing to prevent the Saudis from turning around and selling that same equipment to the terrorists who threaten Israel.

“I guess they’re relying on the Zionists in Saudi Arabia to resist that,” Sherman sarcastically remarked.

Hoffman’s camp has, in turn, accused the congressman of essentially playing the race card in this heavily Jewish district. Hoffman and his campaign manager, Todd Slosek, note that there is a significant difference between the military GPS made available to U.S. servicemen and the commercial GPS sold in Saudi Arabia — the United States has full control over the military satellite.

“He’s trying to scare the Jewish community with these outlandish, unsubstantiated allegations,” said Slosek. “Magellan could not sell to Sudan or Syria; they’re terrorist nations. Do you think [Israeli Internal Security Minister] Avigdor Kahalani would have met with Randy if he thought Randy’s company was selling to Israel’s enemies?”

The meeting between Kahalani and Hoffman took place during the latter’s June “fact-finding mission” to Israel.

The two congressional candidates, who are vying to represent a district that encompasses an area from Thousand Oaks to Sherman Oaks, began sparring in an almost friendly manner back in June. Hoffman entered the race with serious credentials: a Harvard MBA, a CEO of his own high-tech company at 30, he won the endorsements of Mayor Richard Riordan and Sheriff Sherman Block.

But their war of words has continued to escalate as the election neared.

On reproductive rights, both candidates say they are pro-choice. Hoffman, however, sets certain limits: no late-term abortions unless the mother’s life is at risk; no public funding for family-planning programs overseas that include funding abortions; no funding of abortions for military women or even for the poor unless the mother’s health is at risk and she is truly destitute.

These exemptions prompted Sherman to label his opponent as “not pro-choice but multiple choice.” Sherman voted against the recent congressional bill that prohibits late-term abortions, because the bill contained no exceptions for women whose lives or reproductive health were at risk.

On another hot-button issue, Social Security, the candidates differ radically. Sherman believes that maintaining a strong economy will bolster the present system over the long run. He also spoke of having a national dialogue on the subject, enlisting the help of the American Association of Retired Persons and the Concord Coalition, a nonpartisan balanced-budget group, as well as giving trustees more leeway to properly invest Social Security funds.

Hoffman, on the other hand, wants to allow private citizens to set aside 10 percent of their earnings in tax-exempt passbook savings accounts. He bristles when asked if that is not the same thing as “privatizing” Social Security, an unpopular idea among seniors.

“Privatizing has become a term for investing Social Security funds in the stock market and putting those funds at risk,” Hoffman said. “Why would I want to risk money that people like my mother and 33 million others rely on?”

As for education, Hoffman said that he favors allowing parents to set up “educational savings accounts,” which could help those with children in any type of school, public or private. However, Sherman’s campaign manager, Peter Loge, said that ESAs are no more than another term for vouchers, which Sherman opposes because it would decimate funding for already beleaguered public schools.

But beyond these issues, Sherman believes it is the Monica Lewinsky matter that will influence voters on election day.

“It’s made this election center on whether to drag [the impeachment process] out for another year or whether to wrap it up,” he said. “If the Republican Party can pick up 20 seats around the country like mine, they will view it as a mandate to destroy the president slowly.

“I want to emphasize that it’s nobody’s fault but his – both the behavior he engaged in and how he dissembled about it. But just when we in Congress start to get angry, we remember he’s done some very good things for this country.”

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Bibi’s Betrayal

Leave a Comment / Old Stories /

“Binyamin Netanyahu is no longer the leader of the national camp,” Aharon Domb, general secretary of the West Bank and Gaza Jewish settlers’ council, said this week, with all the finality of a judge pronouncing sentence.

Arutz Sheva, the settlers’ pirate radio station, called on army officers to refuse to implement the 13-percent redeployment agreed at the Wye Plantation. They reminded their listeners that Col. Eli Geva, commander of an armored brigade in the 1982 Lebanon War, resigned when he was ordered to shell Beirut.

The Chabad movement, which threw its weight decisively behind Netanyahu in the final week of the 1996 election campaign with the slogan “Netanyahu is good for the Jews,” disowned him. “The prime minister has lost his right to be a trusted representative of the public,” its Israeli rabbis announced.

In a four-column advertisement on the front page of the Jerusalem Post, nine far-right groups thundered at Netanyahu and Foreign Minister Ariel Sharon: “You are responsible for this shameful agreement. We voted for you and we put you in power. We will remember. We won’t forget. And we won’t forgive.”

The 160,000 West Bank settlers are not buying Netanyahu’s pitch that his heart is with them, that he “fought like a lion” for every inch of the sacred homeland, or that he “plugged the holes in the Swiss cheese” that was the Oslo agreement.

