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Jewish Journal

Connect. Inform. Inspire.

February 25, 1999

Going After Generation Next

Leave a Comment / Entertainment, Film, Old Stories /

There’s a bit of dialogue that Ben Younger wrote for his first film, “Boiler Room,” that sums up the slippery morality of the hotshot young stockbrokers whose world he examines:

“My father once asked me where my work ethic is. Looking back now, I realized that wasn’t the problem. I had a very strong work ethic. My problem was my ethics at work.”

“Boiler rooms” are semi-legitimate brokerage houses located primarily on Long Island, New York, whose workaholic salesmen sell IPO (initial public offering) stock the way telemarketers hawk tools or kitchen knives.

They promise big profits and are convincing enough to reel in a sizable clientele.

The only problem is that it’s a con. The IPOs are from bogus companies, which means the only people making a profit are traders (who earn exorbitantly high commissions) and their bosses, who rig the stock sales so that they reap a healthy profit at their clients’ expense.

Recruitment

Younger first became aware of this subculture when he attended a boiler room recruitment seminar. He was excited, but for very different reasons than the eager young men around him.

“As soon as I walked into this room,” he says, “it was unbelievable. I knew immediately that this was going to be the first film I was going to write.”

He had the determination to back up that instinct. Even though he’s only 27, Ben Younger already has several careers behind him. With a political science degree from the City College of New York, he went right into the political arena. After working on Assemblyman Alan Hevesi’s successful bid to become comptroller of New York City, Younger worked for him as a senior policy analyst. He then served as campaign manager for Democrat Melinda Katz, who won a seat on the New York State Assembly.

Then Younger decided it was time to pursue an even more elusive profession: filmmaking. He supported himself working as a film crew technician, while he spent a year interviewing boiler room brokers.

“Normally I would have to [go undercover] to get into the world,” Younger explains, “but these guys were so eager to tell me what they did — how illegal it was — that I didn’t have to play that game. They wanted the notoriety.”

What he discovered was a new breed of salesmen who target specific groups (like midwestern doctors) with the seductive promise of instant wealth courtesy of the raging bull market.

“At least when [salesmen] went door-to-door,” he says, “if you were selling Bibles or vacuum cleaners, you had to look somebody in the eye. What’s interesting about these guys is they can screw somebody out of 50 grand [anonymously].”

Exploitation

The dynamics of the boiler room have levels of exploitation. While it functions as a concerted effort to part suckers from their money, the brokers are often not fully conscious of the complexity of the scam.

That’s the case with the film’s Jewish main character, Seth Davis (Giovanni Ribisi), a 19-year-old college dropout who is intelligent, but easily seduced by the lure of quick money. Seth’s moral dilemma is played out through his relationship with his father (Ron Rifkin), a judge who maintains a yawning emotional distance. “My generation has an extended emotional capacity,” says Younger, “compared to — at least in my community — our eastern European parents. A lot of my friends were brought up by hard-core eastern European Jews. So I explored that juxtaposition, of my generation and the one prior. Seth is trying to make a connection, but his father responds to him by saying, ‘Our relationship? Am I your girlfriend?’ That’s a typical answer you would find in that world.”

Ben Younger, who grew up in Staten Island and Brooklyn (where he still lives), was raised in a modern Orthodox family. His mother is a psychotherapist and father, who died seven years ago, was a CPA.

“I’m an Ashkenazi Jew,” he explains, “the firstborn Younger in this country. My father was born in Budapest. I went to yeshiva my whole life, went to synagogue every week, kept kosher.”

Seth and his boiler room mentor are both Jewish, and Younger infused their feelings of isolation with his own memories.

Going After Generation Next Read More »

The Jewish Community’s ‘Utility Infielder’

Leave a Comment / Entertainment, Film, Old Stories /

The world was a different place for writer-director Pavel Vogler when he arrived here from Poland six years ago.

“It was very hard,” Vogler says. “There were no friends or family or supporting circle…. I started from zero…. A couple of years ago, I decided to start to make my own films.”

Since that decision, Vogler completed his first project, “Three Stories,” which has been nominated for the International Documentary Association Achievement Award. “Three Stories” will screen at the Beverly Hills Library next week.

Before moving to Los Angeles, Vogler lived in Krakow, where he directed and produced documentary films. His life as a Jew in Poland was rather sedate.

“I didn’t experience anti-Semitism,” Vogler says. “When I look back at my school years, I think I had a pretty happy childhood.”

Vogler’s initial reason for coming here had nothing to do with career aspirations. His daughter, Sara, had what doctors called Tara Syndrome — she was born with a radius absent from each forearm. Shriners Hospital in Los Angeles elected to treat her.

However, along the way, Sara set in motion the impetus for Vogler’s film.

“My daughter asked me one day why my father was still in Krakow,” Vogler says. A good question and a good premise for a film, considering her grandfather’s history.

