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Jewish Journal

Connect. Inform. Inspire.

November 26, 1998

Art Power

Leave a Comment / Education, Entertainment, Kids & Teens, Old Stories /

Art may soothe the savage beast, as the saying goes, but can it get through to teen-agers?

Artist Ed Massey believes it can. Massey and his brother, Bernie, both of Beverly Hills, are helping spearhead an award-winning program that uses art to bring social responsibility and self-expression to students throughout California.

Their YouTHink program, currently used in more than 30 school districts, has been acclaimed as an innovative way to use art as a vehicle for discussing social issues, including Jewish identity and tikkun olam.

YouTHink was co-developed by the Masseys’ Center for American Studies and Culture and Esther Netter, executive director of My Jewish Discovery Place Children’s Museum of Jewish Community Centers of Greater Los Angeles. Originally offered to all school-age groups by teachers and instructors, it is now being taught in corporate and community settings as well.

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Honey, I Want a Divorce

Leave a Comment / Old Stories /

On Nov. 27, Jeff Brain, president of Valley VOTE, will be a very happy man. That’s the day he gets to turn in the more than 195,000 signatures that will start the ball rolling on the San Fernando Valley seceding from the city of Los Angeles.

Rumblings of separatism have been heard across the San Fernando Valley for more than two decades. But it took a special vote by the state legislature in 1996 to allow Valley VOTE (Voters Organized Toward Empowerment) to begin their petition drive. The issue took off like wild fire, as evinced by the impressive number of signatures (only 150,000 were required for passage) and the battles being waged in the editorial pages of the area’s two major newspapers.

The petition itself will not ensure secession — only a vote from all registered voters in the city of Los Angeles could do that. But it will make possible a thorough study of secession, which will allow voters to know the full impact of such an enormous move.

“The most important thing for the people of Los Angeles to realize is that the impact on the city must be revenue neutral,” said Brain. “When I tell people on the other side of the hill about this, they typically react, ‘Well then let the Valley secede. Who cares?'”

For example, if the Valley normally contributes $30 million in taxes toward the police force, but only gets $25 million in services from the LAPD, the Valley would still have to fork over $5 million to the city every year after the break-up to maintain revenue neutrality. (“Like an alimony payment,” Brain explains.)

Then why secede? Because the money the Valley retains — like that $25 million — will be under the Valley’s control, said Brain. And if the new Valley’s city council decides it wants to allocate more for neighborhood watch programs or to put more officers on gang patrols, the decision is theirs to make.

One of the primary reasons Valley residents support secession is the desire to improve local schools. Many hold the perception that when extra money trickles down from Sacramento to L.A., it never quite reaches the Valley side of Mulholland Drive. They may have a point: of the district’s more than 800 schools, only 200 are located in the San Fernando Valley area, according to Pat Spencer, communications officer for LAUSD, despite the fact that the population is about equally split.

But Mayor Richard Riordan, who strongly opposes secession, said restructuring the LAUSD is a completely separate issue.

“Breaking up the Valley has nothing to do with breaking up the school district,” Riordan said. “Even now, 12 percent of the LAUSD is outside the city limits. And breaking up the Valley into one big school district would be stupid. If you wanted to improve matters, you should break it up into units where each superintendent would have a direct relationship with every school and not have to go through six layers of bureaucracy.”

While there is no organized opposition to compete with Valley VOTE, some major Los Angeles players, like the mayor, have expressed concern that the average citizen sees secession as a “quick fix” and does not understand how complicated it will actually be. Indeed, Riordan said, the process could take as long as a decade to implement, since its passage would undoubtedly be followed by numerous lawsuits against the Valley seceding.

“While I support the right of the people to vote their conscience, I think on the whole the loss of the Valley would be detrimental to the city of Los Angeles,” Riordan said. “It only takes a modicum of common sense to see that it cannot be a zero-sum game, because the city has a disproportionately higher number of poor who do not pay as much in taxes and who need more help.”

There are also contentions from numerous sources — including a scathing editorial in the Nov. 21 Los Angeles Times — that the petition itself was misrepresented as merely opting to study the issue of secession, rather than initiating secession itself.

“Valley VOTE is being disingenuous in the way it presented the petition,” said Matt Cahn, director of the Center for Southern California Studies at California State University Northridge. “This is a policy request; by signing the petition, voters are requesting secession and if it turns out to be fiscally viable it will go to a full vote of the entire area.”