They don’t trust the Palestinians to fulfill their security commitments or to annul the clauses in their national charter that call for the destruction of the Jewish state. What they see is that 18 of their communities will now be surrounded by Palestinian-controlled territory and that Israel’s security services will no longer be able to hunt down terrorists in areas being transferred from partial to full self-rule.

They are incensed by a barely noticed phrase in the Wye agreement that pledges Israel to fight “terrorism” by Jews against Arabs, just as Yasser Arafat will fight “terrorism” by Arabs against Jews.

“For the past 25 years,” Yisrael Medad, a veteran of the Shilo settlement north of Ramallah, said, “PLO propaganda has branded Israel a terrorist state. Arafat waged war against us by defining the settlers as terrorists. Now Bibi is allowing him to claim that we are indeed terrorists and, thus, are a legitimate target.”

Aharon Domb, who has a reputation as a moderate, accused the prime minister of “treason,” but amended it to “surrender” when he was reminded that it sounded too much like the language which preceded Yitzhak Rabin’s assassination three years ago.

“We are worshiping the golden calf,” he said. “In our generation, this idol goes by the name of ‘peace.’ My colleagues and I will strive to undermine this horrible thing which is crowned the ‘peace agreement,’ by all possible democratic means.”

The settlers’ council resolved to bring down the government. Yet, when Domb was asked to name their candidate to fight Netanyahu, he hedged. The settlers are furious. They believe that the prime minister led them up the garden path. But they are frustrated because they recognize that they cannot mobilize the kind of mass support that rallied against the 1993 Oslo accord.

A poll published in Yediot Aharonot on Sunday found 74 percent of Israelis welcoming the Wye deal as a “good” agreement. Only 18 percent thought it was “not good.” The weekend pray-ins to block West Bank road junctions soon petered out into nothing more than a photo opportunity.

“If you get 50 people out,” said Eve Harow, a Los Angeles-born founder of the militant Women in Green, “you’ve done well. The passion isn’t there. People feel there’s no point any more. With Rabin and Peres, we had a replacement. Now what are we going to do? I don’t see any viable right-wing leadership. Bibi will win again. Even if the left doesn’t vote for him, the center will. We felt he was one of ours, but he’s cut us off at the knees.”

For all that, Harow, a member of the local council in Efrat, between Bethlehem and Hebron, was determined to fight on.

“As a religious person,” she said, “I have to show faith that something better is around the corner. I have to stick it out, but it’s difficult.

“I have seven children, and I see devastating times ahead. The Palestinians are still committed to the destruction of all of Israel. I see no way around a war, not now that they’re going to have 40 percent of the West Bank.”

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Revisionist ‘History’

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Tony Kaye’s “American History X” was supposed to establish him as “the greatest living filmmaker,” he told The Jewish Journal. Instead, the movie, a drama about the redemption of a neo-Nazi (Edward Norton), was “raped” by New Line Cinema; by “narcissistic, dilettante” Norton, who destroyed “X” in the editing room; and by the Directors Guild, which refused to allow Kaye his pseudonym-of-choice in the credits, Humpty Dumpty. What else was a director to do but take out full-page ads in the Hollywood trades, cryptically insulting his enemies by quoting John Lennon and Abraham Lincoln?

First-time filmmaker Kaye, a brilliant commercial director and eccentric “Hype Artist,” isn’t mollified that the critics are hailing “American History X” as very, very good. “Good is the enemy of great,” insists the director, who also served as cinematographer and camera operator on the film.

During a telephone interview, Kaye, 46, revealed that he was videotaping the phone as part of his upcoming documentary, which trashes New Line. He said that he arrived to a now-legendary meeting with the studio with a rabbi, a priest and a Tibetan Buddhist monk in tow.

But just as you are getting ready to write Kaye off as a kook, he waxes eloquent about “American History X” and why he wanted to make the movie in the first place.

Kaye’s grandmother committed suicide, by walking into the sea, on the eve of the Holocaust in Danzig, he says. His father, only 12 at the time, then fled to England. There, Tony would grow up in an observant Jewish home.

Years later, Tony Kaye was denounced in a British fascist publication as one of the Jews who supposedly controls the media. He certainly has received lots of media attention for headline-grabbing Hype Art pieces such as “Roger,” a homeless man he hired to walk around museums. Another Hype Art piece, “Jewish Car for Sale,” was meant to explore the response to racism; “American History X” was to continue the exploration.

As research, an intimidated Kaye frequented skinhead clubs, hung out with the leader of the “Oi!” band Extreme Hatred, and chatted up racists wearing steel-toed Dr. Martens. His camera was always glued to his face. He also repeatedly interviewed Tom Metzger, the leader of White Aryan Resistance (“A nice chap, though I’m sure Hitler seemed nice, too”), who spoke intelligently about the skinhead movement in offices decorated with swastikas and Fuhrer portraits.