Vogler’s father, Henryk, survived four years in and out of German and Polish concentration camps, where his bride, his parents and his sister perished. Following World War II, Henryk remained in Krakow. More than a few people, including Vogler himself, questioned this decision.

“When I asked him why,” says Vogler, “he answered, ‘Because Polish was my language before the war, and I am a writer, and this is the only way I can express myself as a writer.”

Vogler now lives in West Covina with his wife, Ivona, and their two daughters, Esther, 6, and the aforementioned Sara. After much correctional surgery, Sara, now 12, is attending Atid Hebrew Academy and looking forward to her bat mitzvah. Vogler’s next film will center around Sara’s saga and the important role Shriners Hospital played in her recovery.

As for his first film, Vogler believes that its narrative transcends personal family record, and viewers will derive inspiration from the miracles, large and small, presented in “Three Stories.”

“Somehow [my father] is still in Krakow,” says Vogler, “and somehow the culture is still there…. After all the pain [Sara] went through, she is here, growing up. Life goes on.”

“Three Stories” will screen on Thursday, Feb. 25, at the Beverly Hills Library, Community Room, 444 N. Rexford Dr., Beverly Hills. For more information and advance reservations, call (310) 471-3979.

The Jewish Community’s ‘Utility Infielder’ Read More »

Paula Vogel’s ‘Lolita’

Leave a Comment / Entertainment, Old Stories /

Playwright Paula Vogel grew up in suburban Maryland, where the country clubs did not accept her Jewish father. She endured genteel but unmistaken anti-Semitism at Bryn Mawr.

“Because I am a Jew and a woman, I understand marginalization,” says Vogel, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning “How I Learned to Drive.” “And that has been my great strength as a playwright. If one is marginalized, one understands empathy, and what it feels like to be the other.”

Vogel, 47, silver-haired and confrontational, is a lesbian feminist playwright who has made a career of writing about The Other. Her plays, always provocative and un-P.C., have tackled AIDS (“The Baltimore Waltz”), prostitution (“The Oldest Profession”), pornography and domestic violence.

Now comes “How I Learned to Drive,” about a “Lolita”-like affair between Li’l Bit (Molly Ringwald), a teen-ager, and her Uncle Peck (Brian Kerwin), a decidedly sympathetic and charming pedophile.

“I wanted to make the subject difficult and uncomfortable,” says Vogel, who has been fascinated by the issue since reading Nabokov’s “Lolita” when she was 20.

At the time, she wondered if she could tell the story from the female victim’s point of view; later, while teaching at Brown University, she met her share of victims. Students spoke to her of abuse by beloved relatives, not by strangers in trench coats.

Eventually, Vogel read medical abstracts about pedophilia; researched the histories of Playboy and the Vargas pinup girls; listened to the music of the 1960s (“There is a whole genre of ’16’ songs about girls with older men”); and compared it all to the Calvin Klein billboards of the 1990s. She read about the murder of JonBenet Ramsey. “We are trained,” she says, “to be pedophiles in this culture.”

“How I Learned to Drive,” Vogel insists, is not meant to excuse the pedophiles, but is “a gift to my students.” The story of Li’l Bit “explores how adolescents are confused by all the mixed messages,” she says. “And it provides a road map to suggest how a survivor of abuse can ‘drive’ through the trauma.”

“How I Learned to Drive” runs through April 4 at the Mark Taper Forum. For tickets, call (213) 628-2772.

Paula Vogel’s ‘Lolita’ Read More »

The Mitzvah of Tzedakah

Leave a Comment / Community, Old Stories /

Last month, the major private Swiss banks signed an agreement to implement the $1.25 billion fund to pay to survivors of Nazi-era crimes or their heirs. So far, this is the only major settlement in the raft of cases — some 28 to date, with more to be filed shortly — that seek redress against many of the banks, insurance companies and heavy industries that participated in and profited from Nazi Germany’s massive campaign of plunder, enslavement and killing.

By its terms, the Swiss-banks settlement extends to “targets and victims of Nazi persecution.” According to the settlement, that term includes Jews, homosexuals, people with physical and psychiatric disabilities, and Roma (a people who are popularly but inaccurately known as Gypsies). The settlement also includes refused asylum-seekers in Switzerland and people who were forced or slave laborers for Swiss companies.

The Swiss-banks settlement does not, regrettably, include all of the victim groups that the Nazis singled out. The landscape of death and suffering inflicted by the Third Reich was on a far vaster scale, one that is only slowly coming to public perception. The amount of the settlement, while seemingly large, is, to put it in perspective, less than three times what Merrill Lynch agreed to pay Orange County for allegedly faulty investment advice. Arithmetic dictates that, for a fixed fund, there will be a smaller per-capita recovery the larger the class of defined victims is.

Initially, the World War II-era litigation involved relatively discrete claims for unredeemed bank accounts and insurance polices. The Swiss-banks case and most of the others, however, are now driven mainly by other issues — slave labor and looting and plunder of property. The German war machine was kept up and running by the unlimited supply of free labor funneled to it by the SS. Banking and industry were greatly and unjustly enriched in the process.