Cahn said he believed the secession movement was as much about the perceived image of the Valley as about whether the Valley gets its fair share of city services.

“The Valley has an authentic gripe — being the stepchild municipality has been hard to swallow,” he said. “The Valley is the Rodney Dangerfield of Los Angeles, but part of the problem is that we don’t take ourselves seriously.

“Here at CSUN we’ve had to take a hard look at our constituency and realize, while we’re not UCLA, there are areas where we are actually better. It would be nice if people in the Valley could feel like that instead of comparing themselves unfavorably.”

Cahn’s department has already completed one study on the effects of secession, concentrating on race and class differences; they are currently seeking funding to perform a second study that would examine the political impact of the Valley breaking off from the city.

“The report will look at which constituencies will win and which will lose,” he said. “For example, Latinos in the Northeast Valley have a strong coalition with Latino communities on the other side of the hill, while the Valley’s Jewish community is networked into the Westside. This landscape is bound to change dramatically by cutting one-third out of the pie.”

Should Valley secession succeed, however, Jewish leaders said the break-up should have little effect on the continuity of city-funded services to the Jewish community.

“It’s still a little early on, but I would not anticipate that any new governmental body in the Valley would want to do anything to reduce services that are so highly regarded,” said Michael Hirschfeld, executive director of Jewish Community Relations for the Jewish Federation of Greater Los Angeles.

Brain agreed, saying that Jewish and other social agencies could even get a boost from the new Valley city.

“What we’re seeing in L.A. city is that the economy of scale is being overcome by the efficiency — or rather inefficiency — of size,” Brain said. “There are 87 cities in the surrounding area. All have lower business taxes. We think we can provide the same kinds of better quality services and lower taxes if the Valley becomes independent.”

Honey, I Want a Divorce Read More »

An Afternoon at the Motion Picture Retirement Home

Leave a Comment / Old Stories /

They were actors, set designers, writers, studio secretaries, directors. Now they’re residents of the Motion Picture Retirement Home, a placid place tucked into a sleepy Woodland Hills neighborhood and dense with stories of Hollywood past.

I pull up a chair in the home’s sun-drenched dining room, designed to look like a studio cantina, and settle in to talk to some of the home’s residents. I want to hear their stories, but as someone just starting out here, I guess I also want to know if it was worth it.

“It’s been a tough road,” says Hal Riddle, 79. “I never encourage anyone to go into this business. There’s lots of rejection and heartbreak. I didn’t become a star. I didn’t become Elvis.”

Riddle, who moved into the home four years ago and has no family, knew he wanted to be an actor when he was 9 years old, sitting in a Kentucky movie house and watching a silent film.

“There was something up there that mesmerized me,” he explains.

After serving in the Navy, Riddle won a scholarship to the renowned Neighborhood Playhouse in New York. Every year, he performed in summer stock theater, rooming with Jack Lemmon in the summer of 1948, a friend with whom he still keeps in touch.

Riddle and pal James Dean, a fellow struggling actor, would earn pocket money testing stunts for “Beat the Clock,” a 1950s game show that paid the actors $5 a day.

At age 30, Riddle finally got a break, appearing in “Mr. Roberts” on Broadway. More roles followed, including his film debut in “The Cop Hater.” A few years later, he was invited to Hollywood to act in “Onion Head” with Andy Griffith. He has never left, appearing in scores of TV shows, commercials, soap operas and 16 films. Three of his films starred Elvis Presley.

The actor, a dapper man with perfectly wavy gray hair, applied to the Motion Picture Retirement Home when he had some health problems.

“I was still working, but I could see down the road. I needed security,” he says. “Here, we’re retired, but we’re still with our peers, we’re still connected to what we’ve done our whole lives. We’re still wanted.”

Pausing for a moment he adds: “I dreamed of money and fame, but look how Elvis ended up and where I am. I’m happy. How many people retire and live in a beautiful place like this?”

And how many people have stories like his to look back on, I think to myself. A gold watch and a pension are one thing, hanging out with James Dean is another.

Across the table is Pearl Smith, 85, who was a studio secretary for 33 years, working with such notables as Edith Head and Gloria Swanson. She was even responsible for renaming Bernard Schwartz, who her boss wanted to call Edwin Curtis. No, she said, he’s a Tony.

“We’re one family here. We speak the same language,” says Smith, her expressive eyebrows lifting. Like many of the residents, Smith’s career was the focus of her life. She never married.

