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Jewish Journal

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December 23, 1999

Winona Ryder– Girl Interrupted

Leave a Comment / Old Stories /

At first glance, the author Susanna Kaysen and the actress Winona Ryder have little in common. Kaysen, who is in her 50s and the author of several well-received volumes, grew up upper-middle-class and Jewish in Cambridge, MA and is the daughter of an economics professor. And Ryder, the movie star, spent many of her formative years in a Northern California commune, the daughter of a Jewish hippie intellectual who often chatted around the kitchen table with poet Allen Ginsberg and LSD guru Timothy Leary.

What the two women share, however, are dark memories of childhood’s end; a time in their late teens when each descended into severe depression and landed, for a while, in a psychiatric hospital. Kaysen eloquently wrote about her experience in her best-selling memoir, “Girl Interrupted” — a book that Ryder’s rare book dealer father, Michael Horowitz, chanced to give her in galley form in 1993. At the time, the actress was emerging from her own two-year crisis, and Kaysen’s book was the first she had read, from a women’s perspective, that articulated her own sense of “feeling you are going crazy.”

Which perhaps explains why Ryder became obsessed with the novel and, subsequently, used all her Hollywood clout to bring the story to the screen. It took all of six years, and the actress, who is also making her producing debut, persevered despite the emotional toll. Ryder’s youthful anxiety attacks returned during the three-month shoot at a real psychiatric ward, one that strongly resembled the grim, brick structure where Kaysen was incarcerated in the late 1960s. Nevertheless, the Oscar-nominated actress endeavored to finish the film, which, because of the personal connection, she regards as perhaps the most important of her career.

The waiflike Ryder, who has enormous, intense brown eyes, has explained that she did not have to conduct research to portray Kaysen. By the time she was 19, she was in the midst of an identity crisis, the result of virtually growing up on screen, and was suffering from paralyzing insomnia and anxiety attacks. She was exhausted and overworked; there was a painful and public breakup with her first love, actor Johnny Depp, and most troubling of all was that she could not describe her feelings even to her loved ones. “And then, of course, actors are not allowed to complain,” she told the Journal, with a thin smile. “When actors complain, it sounds a little nauseating.”

And so Ryder checked herself into a psychiatric ward, a “stark, bare, scary place where they take everything away from you,” but left a week later, feeling that the stay had not helped her. It was only slowly that she recovered, with the help of a good psychiatrist. But her memories of the experience, she says, were invaluable as she brought “Girl, Interrupted” to the screen.

During the recent Journal interview, Ryder said she has been influenced by another Jewish girl, interrupted: A Russian-Jewish cousin, also an actress, who looked like her and was about her age when she died in the Holocaust. It was Ryder’s grandmother Horowitz, who is now 99 and a resident of Brooklyn, who first showed her the photographs of the young woman and the other relatives who died in the camps. Sometimes, she has said, the dark-haired cousin has been almost like a spirit guide, perhaps as much an influence on her life as Kaysen. “I learned about my family history when I was of the right age to hear about something so tragic,” she says, softly, “and it has been a very big part of my life.”

“Girl, Interrupted” opens this week in Los Angeles.

Winona Ryder– Girl Interrupted Read More »

Making the Grade

Leave a Comment / Family, Judaism, Old Stories /

A story is told of a man who came to his rabbi complaining of depression. His life lately seemed like an endless string of failures, disappointments and missed opportunities. Why, he asked, had God condemned him to live such a frustrating existence? The rabbi listened carefully and after some moments of contemplation, he asked the man to reach behind him and remove a large volume from the bookshelf. Assuming this was some tome of ancient spiritual wisdom, the man reached for the volume. He was surprised to notice that his volume was no tractate of Talmud, but an almanac of sports statistics. Read page 543 aloud, the rabbi instructed. And the man began reading the life-time batting averages of baseball’s greatest hitters: Ty Cobb, Babe Ruth, Ted Williams. Not one of them more than .400! the rabbi observed. That means more than six in ten times, the greatest of the great struck out, popped up or flied out. More than six in ten times, they failed. Are you better than they were? Why do you expect more of yourself than they did?