Companies that have already been sued for their use of slave labor include Ford, Siemens, Volkswagen, Heinkel and Degussa — the last of which is also accused of manufacturing Zyklon B for the gas chambers. Others are expected to be added soon. The major German and Austrian banks are also alleged to have reaped large profits from slave labor and looted assets.

Who were the Nazi’s victims? The Swiss-banks case has one definition. Other pending and future litigation may provide a fuller historical picture.

The Nazis intended to exterminate the entire Jewish people. The Roma were also marked for total extermination. While Roma are included in the Swiss-banks settlement, many aspects of their persecution, however, are not well understood by the public. The stereotype of Roma as shiftless nomads, for instance, has not withstood scrutiny. It has become clear that many European Roma had, by 1933, joined the ranks of the middle class and owned considerable property and other wealth. The Germans labeled the Roma a people of artfremdes Blut (alien blood). Nazi policy from the outset was to render the Roma zukunftlos (futureless), first by forced sterilizations — Roma accounted for some 94 percent of those the Germans carried out — and then by outright killing.

The persecution of people with physical and psychiatric disabilities has also received some public attention. These individuals who had the misfortune to live within the Reich were, as the Roma had been, also labeled lebensunvertes Leben (lives unworthy of life) — and dealt with accordingly.

Homosexuals were forced to submit to “medical experiments” or subjected to forced labor.

The Swiss settlement appears not to account for several other groups of victims. There were those, for example, whose actions were deemed contrary to the interests of the state. Early in the Nazi years, socialists and communists were arrested en masse and their assets seized. Laws devised to combat the political left were later used against the Jews. Many communists fled to the Soviet Union; the Kremlin authorities then often sent them to the Gulag or handed them back to the Nazis after the German-Soviet nonaggression pact of 1939. Jehovah’s Witnesses, who refused to salute the flag, serve in the army or work in war industries, were also seized. Many Spanish republicans who had fled to France in the wake of Franco’s victory were rounded up by both the Nazi occupation and the Vichy regimes.

Prisoners of war were killed in enormous numbers. We have the testimony of a witness of no lesser stature than Primo Levi, in his last completed work, “The Drowned and the Saved,” that, in Auschwitz, Soviet POWs — a total of 2.2 million to 3.3 million of whom were killed in German captivity — were considered “only one degree superior to the Jews.” Bergen-Belsen began as Stalag 311, a prisoner-of-war camp. The historian Sybil Milton has reported that the 15,000 Russian prisoners at Auschwitz-Birkenau suffered a 99.2-percent mortality rate.

The suffering of non-Jewish Poles and other Slavs — whom the Nazis deemed untermenschen (subhumans) — under German occupation was also extreme. In pursuit of German policy “to see to it that only people of purely Germanic blood live in the East,” Hitler ordered the SS to “send to death, mercilessly and without compassion, men, women and children of Polish derivation.” Already by the end of 1940, the SS had expelled more than 325,000 Poles from their homes and looted their property. Scholars estimate that between 1.8 million and 1.9 million non-Jewish Poles became victims of German occupation policies and the war.

Slave labor was a favored fate for the Polish people. Indeed, Poles made up perhaps the single largest group of slave laborers. By war’s end, at least 1.5 million Poles had been impressed into forced labor and transported throughout the Reich to work in every economic sector. In August 1942, a subaltern of Alfred Rosenberg — the chief Nazi ideologist and the Reich minister for the Occupied Eastern Territories — put it this way: “The Slavs are to work for us. In so far as we do not need them, they may die.” Resisters were executed, and many more died from the exhausting work and harsh conditions. Poles — who were identified by purple P’s sewn to their clothing — became prisoners in nearly all of the concentration camps within the Reich’s far-flung system.

The list of defendants in the U.S. litigation is lengthening. At the same time, the recognition of who their victims were is becoming clearer. While true compensation is, of course, impossible, the record must reflect the realities of history, and those responsible should be held to account for actions of enormous magnitude and scope.

Barry A. Fisher is an international human rights lawyer in Century City. He is one of the attorneys for the plaintiffs in the Swiss-banks litigation and some dozen other lawsuits involving World War II-era assets.

The Mitzvah of Tzedakah Read More »

Finding God Among the Ruins

Leave a Comment / Books, Old Stories /

“Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith” by Anne Lamott (Pantheon Books, $23.00).

In “Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith” (Pantheon Books, $23.00), a gentle and touching memoir, Anne Lamott tells a variation of an old story:

A man in a bar is telling the bartender that he completely lost his faith after his small plane crashed in the frozen Alaskan tundra.

“I lay there in the wreckage, hour after hour, nearly frozen to death, crying out for God to save me, and he didn’t raise a finger to help.”

The bartender responds: “But you’re here. You were saved.”

“Right,” says the man, “because finally a damned Eskimo came along.”