Recently, Director Steven Spielberg visited the retirement home, and recognizing the former secretary, he ran over and gave Smith a huge hug. A photo of the two now hangs at the home, along with pictures of donors like George Burns and residents like Fayard Nicholas, of the tapping Nicholas Brothers.

Since it opened 58 years ago, the Motion Picture Retirement Home has been supported by donations from more than 1 million industry professionals. “We take care of our own,” is the home’s official motto.

According to Carol Pfannkuche, public affairs director at the home, those who succeed financially are happy to give back because they see their success as part of a team effort. Aaron Spelling, she tells me, stopped by and went out of his way to greet a former “Love Boat” script supervisor now living at the home.

Other than just shelter, the home offers support groups, holiday programs (including a Passover seder) and group dining to provide the socialization that is so often missing from the lives of seniors. An Alzheimer’s unit, courtesy of Kirk Douglas, provides a “wandering garden,” a safe place for the disoriented to enjoy the outdoors. A hospital cares for the very sick and dying.

I’m a little nervous to discuss the ‘D’ word, but I go ahead and ask Pfannkuche what happens to those who can’t afford funerals.

“We provide burial services,” she says. “Those who support the home would not want one of their own going without a proper burial.”

Driving away, some of my worries about the future are soothed, others are picked raw. My mind is back in time with James Dean and Gloria Swanson, as my Datsun wanders in search of the 101. Still, I know where I am, and now I know there’s a place I wouldn’t mind ending up.

Now it’s just the next 50 years I have to worry about.

Teresa Strasser is a 20-something who writes for the Jewish Journal

An Afternoon at the Motion Picture Retirement Home Read More »

Climbing Jacob’s Ladder

Leave a Comment / Old Stories, Torah /

When I was 16, my family picked up and moved from Santa Monica, where I had been born and raised, to Sacramento. The move came on the heels of the best and most exciting year of my life. My first year of high school had been an amazing whirl of new and old friends, educational successes and the thrill of being a drummer in the Santa Monica High School marching band. We played pep rallies and football games, and at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion as part of the dedication of the new Music Center. This exciting, whirlwind year ended with the privilege of appearing live at the Hollywood Bowl as featured drummer with the “Samohi Serenaders,” the school’s award-winning stage band.

The very next morning, I was stuffed into the car and left everything and everyone I had known (outside my immediate family). It was the most painful and difficult thing I had ever done in my life. I will never forget the feeling of dread as I rode for hour after hour, contemplating my unknown future — a strange school with no friends in a strange city devoid of anything familiar or recognizable. It was not a pretty picture, and I was miserable.

I had also just celebrated my Confirmation that month, and I felt as though I were leaving behind every familiar Jewish landmark and relationship as well. It ended up being that Confirmation class experience gave me a strategy for coping with the turmoil of this traumatic life change. I was only dimly aware of how powerful this tool would be at the time, even as I almost unconsciously began using it to help transform my rapidly changing life.

You see, the most important thing I did on that fateful ride from Santa Monica to Sacramento was dream. Even as I wallowed in self-pity over the cruelty of fate and the capriciousness of parental decisions, I began to use my own dreams to fashion a vision of the future that I wanted to create. But it wasn’t merely my dreams that turned my life around; it was the dreams and dramas of the Torah as well.

Confirmation was the first time I had ever taken Judaism very seriously. I remember realizing that it might be the last time I would ever be exposed to a “formal” Jewish education, and, feeling so pathetically illiterate as a Jew, I sat down and began to read and think about the Torah in a way differently than I had ever read it before.

All of a sudden, those stories seemed to be about my ancestors. It began to feel as if I was actually reading about my own ancient relatives, as if somehow my own life was intimately connected to their lives in an as-yet-undiscovered way. And as I read on and identified with them, my own life lost some of its fear. I began to think: “If they could do it, so can I. If they could survive dislocation, sibling rivalry, frustration, disappointment, death of loved ones and family turmoil, so can I.”

So, on that ride from Santa Monica to Sacramento, I thought about Jacob and how he must have felt as he ran for his life, leaving behind the security of his family and friends and striking out into the unknown. I actually remember thinking about Jacob’s dream of the ladder stretching from earth to heaven, with the angels going up and down. If Jacob, in spite of his fear and inner turmoil, could conjure up the comfort of angels and a comforting voice that assured him everything would turn out OK, then I was determined to do the same thing. And I did.