Jewish kids all have to get A’s. It’s a fact. They’re all above average. But what happens when they don’t excel? What happens when they fail? “You’re not working up to your potential,” a teacher once told me. And I suffered. It was only years later that I realized that no one really “works up to their potential.” Such a demand is limitless. Such a requirement can never be satisfied. Like the horizon, one’s “potential” is never meant to be reached. If you’re “working up to your potential” it’s only because your potential was defined too low. My teacher, Rabbi Harold Schulweis once observed that we Jews practice a particularly cruel form of child abuse. It’s called “disappointment.”

Is there room within the Jewish family for failure? Is there love and forgiveness for the child who tries and can’t succeed?

I’m told of a young engineer at a giant technology company who made an error in calculations and an entire product-line went down in flames. Called in to the chairman’s office, he was fully prepared to tender his resignation and accept a biting castigation. Resign? asked the astonished chairman, I can’t let you resign! I’ve just spent $120 million dollars educating you!

If it doesn’t break us, failure can be life’s greatest teacher. What can we learn from failure? That we can start again. That we can ask for help. That we can be forgiven. What does failure teach? That we are limited, finite, fallible, vulnerable, but still worthy of love.

I worry about children who are told they must get every answer correct. I worry about kids told there’s no room for second-best. I worry about kids constantly measured, evaluated, tested and graded. Surely there’s more at stake in education than admission to the next school, the marks on the next report card, the scores on the next exam. If we demand success each time, if we leave no room for failure, our children’s dreams will shrink to fit their certainties. They will play it safe and never try too hard, never reach too far, never put too much of themselves into any pursuit. It is entirely possible to exalt the mind while crushing the soul.

Those who dream big, fail big. Einstein spent a lifetime looking for a theory that doesn’t exist. Babe Ruth holds a record for most strike outs. Columbus never did make it to India. And Moses never made it to the Promised Land. Imagine that, the entire Torah ends in failure: Moses never gets to see the fulfillment of his dream. Is he any less of a tzadik?

The weekly Torah portion recounts the deathbed blessings and instructions Jacob offered each of his sons. What’s remarkable is that they’re all present: the beloved Joseph, the mighty Judah, inept Reuven, tempestuous Simon and Levi. All have a place in the family. Abraham had but one blessing: Isaac was chosen, Ishmael was cast out. Isaac had but one blessing: Jacob was favored, Esau rejected. But Jacob finds words for each of his sons. Each belongs to him. And all remain children of Israel. Were we so wise.

Ed Feinstein is rabbi at Valley Beth Shalom in Encino.

Making the Grade Read More »

Is It a Match?

Leave a Comment / Uncategorized /

It’s wonderful to think that the world is beshert, that for every baby boy born there is a baby girl, but it’s not that way. For every 100 baby girls born, approximately 106 baby boys are born.

Apparently the Grand Planner knows what parents of boys unfortunately know — their sons are much more prone to mischief than girls and fewer boys survive to post-adolescent maturity. The numbers of males and females eventually even out, and females outnumber males around age 50.

In addition to the lower mortality rate of women, moving in or out of a locale for such reasons as education and career may also create imbalances between men and women. But, theoretically, when men and women start thinking of marriage, and they are in a large Jewish population center, there should be an adequate supply to meet the demand.

The situation would be ideal if men and women married at the same ages and married partners of the same approximate age. In actuality, women tend to marry earlier and the men they marry are somewhat older. The opposite holds true for men. Therefore in the Los Angeles Jewish community’s younger age (under 40) singles market. We in The Jewish Federation’s demographic section have discovered that men tend to outnumber women. These younger women may be shopping for a groom not only among men their own age group, but often among men who may be five or 10 years their senior.

We also found that while Jewish young men may be supplementing the short supply of Jewish women with non-Jewish dates, they are often busy pursuing their education or establishing a career. The overall Jewish singles sex-ratio shifts with age. Singles ages 18 to 24 are equal in number; as more women begin marrying at around age 25, single men start outnumbering single women until age 40 – 44 when again there is an equal number of single males and females. After age 45 there are greater numbers of single women, a disparity which only increases with age.

If all age groups were more or less equal, the problem of younger marrying older would not be an issue. However, World War II, the Holocaust and other factors created the big demographic bulge known as the baby boom. Currently, a disproportionately large number of 40ish single males are looking for fewer, younger female mates, thereby creating harsh competition for younger males. There is also a disproportionately large number of 40ish single females in search of much less numerous older single males. This is the “gender mismatch” caused by the hesitancy of same-aged males and females to marry each other.