Anne Lamott is a survivor of more than a few plane crashes: the early death of her father, alcoholism, drugs, bulimia, the loss of close friends to cancer and AIDS, love affairs gone awry. Now in her early 40s and currently a contributor to the online magazine Salon, Lamott has written her eighth book. It is a generous, humorous and ultimately moving account of the many Eskimos who finally came along.

Lamott writes of the self-destructiveness of not forgiving people (“like drinking rat poison and then waiting for the rat to die”), the grief that accompanied her consideration of abortion (“which theoretically and politically I support”), and her ultimate realization that the voice of God at the entrance of the cave was the “imperfect love of people.”

Despite its subtitle, the book, at its heart, is not Lamott’s reflections on religion, but her gracefully written recollections of the unexpected grace that entered her life. To a friend who discounts the possibility that God was involved, she says: “Thanks for the input, but I know where I was, and I know where I am now, and you just can’t get here from there…. So it was either a miracle…or maybe it was more of a gift, one that required some assembly.”

Lamott is not an evangelical; she was not born again; she did not arrive at faith in a flash of emotion or enlightenment. She reached it through small moments of grace — the realization that, for a friend in crisis, all she could do was show up, but that simply showing up changed things radically; that a sense of humor could protect her even from the most terrifying moments in life; that paradoxically she could feel the all-encompassing nature of God not through theology but rather by hanging out in ordinariness — in daily ritual, in appreciation of the moment, in simply saying thank you, thank you, thank you to someone she was not sure was there.

Jews and Judaism play a small but important role in this book. Lamott’s aunt married into a large Jewish family, “but they were not really Abrahamy Jews; they were bagelly Jews…other than accusing you of anti-Semitism if you refused second helpings of my uncle Millard’s food, they might as well have been Canadians.”

In a small moment of classic comic writing, Lamott includes a memoir of the faux bat mitzvah her Jewish college friends gave her (she remembers only one question the “rabbi” asked, to establish if she had sufficiently studied Jewish culture in preparing for her day: “do we like to camp?”). But behind the humor are some remarkable religious insights, including wonderful readings of the Binding of Isaac and the 23rd Psalm, and quotations from Micha and Martin Buber. And the book as a whole is as good an explanation of radical amazement as one is likely to find in a non-Jewish source.

This is a book that complements Naomi Levy’s “To Begin Again: The Journey Toward Comfort, Strength and Faith in Difficult Times.” Lamott’s memoir is a beautifully written example of the movement from false comforts to something truly miraculous. Even more, it is a portrait of someone who, nearly frozen and lost in Alaska, feeling abandoned, came back from the long, dark night to become a mensch.

Rick Richman is a member of Sinai Temple in Westwood.

An Excerpt from ‘Traveling Mercies’

In college, though, most of the smartest, funniest women in our dorm, the ones who always had the best dope, were Jews and referred endlessly to their Jewishness. It was exhilarating, and I wanted to be one of them. I’d thought for a while, and especially since Pammy and I had become strident atheists, that Jews were better, smarter, hipper than the rest of us. If you were Jewish, you were part of the tribe that included Lenny Bruce and Bette Midler. Allen Ginsberg was one of you, and Mel Brooks and Woody Allen. The women we revered were Jews: Grace Paley, Hannah Arendt, Bella Abzug, Gloria Steinem. Ram Dass, who’d started out at Harvard as Richard Alpert but had just come back from India a Hindu convert, called himself a Hin-Jew. Most of the girls I wanted to be like were Jews, and in comparison, the rest of us looked like we’d come from Grand Rapids.

One of my friends in college took me home to visit her mother one three-day weekend. Her mother, Billie, was big and fat and unbelievably beautiful, except that she sported a heavy beard — a real beard, like three-day stubble. She acted like she’d known me forever. When I woke up in her house that first morning, she shaved for the occasion and put pancake makeup over the stubble. It looked like she had a thousand blackheads.

She was a Zionist and convinced me that Israel should bomb the s— out of Syria, and by the time I’d finished my grapefruit, I too believed this to be obvious. I asked her if she went to temple, and she acted as if I’d asked if she frequently used an escort service.

“Of course not,” she said. “What’s there for me? You sit, they don’t speak English, only the men count for much, you wait forever for a song you might understand, you check out what everyone is wearing? And what’s the pitch — you’re born, you die, you go into a box? What’s so tempting there?”

“But, Mom,” cried my friend, “you never let us go out on Friday nights.”

“You should be out gallivanting on the Sabbath?”

Finding God Among the Ruins Read More »

Old Friends

Leave a Comment / Old Stories /

I have just emerged from a four-day conversational jag with an old friend who was visiting me from New York. There is something intoxicating about such reunions — a bit like a family gathering that suddenly and unexpectedly takes you back to an earlier and different life.

My old friend, Lore, and I met 40 years ago, when she was just launching her career as a writer. I was then a young editor, newly settled in New York City. We began in a natural enough way: I read her stories, then her first novel, and commented upon them.