I thought of Jacob’s dream, and I concentrated on my own. The angels went up and down, not down and up. So it’s up to us to recognize the angels who are here on Earth, those messengers who can bring us comfort and support and inspiration and love first, and then, perhaps, they will find their echo in the heavens as well. I know it worked for me.

Steven Carr Reuben is senior rabbi of Kehillat Israel, the Reconstructionist Congregation of Pacific Palisades.

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Hostile Intimidation

Leave a Comment / Old Stories /

Every Saturday afternoon, spot on 5 p.m., through the summer and into autumn, a squad of Jerusalem police clip-clopped on horseback past my house on Rehov Hanevi’im, the Street of the Prophets. Half an hour later, equally as prompt, dozens of fervently-Orthodox Jews in their Sabbath best gathered outside the Fresco fish restaurant, 100 yards up the road, and rioted till sunset.

The men, bearded patriarchs in long, black, tailored silk coats and cartwheel fur hats, sweltered piously in the hottest summer on record (up to 93 F). Their wives, wigged for modesty, sweated in floral prints with long sleeves and hems below the knee.

Small boys in black knickerbockers and velvet yarmulkes twirled their sidecurls and shrilled, “Shabbes! Shabbes!” whenever a car approached. Their elders took up the raucous refrain like a chorus from “Fiddler on the Roof.”

Sometimes they surged forward, jeering and leering. One week I watched an Arab family, visiting a nearby maternity hospital, turn tail and flee down the hill to the sanctuary of the Old City. If the Jews were having an Intifada, they wanted no part of it.

The police, with batons drawn, forced the rioters back — and were cursed as “Nazis” for their pains. Things turned doubly ugly when secular Israelis drove up and down with their radios blaring heavy metal in counter-demonstration.

The religious Jews were protesting that the Fresco, a cool oasis in a restored 19th-century mansion, served non-kosher Mediterranean seafood, and on the day of rest too. The restaurant, truth be told, is tucked between Prophets Street and Jaffa Road, the main drag of Jewish West Jerusalem. It interferes with no one’s Sabbath.

The rioters’ real aim was to close Prophets Street, which runs near, but not through, the Orthodox ghetto of Mea She’arim, on Saturdays. In a holy city where logic-chopping has been raised to an art form, such distinctions dictate how the rest of us live.

Last year the rioters forced the town council to close another main road, Bar-Ilan, on Saturdays. Bar-Ilan has been engulfed over the past decade by the synagogues and seminaries of an expanding Haredi suburb. They are less likely to succeed in Prophets Street, where the only ecclesiastical buildings are the Anglican School, a French convent and the Swedish Protestant Theological Institute.

The zealots campaign with total conviction and no scruples. Yeshiva students harass the Fresco throughout the week. On Fridays, they call 20 or 30 times, always from public phone boxes so that they can’t be traced. They book tables, then don’t turn up.

“They threaten to burn us down,” said Udi Me’iri, the 26-year-old chef and part-owner. “They threaten to smash up the place. They yell that cancer will consume us, that we’ll be struck by lightning.”

When Nurit Rosenberg, a 25-year-old waitress, answers the phone she is cursed as a whore. “One Friday,” she said, “I just cried.” Occasionally, the students come to the door and spit on her. They call her a shiksa. “It’s frustrating,” she confided, “it’s insulting, it’s humiliating.”

The Fresco is one of dozens of Jerusalem restaurants open on the Sabbath. In the Russian Compound, just as close to Mea She’arim, discos rock till dawn. According to a survey published last spring by the Committee to Uphold the Sabbath in Jerusalem, the number of businesses open on Friday night and Saturday has doubled in the past three years.

They logged 43 restaurants, 13 coffee shops, 26 pubs, nine night clubs, three cinemas, eight kiosks, six fast-food and takeaway shops, and 10 taxi ranks. A local paper counted another 30 eateries the committee missed. You have to book if you want to be sure of a table.

Jerusalem is at once a holy city and a capital city, the home of countless yeshivas, but also of the Knesset and the civil service, the Supreme Court, the Hebrew University and the Bezalel Academy of Art. Jewish tradition speaks of two Jerusalems, the heavenly Jerusalem and the earthly Jerusalem. Despite the aggravation, they find ways to coexist.