Survey research at the Federation and elsewhere shows that the majority of single Jewish men and women prefer to marry a Jew, and in Los Angeles over nine-out-of-ten Jewish persons having two Jewish parents have married Jewish. (This is a different statistic from the oft-quoted 52 percent intermarriage found for all Jewish persons who married between 1985 and 1990 nationally and the 41 percent intermarriage found in Los Angeles of those marrying between 1992 and 1997.)

How does this come about? Most singles eventually find a Jewish partner, though some singles do not and may never marry or remarry. At present the large number of unmarried baby boomers are facing a tighter supply of potential Jewish spouses. Therefore some may never find a Jewish person to marry because of the acute gender mismatch among baby boomers.

If people want to marry, what are some possible solutions that may be considered?

*Men and women who are approximately the same age or untraditional ages could choose each other as marriage partners.

Younger persons may want to think about a “marriage career” as well as a professional career rather than deferring marriage until after professional training and career establishment.

Marrying younger reduces age differentials between the spouses, though this may increase the chance of divorce. The Jewish community compared to non-Jewish communities has a very low divorce incidence. In Los Angeles in 1997, 85 percent of all married Jewish persons were in their first marriage.

*Marrying a Jew-by-Choice or being open to relationships with non-Jews who are seriously considering conversion to Judaism.

If one considers marrying a non-Jew, research has shown that there may be serious drawbacks to the chance of a happy marital outcome. The likelihood of divorce in intermarriage is approximately four times higher than when a Jew marries a Jew. In addition, the likelihood of personally experiencing anti-Semitism almost doubles from 19 percent for in-married Jews to 37 percent for intermarried Jews. Chances for a successful marriage can be increased if the non-Jewish spouse becomes a Jew-by-Choice. Professor Bruce Phillips of Hebrew Union College in his study of intermarried households found that the non-Jewish partner was often more receptive to the idea of conversion than the Jewish partner realized. Often the topic was not discussed because of hesitancy to “rock the boat” on the part of the Jewish partner.

In a recent study of Jewish singles by the Jewish Federation’s Jewish Singles Task Force, Tanya Labowitz, singles coordinator, found that the most common reasons given by singles in focus groups who have not met their significant others is that they haven’t met someone with common values, goals or interests. Singles reported that they had difficulty in meeting “quality” people. Single women in the focus groups often stated that they perceived that Jewish men prefer to date non-Jewish women who are blond and petite. Jewish single males said that Jewish women cared too much about men’s incomes. Telephone interviews of engaged to be married or recently married persons reported that singles often have unrealistic expectations about meeting a significant other. The consensus of these informants in serious relationships was: “to keep an open mind, not make rash decisions about others, do things of interest to them and be open to new experiences. Singles should look for others with the same goals and values.”

What kind of personal strategies could be used to improve one’s chances of Jewish marriage? Research has shown that most people find their spouses through family and friends. One of the easiest ways to increase the number of friends one has is through club or organizational membership and activity. The Los Angeles Jewish Population Survey found that baby boomers had the lowest reported rate of Jewish club or organizational membership among all age groups. One good tactic would be to become an active participant in a Jewish setting such as a synagogue, center, club or organization. The gender mismatch may be replicated within the Jewish club or organization, but the chances of finding a likely partner are greatly increased in addition to the known health and life benefits of the increased social interaction.

It’s a long held Jewish tradition to use migration or moving in order to search for a spouse (e.g. Isaac and Jacob). Does this work for moderns? It may, but remember the importance of having family and friends in order to make the connections in the new setting. Moving geographic locales often entails the loss of a lot of intangibles such as familiar surroundings, family, friends, neighbors, stores, services, entertainment, etc. The demographics are a national phenomenon and the boomer bulge exists nationally, though there are pockets where the sex/age ratio may be more favorable. Looking to marry a Jewish doctor? You may want to hang around places or be employed where there are lots of Jewish medical school students, interns, residents and fellows such as San Francisco. Looking for lonely single Jewish physicists? Almagordo, New Mexico may be the place for you. Major college campuses often have single Jewish undergraduates, graduate students and faculty who are quite marriageable, so knowing the local Hillel director can be advantageous.

A list of organizations and events that may be of interest to Jewish singles can be found on the Jewish Federation’s singles Web site at www.jewishLA.org/singles. For a pri
nted directory, contact the Federation’s singles coordinator at (323) 761-8348.