But, soon, there were other markers along the road: meeting the young man who would eventually become her husband; celebrating parenthood (our firstborn were delivered the same day, which somehow meant that we automatically received, just prior to publication, the children’s books she wrote); and dealing with those critical moments when despair and defeat seemed all engulfing — divorce in my case and, in hers, the death of her husband, David, at age 42.

These are memories, I realized this weekend, that have only turned sharper with time.

Our conversations over the four days were almost nonstop. “Remember that obnoxious writer who tried to be a literary gadfly,” I began, “you know, what was his name — “

“Oh, he’s dead.” She waved her hand dismissively.

“But tell me about Sally,” she began. “I still see her, but she has always puzzled me. I admire her. She still writes, never has married, ekes out a modest living and stays very private.”

Lore paused for a moment, but then, given that I was an old friend, went on. “Do you think, she’s …?”

“No, no,” I said. “She had a great romance with Calvin right after college and then married — briefly — an academic who wanted her to darn his socks. You didn’t know that?

“And I have my own flirtation story with her that I can tell you. Once, she came to my apartment for a coffee. I sat at her feet on the floor, looking up at her with an expression that must have been a cross between fondness and adoration, as she stretched out luxuriously on my couch. Impulsively, I offered her the couch for her new apartment because, I blurted out, she looked so good reclining in it.

“It was precisely at that moment that my wife came home. Somehow, without words being exchanged and the temperature in the room decidedly chilly, the offer was tacitly rescinded.”

And so we continued, sharing old, familiar stories, keeping our friendship warm.

“Remember that lovely dinner party you gave,” she began, “when Anthony insulted your wife’s favorite cousin — called her a stupid cow — and the room turned silent as everyone tried to look the other way.”

“And the party at Rust’s house,” I countered, “where your husband, David, made disparaging remarks about Bob’s ability as both writer and editor, and Bob’s wife, overhearing, stepped forward and tossed her drink in his face.”

“Yes,” she started giggling. “And David, without so much as hesitating, tossed his drink right back in her face. Oh that was my David. Unflappable.”

The stories went on like that, rising and falling as another time, another life, came into view.

And then, on the last morning, just before Lore’s departure, in the companionable silence of Sunday-morning coffee, she told me a new story, one she had never shared with me.

It was about a time before I knew her, when she was a young Jewish child in Vienna. It was 1938, right after Austria had fallen to the Germans. Her father, in her words, not a very imaginative or charismatic accountant, had stood in endless lines and pulled together connections, money and all the proper papers to send Lore out of Vienna on one of the kindertransports that eventually carried about 2,000 Jewish children from Austria to England. Her mother had objected: “We’ll all stay together and die together.” But, in this instance, her father — for the first time Lore could remember — had prevailed.

“She will save our lives, will get us out of here,” he had said with finality. And, so, at 10 years of age, she boarded a train that made its way to England. She then lived, as she wrote in her first book, published nearly 40 years ago, in “Other People’s Houses.”

“Oh, I was a terrible child,” she told me. “Not appealing at all. When strangers would tousle my hair in an effort to be kind, I would look at them imploringly and ask, as my father had instructed me, ‘Won’t you please help me get my mother and father and my grandparents and my uncle Paulie out of Austria?’ I did not know it at the time, but it was very un-English. Their hand would freeze in midair, their eyes slide away, and they would soon move to a far corner of the room.”

But her father had also compiled a list of addresses of people with their family name in England. And, so, dutifully, Lore wrote letters to each and every one of them. The letters weren’t bad, she told me that morning. I read some of them recently, she explained. The metaphors really sparkled. And, so, very quickly the letters became a centerpiece, a daily reason for being.

A click went off inside me when she said that. She had used something like that phrase to describe her ritual of rising each day and heading off into her study to write. And, of course, improbable as it sounds, she did save all their lives. One of her letters eventually found a distant cousin, who arranged for her family to exit Austria for jobs as servants in England, while Lore continued to live in other people’s houses.

Today, the family is closer at hand. She, her son and her 92-year-old mother all live in the same high-rise apartment building on Riverside Drive in New York. They inhabit three different apartments, in what might loosely be described as a vertical home.

“I have to call my mother,” she said before departing, “to see if she’s OK.” But we both knew that whenever Lore is far from home, she becomes anxious and needs to connect by letter or voice with the mother she nearly lost 60 years ago.

That was her parting story — a gift to me. A way of renewing an old friendship. — Gene Lichtenstein

Old Friends Read More »

The High Cost of Jewish Living

Leave a Comment / Old Stories /

Weekday mornings at 8:20, Judy Penso sets out for her office at a Jewish Community Center just outside San Francisco, where she runs the Marin County region of the Bay Area Jewish Community Relations Council.