Thousands of art-lovers troop every Saturday through the Israel Museum. The box office is closed in deference to the Sabbath, but they buy tickets from a “private” van in the parking lot. Jerusalem is home to Betar, the national soccer champions. Its Sephardi fans are celebrated for going to synagogue on Saturday morning and the match in the afternoon.

Yet the zealots, about 30 percent of Jerusalem’s 400,000 Jews, are slicing away at the resistance. Demography is on their side. More than 50 percent of this year’s primary school intake was Orthodox.

Fresco’s gentle chef, Udi Me’iri, is pessimistic: “They take one street after another. A lot of my friends are moving to Tel-Aviv. We tried to negotiate with a more respectable delegation that came to see us. But they wanted us either to go kosher or close. The gap is so wide that I don’t think it can be bridged.”

In the Street of the Prophets, that has a ring of self-fulfillment.

Hostile Intimidation Read More »

The Idiot Box

Leave a Comment / Old Stories, Opinion /

One of the most common complaints against television journalism is that it has deteriorated into entertainment. The cause, as always, is attributed to the rating wars — the need to capture the greatest number of viewers by the most dramatic and theatrical means possible.

Entertainment is also the rabid preoccupation of the afternoon talk shows. Here, the source of entertainment is the real or contrived conflicts of husbands, wives, families, gays, whores, strippers, cross-dressers et al. A never-ending procession of victims or aggressors who parade their aberrations before us every day.

Conversation on television also obeys the rules of entertainment. Radio phone-in shows may suffer fools gladly, but television insists that “talk” be amusing, unpredictable, extreme, raunchy, outrageous and, wherever possible, accompanied by lively pantomime. Bill Maher’s “Politically Incorrect” on ABC is perhaps the most glaring example of just how low standards for public discourse have sunk in America.

This is the show on which a smarmy, eye-popping Maher introduces some serious subject for discussion and then, tosses it out to a handful of presumably literate guests. The “serious topic” is clearly a ruse to enable Maher’s panel to invent one-liners and comic conceits. Anyone presuming to deal seriously with an issue is immediately construed as a “party pooper,” both by the audience and the panel, and relegated to the background. If you can’t be funny or outrageous, the audience seems to be saying, Don’t interfere with those who can!

Rigidly observing this lame format, chat never rises to the level of controversy and the danger of climbing into a ring where combatants actually butt heads on a real issue is successfully avoided.

Maher, as Master of the Revels, grins and smirks and gives the appearance of a chicken just about to lay an egg. Being arid and cerebral rather than fanciful and inspired, he lacks the essential qualities of the comedian, but, then, it is clear from his demeanor that he sees himself not so much as a comic but as a droll pundit — a more mischievous version of Will Rogers who, instead of twirling a lasso, manipulates the low expectations of his undiscriminating public.

In a recent outing, Arianna Huffington, that walking monument to naked careerism, dealt with the issue, “How is conservatism reconcilable with the Moslem-like morality of the Republican Party,” by simply reiterating her leitmotif that Clinton should be forced to resign. Since no one had alluded to Susan MacDougal and Huffington had her quip (“Everyone is treating her like Joan of Arkansas”) already prepared, she arbitrarily inserted it into the discussion. A gay journalist and a confused Mark Hamill crossed swords with the right-wing opposition (a Bible-thumping Rev. Louis Sheldon in consort with Huffington) and, the topic was successfully drowned in banter and horseplay, even to the point of irritating emcee Maher who tried in vain to resuscitate it. Within the space of about 20 minutes, weighty subjects such as conservatism, impeachment and same-sex marriages were blithely dispatched without one new insight penetrating the collective fog.

Watching the show over a period of weeks, listening to bathos disguised as profundity and levity aspiring to wit, one cannot fail to reach the conclusion that everyone on this talk show, whether they be actors, writers, singers, journalists or politicians, suffers from foot-in-mouth disease. Cliché is embraced as a life-jacket might be passionately clutched to the bosom of a drowning man.

Many moons ago, when the British Broadcasting Corporation was not quite the offspring of commercial television that it has now become, there was a program called “That Was the Week that Was,” hosted by David Frost; this is when Frost was merely an insolent commoner and not yet a pinstriped Knight of the Realm who conversed only with heads-of-state. For all its unevenness, the show was a genuine attempt to tackle relevant social and political issues, and guests were encouraged to discuss those issues with gravity where appropriate, or gravity leavened with wit where that was called for. Entertainment was derived from the fact that selected first-class minds were spontaneously grappling with pertinent issues, and the collision of divergent views expressed by articulate and educated men and women was sufficient either to divert or compel the attention of the viewing public.