It didn’t help that Kaye arrived to the interviews in the “Jewish Car,” a Lincoln Towncar with four cell phones, a fax and license plates that read, “JEWISH.” “I parked the car around the corner,” the director sheepishly admits. “I was really scared.”

Kaye, who has a shaven pate, razor-intense eyes and a pronounced stutter, says he was willing to take the risk because he wanted “American History X” to be so good that it would turn around the occasional skinhead. He doesn’t think the current film is powerful enough to do so, though many reviewers — and star Norton — disagree.

In an interview last weekend, Norton told The Journal that he took less than half his usual pay to secure the “X” role of Derek, the skinhead leader who transforms in prison and tries to save his brother (Edward Furlong) from the white power movement.

“Unfortunately, Tony has let himself get more wrapped up in the melodrama of Tony Kaye, the ‘Artist’ with a capital A, than the grounded job of making a film,” said Norton, who appeared to have lost all the muscle bulk (and the swastika tattoos) he carried for “American History X.” “I think Tony is victimizing himself with his professional immaturity. The irony is, the film he delivered to New Line, which is essentially the film everyone is seeing…has received such a tremendous response. We set out to provoke thoughtful discussion about certain issues, and Tony has succeeded in doing that, whether or not he wants to claim it for himself.”

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Marital Bliss

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A story is recorded in the inspiring biography about the late Jerusalem rabbi Aryeh Levin, “A Tzaddik in Our Times.”

One of the rabbi’s students was about to be married when he came to Reb Aryeh and asked: “How should I behave toward my wife? How should I treat her?” Reb Aryeh looked at him in wonder and said: “How can you ask a question like that? A wife is like your own self. You treat her as you treat yourself.” And, indeed, when his own wife, Hannah, felt pains, he went with her to Dr. Nahum Kook and told him, “My wife’s foot is hurting us.”

This same idea is found in the Torah, where it permeates the life of the first patriarchal couple, Abraham and Sarah. It is not surprising, therefore, that Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz wrote in his work, “Biblical Images,” “Abraham and Sarah were not just a ‘married couple’ but a team, two people working in harmony.”

We might wonder, however, how Abraham and Sarah transformed their marriage from “married couple” into a harmonious “team.” Perhaps the answer can be found in a puzzling incident. The Torah relates that soon after arriving in Canaan, Abraham and Sarah had to leave for Egypt because of a sudden bitter famine. As they approached the border of Egypt, Abraham commented to Sarah, “Behold, I now realize that you are a woman of beautiful appearance” (Genesis 12:11).

The commentaries question how Abraham could have made such a statement, as if he were seeing Sarah for the first time, when, in fact, the two had already been married for many years. Rashi, the classical commentator, likewise was perplexed, offering us not one but three answers to the problem. His last answer, labeled “the simple explanation,” seems most intriguing. Rashi suggests that Abraham always had appreciated Sarah’s beauty. He was not an ascetic, oblivious to physical reality, but, instead, recognized the true extent of her attractiveness. His unexpected remark was made, therefore, because he also realized that she would be attractive to the Egyptians, and he had to protect her. In worrying about her welfare, he demonstrated that her problem wasn’t simply her own; rather, it was their problem.

With this in mind, we can comprehend the next words in the text, which state that Abraham said to Sarah, “Please say, therefore, that you are my sister so that it will go well with me for your sake, and my life will be spared because of you” (Genesis 12:13). How, we must wonder, could Abraham ever have jeopardized Sarah’s life in order to save his own? Abraham, however, is really saying that he and Sarah are one. By saving himself, he likewise would save Sarah, and, therefore, he is totally justified in offering this plan of action.

A number of years ago, when the late sage Rabbi Shlomo Zalman Auerbach of Israel lost his wife after 50 years of marriage, he eulogized her and declared: “It is customary to request forgiveness from the deceased. However, I have nothing to ask forgiveness for. During the course of our relationship, never did anything occur that would require either of us to ask the other’s forgiveness. Each of us led our life in accordance with the Shulchan Arukh, the Code of Jewish Law.”

When I heard this story, I wondered how anyone could make such a statement! But then I realized that Rabbi and Mrs. Auerbach had models whom they followed. They had an image of how to treat each other, and they followed that image in every aspect of their relationship.

The image of biblical figures such as Abraham and Sarah, and of contemporaries such as Rabbi and Mrs. Levin and Rabbi and Mrs. Auerbach, can inspire all of us if we consider what our spouses really mean to us. Our mission in life is to emulate these models to the best of our ability, because when we do, we achieve real marital bliss.

Rabbi Elazar Muskin is rabbi of Young Israel of Century City.

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