Before heading across the bridge from her Berkeley home, though, she drops off her 15-month-old daughter, Amalya, at a neighborhood day-care center run by Christian fundamentalists. There’s good day care at the JCC, but Penso can’t afford it. Not on the salary she gets from the Jewish community.

“I love my work,” says Penso, a single mother whose salary is “in the mid-40s.” “I’ve committed my life to working for the Jewish community — my education, my professional career. I’m not looking elsewhere. But I did assume that working for the community, I’d be able to enjoy the community’s programs and services like anybody else — day care, day school and so on. It turns out that’s out of my reach.”

Shockingly, Penso isn’t unusual. Jewish community workers nationwide say they can’t afford many of the services of the community they serve. Jewish life is too often for the affluent, and that’s something Jewish communal workers aren’t.

“The community generally ignores these class issues,” says Yehudit Moch, a New York specialist in Jewish family education.

Moch herself sends son Samuel, 11, to public school because she can’t afford day school on her $30,000 annual salary. “I’m a Jewish family educator who’s unable to afford my own son’s education,” she says bitterly. “It’s humiliating.”

The problem isn’t only among communal workers. Across the country, many ordinary Jews — some say most — can’t afford basic Jewish services. “Tremendous numbers of people are totally left out because of it,” says Moch.

The math is straightforward. “You could take a family of four with an income of $75,000 as typical,” says sociologist Gary Tobin, president of the San Francisco-based Institute for Jewish and Community Research. “Knock off 30 percent for taxes, take off another 25 percent for housing, and they’re left with about $30,000. Day school averages $8,000 to $10,000 a year per kid. Synagogue dues average about $1,000. Sending the kids to camp costs at least $1,500 each. If you belong to the JCC, that’s probably another $1,000. You have now exhausted the family’s income, and that’s before they buy food, clothing and drive a car. And let’s not even talk about the extra cost of kosher meat.”

According to a 1992 study by the American Jewish Committee, the cost of living a fully engaged Jewish life — including synagogue and JCC membership, day school, summer camp and a modest UJA gift — was between $18,000 and $25,000 per year for a family of four, based on 1988 figures. To afford it, the AJC calculated, a family would need an annual income of $80,000 to $125,000, depending on region. That was beyond the means of some 90 percent of the Jewish families in America.

The implications are staggering. Despite widespread anxiety over low rates of Jewish participation, the basics of Jewish life are priced beyond the reach of most Jews. “I’m convinced that the high cost of Jewish living is one reason for the low rate of Jewish affiliation,” says Rabbi Ira Youdovin, executive vice president of the Chicago Board of Rabbis.

Some manage despite the difficulty. Daniela Davis (not her real name), a Los Angeles widow, supports her two teen-age daughters on her $60,000 salary as a government attorney. She brings home $43,000 after taxes. She sends the girls to an Orthodox Jewish day school — combined tuition $16,000 — “because I’m committed to it, so I don’t have any options. But, sometimes, it leaves me feeling frightened and despairing.”

Outside the Orthodox community, though, few feel that deep a commitment. Most look at the price tag and walk on.

And day schools aren’t the only barrier to Jewish participation. Those who’ve studied it say the most frequent cause of Jewish sticker-shock is the synagogue, the institution most Jews consider their primary link to Judaism.

“Synagogue dues are both a financial barrier and a psychological barrier,” says sociologist Tobin. “Especially for Jews in the 18 to 30 age range, which is the generation everyone is worrying about. A sizable group finds it objectionable on principle that they have to ‘pay to pray’ — that’s the phrase they often use.”

Others don’t feel the need. Yitzhak and Leslie Mizrahi, a dual-income Long Island couple, recently quit their synagogue, concluding that they weren’t “taking advantage” of it. “We found a place that offers High Holy Day services for free,” says Leslie. “That’s all we needed. And it was quite expensive.”

Community leaders insist that synagogues are more accommodating than people realize. “I don’t know of any synagogue that turns people away because of money,” says Rabbi Ellen Nemhauser, Philadelphia regional director of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations. “Every congregation has some form of dues relief. Nobody who wants to join a synagogue is kept out.”

Trouble is, most Jews aren’t sure what they want. Confronted with a price tag at the outset, many don’t bother looking further. Even when they do, says Tobin, “many would rather not go through the humiliating process of demonstrating that they’re needy in order to join a synagogue. It becomes a life choice they’re not willing to make.”

Some synagogues are now working to entice newcomers, hoping shul-going becomes a habit. In Chicago, five synagogues and a JCC along the affluent Gold Coast banded together in 1996 to offer under-30s a two-year introductory package for just $150. In Philadelphia, the federation runs a free year-long program that introduces first-timers to community life. A synagogue in San Francisco, Temple Emanuel, simply offers a year’s membership free to first-timers.

Studies suggest that the introductory packages, well marketed, attract fair numbers. About half stay on to become dues-paying members.

The other half wanders off, though, often citing cost. “It really does prevent those with low and marginal incomes from joining,” says Tobin.