Sparkling conversation by intellectually agile minds is one of the most entertaining things I know. But fudged conversation by celebrities who use issues merely to score comic points or ingratiate themselves with a studio audience is equivalent to a dinner party where, instead of exchanging ideas, people dwindle into telling jokes to one another. Those are the kind of dinner parties where conversation turns even the best cuisine rancid.

Programs such as “Politically Incorrect,” anchored by smart-alecky stand-ups who equate being well-informed with being intellectually resourceful, are part of the unremitting plague that has blighted American culture. They go hand-in-hand with the general shrinkage of educational standards, which pollsters announce with such depressing regularity, and language’s nose dive into illiteracy. So long as we find ourselves “entertained” by mindlessness and regaled by bathos, the idiot box will be an accurate euphemism for our electronic pastime.

Charles Marowitz is theater critic for The Jewish Journal

The Idiot Box Read More »

A Talk About Death

Leave a Comment / Old Stories, Womans Voice /

Leon Wieseltier did not want to talk about death. I, of course, wanted to talk about nothing else.

“It’s over for me,” the tall, lanky, white-haired professorial-looking author told me of his new book, “Kaddish.” “I did it already.”

Well, not quite. “Kaddish” is a 588-page journal of the year Wieseltier spent mourning his father. Poignant, written-from-within grief, coated in a radiant love of Jewish learning that belies the author’s anti-mysticism, this is a book that finds in a people’s tragic history the spiritual foundation for our own shattered time.

“But I believe in God and you don’t!” Wieseltier recalls a friend telling him, as a way of challenging what he calls his year of “soldierly discipline” with prayer and text. He answers, “I’m not praying and studying entirely for filial reasons. I am not only a son.”

A Talk About Death Read More »

The Power of Israel

Leave a Comment / Israel, Old Stories, Other Voices /

My name is Sarah — actually, it used to be Sarah, but that was before I went to Israel and experienced the best summer of my life. A summer that changed me forever.

In one summer, I made new friends, saw sights that brought history alive, learned more Hebrew and Judaica than textbooks had ever provided, and discovered a sense of home — and of myself.

One of the great things about taking a teen trip to Israel is that you meet and travel with kids of your own age, learn together, share adventures and experiences and form friendships.

The truth is I’d never been away from home for more than two weeks, and that was for vacations with family members and friends on the East Coast. I was apprehensive about going to Israel — so far away and different — and without the anchor of friends or family members.

The Power of Israel Read More »

This is Your Life

Leave a Comment / Community, Old Stories /

Very few people understand your world better than Neal Gabler. His new book, “Life: The Movie” (Knopf, $25) provides a fascinating historical and cultural analysis of something you have probably long sensed to be true: our world is being taken over by entertainment.

From O.J. and Lewinsky to Tonya Harding and Joey Buttafuocco, from presidential elections to nightly news, titillation has supplanted seriousness, amusement has trumped gravity. News itself has been usurped by a succession of what Gabler calls, “lifies,” stories like Lewinsky and Harding that are part real-life, part media-generated movie.

Pop culture has been toying with Gabler’s Big Idea for a while now in movies like “The Truman Show” and “Pleasantville,” but Gabler provides amply researched perspective. He chronicles the bloody moment in American history when art and entertainment irrevocably clashed and diverged, then zeroes in on how the creation of the motion picture ultimately brought the conventions of cinematic storytelling to real life. Gabler, author of the seminal, “An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood,” is well-aware of the irony here: struggling European immigrants created fictions on celluloid of an idealized American life. The fictions have been so powerful that we have re-created real life in the image of these stories.

In an interview with The Journal from his Amagansett, N.Y., home, Gabler the critic is quick to analyze, yet slower to despise these developments. He watches as his two young daughters eagerly create their lives to reflect what they see on-screen — the clothes, the lingo — and he himself is an avid consumer of this year’s Lifie, the Lewinsky story. “I’m addicted to it,” he says. “It’s good entertainment.”

But what concerns him is the flight from seriousness in what passes for political coverage, and the fact that entertainment is a juggernaut that just will ultimately dominate every world culture. “Entertainment is so inexorably and irresistible a form that virtually nothing can withstand it,” he says. The appeal is so powerful, he posits, it might even be biological.