The solution? It’s painfully obvious: money. Money to pay teachers’ salaries and reduce school tuitions. Money to pay synagogue heating bills and offer lower dues. Lots of money. Plus a new readiness by federations, synagogues and JCCs to cooperate and pool resources. “Some people are talking about a parish model for American Judaism,” says Chicago’s Youdovin. “The idea is that one low fee buys you membership in all the community’s institutions. It works in Europe.”

“The bottom line,” says Tobin, “is that for all the talk of Jewish continuity and renaissance, it’s not going anywhere until we start seriously addressing subsidies. We’re going to need billions and billions of dollars to subsidize this renaissance.”

J.J. Goldberg writes a weekly column for The Jewish Journal.

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Haggadah

Leave a Comment / Books, Old Stories /

A 1998 article about Chicago collector Stephen Durschslag’s haggadah collection set the number of different haggadot on his shelves at 4,500, increasing almost daily.

It’s probably impossible to know how many haggadot exist, but it’s obvious that for every Jew, there should be a haggadah that fits like a glove.

In Every Generation —

Escape and Survival

One of the few new haggadot this spring is a fascinating reminder of the parallels between our ancient and more recent past. A Survivor’s Haggadah (Jewish Publication Society, 2000) is a facsimile of a work written in 1945-46 by Lithuanian survivor/ teacher/ writer Yosef Dov Sheinson. Used during the first post-liberation Passover seder in Munich, in April 1946, the original booklet was found by editor Saul Touster of Brandeis among his father’s papers and serves as the source for this edition.

Professor Touster’s introduction and commentary are revealing and jarring, in keeping with the powerful words by Sheinson and the woodcuts by another survivor, Mikls Adler. To read of the DP camps and initial Allied political insensitivities is to be angered; to read Sheinson’s text indicting factionalism among the Jews within the camps (as among the Israelites in the desert) is to be bemused; to read of the roles played by Rabbi Abraham J. Klausner and other U.S. chaplains in “organizing” for the Saved Remnant is to be inspired; to trace through word and woodcut these dual stories of deliverance is to be moved beyond words.

Contemporary User-

Friendly Haggadot

A Different Night: The Family Participation Haggadah by Noam Zion and David Dishon (Shalom Hartman Institute, 1997) is especially designed to let you plan seder length to what your group can handle. Suggested thought questions, quotations from myriad sources, cartoons, and artwork from more formal sources are included, and the book is guaranteed to involve everyone.

Rabbi Mordecai M. Kaplan, with rabbis Eugene Kohn and Ira Eisenstein, edited a breakthrough haggadah, The New Haggadah (Behrman House) for the Jewish Reconstructionist Foundation in 1941. A 1999 Behrman House revision, prepared by an editorial committee of outstanding young rabbis and retitled The New American Haggadah, includes songs by Debbie Friedman and references to civil rights and other timely issues — and you’ll be able to read the typeface.

Among other fine and friendly table haggadot are the abridged Family Passover Haggadah by Elie M. Gindi (SPI Books), a real labor of love that incorporates illustrations from ancient illuminations to photographs to animation figures with ideas and questions scattered throughout.

Tents of Jacob and

Tongues of Exile

Haggadah from Four Corners of the Earth by Ben Cohen and Maya Keliner (1997) is recommended for families with multilingual guests, since it combines the Hebrew text with linear translations in English, Russian, Spanish and French. Nicely designed and certainly indicative of the diversity of Am Yisrael.

To obtain information on haggadot in Hebrew and other languages (e.g., Hebrew-Arabic, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Polish, Russian and Spanish), go online to http://www.books international.com/hags.htm. Questions can be directed to info@booksinternational.com. This company is based in Israel, so don’t count on quick delivery. Check local sources first.

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Living Single in the ‘New Hollywood’

Leave a Comment / Old Stories, Singles /

Dear Jewish Journal:

About five years ago, I ended a very serious relationship. I was devastated, but knew that my life could not end over this. I did everything to try and resolve my pain but it was hopeless. I eventually moved to another city, started a new career, and got on with my life. About two years later, I was ready to return to Southern California and pick up where I had left off. I figured I would contact some of the old people I used to hang out with. To my surprise, they too had moved on. Many got married, started families, etc. This was going to be a lot harder than I thought it would be.

Ever since I can remember, I have wanted to get married to the perfect guy, have a family and live happily ever after. That is the way it always was in the storybooks. If that was going to happen, I had to get serious about this whole relationship and dating thing now!

I received The Jewish Journal and often thumbed through the personals. Occasionally, I made a couple of calls, but I never really found that connection — the kind of connection where you feel absolutely comfortable and free with another person. One evening in September 1998 while flipping through The Journal, the 900 number just about jumped off the page. I don’t know what made me call, but there was a strange force pulling me in. I called the number and browsed through a couple of ads until I heard a male voice that actually drew me in. I listened to the ad in its entirety hoping to hear the guy’s name, but no name was given. I left a message anyway. The next day someone called me back and I knew instantly who it was. It was that familiar voice that was so captivating the day before. We spoke that evening for several hours and arranged to meet that week. Each night until we met we spoke on the phone. The excitement was so intense for both of us. I remember on the afternoon of the day we were supposed to meet he called me. He said he couldn’t wait to meet me and all he could do was think about that night!

We met and it was as if we had known each other forever! He was so perfect. Tall, handsome, sweet and very funny. We laughed and talked until very late in the evening. We spoke and saw each other on a regular basis for the next two years. Recently, we took a cruise and there on the bow of the boat with the wind blowing in my hair, he got down on one knee and asked me to marry him. I was breathless! It was right out of a movie. Nothing could have been more perfect.

Our wedding is planned for May 2000. I am doing something I always dreamed of — marrying my best friend, my soulmate. If you never believed it could happen to you, think again. They say there is someone for everyone out there, you just have to know where to look. For all of you hopeless romantics out there who are still looking for love in all the wrong places, look right here in The Jewish Journal. Your true love could just be a phone call away. Mine was!

Thank you, Jewish Journal, for making this connection possible! Without the personals we probably never would have met.

Sincerely,

Debbie

(last name withheld upon request)

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On Living with Tension

Leave a Comment / Judaism, Old Stories /

Once, a stranger approached Hillel and Shammai, the great sages of the first century, with a request: “Teach me the Torah while I stand on one foot.”

First, he brought the request to Shammai. According to the Talmud, Shammai picked up a builder’s rule, smacked him along side his head and dismissed him.

So he came to Hillel. “Teach me the Torah on one foot.” Hillel taught him: “That which is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow. That is the whole Torah; all the rest is commentary. Zil u’gemar — now, go and learn.”

Hillel’s answer is loving, accepting and kind. But Shammai was right.

“Teach me the Torah on one foot.” Rabbis hear this daily. Some people want spiritual enlightenment but without spiritual discipline. They seek inner peace without facing their own dark side. They demand Torah in monaural — monolithic, doctrinal, authoritative. A simple truth to live by — void of complexity, detail and nuance. And quickly. Who has time to master all those dusty books?

We are bound to disappoint them because Judaism never comes that way. That’s not how Jews think. In our tradition, there is a distinct pattern, a texture of thinking. You find it in Bible, Mishna, Talmud. It is never on one foot. It is always dialectical: In argument, in tension, in polarity. Truth is too big to put into simple maxims. It is too important to set down in simple discursive rules. It always comes in contradiction.

Rav Naftali the Ropshizer Rebbe, told his Chassidim that before he was born, an angel appeared and showed him a tablet divided into two columns. On the right side, it offered Talmud Taaneet: “The learned man should be a fiery furnace.” On the left side, it quoted Talmud Sanhedrin: “The meek and lowly shall inherit the world to come.” On the right side, from Talmud Brachot: “Man should be wise in his fear of God.” And on the left side, from the Yalkut: “You should be simple-hearted in your love of the Lord.” On the right side, from the Talmud: “God wants the heart.” And on the left side, from the Prophet Jeremiah: “The heart of His people is corrupt and wayward.” And the Rebbe pondered the contradictions until he heard the voice of the angels announcing, “You are now to be born.” Whereupon he resolved in his heart to follow both columns no matter the contradictions.

To be Jewish is to live both columns. It is to live with tension, ambivalence and paradox. “Polarity,” wrote Abraham Joshua Heschel, “is at the heart of Judaism.”

Consider this image: A pendulum, swinging back and forth. The arc described by the pendulum is truth. If you stop the pendulum anywhere along the arc and say, “This point here at the zenith, this is the truth,” or if you stop it down at the midpoint and say, “This is truth,” you are wrong. You always will be wrong. Because truth is the pendulum in motion.

The philosopher Isaiah Berlin taught that every difficult, complex problem — in politics, life or thought — has a simple answer. Which is always wrong. Not just wrong, but deadly. For throughout human history, we Jews have always been the exception to somebody’s rule. We have always been the anomaly to someone’s absolute. And we have suffered for it.

This is why extremism of any kind makes us so anxious. It is what scares us about fundamentalism and simplistic moralism. We respond viscerally because whatever reduces truth to a simple absolute, reduces us.

Every morning, we recite, “Blessed is God who creates light and darkness, peace and all else.” Ours is not a monism, reducing all experience to one principle, one idea, one path — denying the contrasts and the reality of tensions. But neither are we dualists who break everything into sharp disjunctions between good and evil, light and darkness, religious and secular, us and them. We are monotheists. We can acknowledge the contrasts in experience because we affirm that beneath them there is a basic unity. This is the meaning of the first of the Ten Commandments read this week all over the world: Ani Adonai Eloheychem. I am the Lord your God. In worshipping one God, we embrace life’s rich complexity.

Ed Feinstein is rabbi at Valley Beth Shalom in Encino.

On Living with Tension Read More »