“Maybe it’s a Darwinian adaptation, maybe it helps us survive.”

Gabler will speak at the Skirball Cultural Center, Tuesday, Dec. 1 at 7:30 p.m. For tickets, call (323) 660-8587.

This is Your Life Read More »

Berkeley Comes to Israel

Leave a Comment / Old Stories /

At the beginning of this week, dozens of Israeli university students entered the third week of their hunger strike. The country’s 175,000 university students entered the second month of their strike from classes. Along the way students have been clubbed and even horsewhipped by police. They’ve blocked major intersections in Jerusalem, Tel Aviv and Haifa. At times some have even demonstrated in the nude.

All this is utterly unheard of for Israeli college students. They are among the most conservative, grade-obsessed of any in the world. The late-60s passed them by. Thirty years later they are either becoming fiercely idealistic, or are just a little over-infatuated with themselves.

The strike started out with one goal — to cut tuition in half. But after the students got clubbed and beaten for many days running — and still went into the streets by the thousands and began the hunger strike — the protest clearly became something much bigger than a fight for lower tuition.

The focal point of the protest is the hunger strikers’ tent opposite the prime minister’s residence in Jerusalem. Students pace the sidewalks, shouting into bullhorns to win support from passing motorists, many of whom honk in solidarity. The strikers’ camaraderie, strengthened by taking police beatings together, is enviable. Israeli adults, including any number of politicians and public figures, come by the tent to encourage the students.

The atmosphere is heady. The watchword in the protest now is “social revolution.” The students have attracted tremendous sympathy, mainly from the middle-class left and center.

The government seems to be split over the strike. Communications Minister Limor Livnat, who began her political career as a right-wing activist at Tel Aviv University, warned that the students have “a political agenda,” meaning that they are anti-government, which the strikers deny.

Some other ministers have voiced their support for the protest. Prime Minister Netanyahu — as if he doesn’t have enough disunity in his ranks — scolded the ministers who had shown a soft spot for the students, because, he said, this weakened the government’s “solid front” against them.

But Netanyahu hasn’t been leading at the front; that task has been taken up by Finance Minister Ya’acov Ne’eman, a 60ish, multimillionaire attorney and stern economic conservative. With his thick glasses and ponderous way of talking, he is the perfect foil for the students.

Of late, Netanyahu has stepped into the negotiations, and is trying to portray himself as understanding the students’ cause, and ready to work out reforms. He had scheduled all-night negotiations with the students Sunday night, but the strike leaders didn’t show, saying the finance ministry had been spreading “disinformation” about the protest.

The Histadrut National Union has entered into a covenant. The union pledged that if a settlement of the student strike was not reached, the union would hold a nationwide general strike on Wednesday in solidarity. Student leaders, for their part, have promised to back the union in its battles for job security and better wages and conditions for workers.

Yet while the protest has captured Israeli hearts, a cool-headed examination of the strike’s goals yields a number of doubts, and these have been expressed by critics from the left, right and center.

The key criticism is that tuition in Israel’s seven public universities currently runs below $2,500 a year — possibly the best bargain in this country. With many public school pupils going home as early as noon, with public school fees costing parents hundreds of dollars a year per pupil, should university tuition now be cut in half?

“In Israel there are at least 10 groups which a ‘social revolution’ should aid before it aids university students: residents of poor, backwater towns; single-parent families; low-ranking public servants; marginalized new immigrants; the unemployed; high school drop-outs, and the list goes on,” wrote Ma’ariv columnist Rafi Mann, who accused the students of wrapping a pocketbook-oriented strike in “pseudo-ideology.”

When Israeli university students are compared with their counterparts in the West, it is always pointed out that the Israelis have it much rougher. Because of the army, they usually don’t start university until they’re 21 or older. Many male students do weeks of army reserve duty every year. Many are married, and many work to pay their way through.

There is no tradition of “campus life” in Israel, partly because in such a small country, nobody “goes away” to college. Students stay close to their parents and friends. Unlike the West, Israelis do not “come of age” at college; they do that in the army. By the time they get to college, they’re already basically grown up. They don’t do crazy things and they don’t sacrifice themselves and risk their necks for any causes.

Until now. Maybe this is the underlying reason why the student strikers have won so many hearts (if fewer minds): they’re providing a glimpse of what Israel could be like if it were a “normal” country where young people didn’t have to spend so much time carrying guns. A place where they had the freedom to be young.

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