Is It a Match? Read More »

Interfaith Dating

Leave a Comment / Judaism, Old Stories /

Heather Levy, l9, a merry, self-confident young woman from Silver Spring, Maryland, has dated primarily non-Jewish boys, and believes that religion should not get in the way of falling in love. She acknowledges that when children come along in an interfaith marriage “it gets really hard,” but sees herself many years away from marriage.

Heather, who a year ago broke up with a non-Jew she dated for two-and-a-half years, says, “I find dating only Jews too limiting.” Her mother, Bev, sees the handwriting on the wall.

Bev’s older daughter, Laura, is married to Pat, who is not Jewish. Bev struggles with conflicting emotions, each of which have a strong claim on her actions. She is balancing the desire to keep peace in the family with a commitment to perpetuate the Judaism that was at the heart of her own upbringing. Having Jewish grandchildren is an assumption she has not relinquished.

“As long as Pat (Laura’s husband) respects our religion and allows and encourages Laura and their future children to practice Judaism, that’s all I ask,” says Bev. She admits that her assumption that her daughters would marry Jewish men was implicit and not articulated.

With intermarriage in the Jewish community at the 50 percent mark and rising, it’s obvious that the message “I expect you to marry a Jew” is being short-circuited in Jewish homes around the United States. In the overwhelming majority of these intermarriages, the non-Jewish partner does not convert to Judaism, and in nearly three-quarters of these interfaith homes, the children are not being raised as Jews.

Through the years, the Levy house on Huckleberry Lane was warmed by Passover and High Holiday Day celebrations, and by the girls’ childish bat mitzvah chants learned at their Hebrew schools.

Still, a generation and a world of divergent values separate Heather and her mother. Heather is growing up in an open society which extols individuality, perplexes young people with choices, and offers the freedom to adopt new belief systems. She springs from parents who belong to a generation which assumed from the givens of their own upbringing that their children would make the same choices regarding dating and marriage that they did.

Bev Levy’s father was Orthodox, and plain speaking characterized his message to her about marriage. “The bottom line was that intermarriage was unacceptable,” she recalls.

“My sister and I grew up knowing our parents would love us and support us in our choices. They did and it has made a lot of difference to us,” said Laura, now 27. When I told Pat I wanted him to meet my family, I said, ‘If you meet my family, you’ll know what I want out of life.'” Pat and Laura respect each other’s traditions. They make a Seder, and light Chanukah candles. They celebrate Easter and have a small Christmas tree. “Pat has learned that my identification with Judaism is less with the ritual and more with the traditions we celebrate as a family,” said Laura.

Jewish memories, Bev believes, are part of what makes a person who they are, and Pat and Laura are trying to create their own Jewish memories.

When Laura didn’t get home in time to light the Chanukah candles last winter, Pat did it himself, reading the blessings on the box as best he could, Bev says proudly.

“I expect you to marry someone Jewish” is one of the l0 things Rabbi Jack Moline of Agudas Achim Congregation in Alexandria, Virginia, believes parents should say more often to their children. Say it before they begin dating, Moline urges in “Tomorrow’s Harvest: Planting Seeds of Jewish Renewal. After that, it comes out like a judgment. “

“What do you say after you’ve said no,” asks Dr. Egon Mayer, professor of sociology at Brooklyn College, director of the Center for Jewish Studies at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, and author of numerous studies on Jewish intermarriage, outreach and conversion. “Because the no expresses a wish more than a powerful affirmation of ‘you must not or else.’ Once it becomes an issue, saying no is a weak response,” says Mayer.

For parents anxious about the future Judaism of their grandchildren, the wisdom inherent in all parenting advice applies: consistent articulation of values without apology.

Parents heed this advice when it comes to teaching children about hard work, honesty, compassion and loyalty. Yet somehow, plain talk about religion seems awkward to some parents, a contradiction of American values of tolerance and equality.

Yet psychologists, educators and rabbis underscore the value of religion in guaranteeing a child’s security, sense of well-being and rootedness.

For Ellen and Roy Rosenthal, of Potomac, Md., Reform Jews who gave their three girls a Hebrew school education but sent them to secular schools, Jewish identity is a matter of pride, the comfort and self-esteem they feel in being Jewish. Their oldest daughter, Dayna, is married to a Jew, and Roy believes that a young man’s religion places high on his daughters’ list of priorities.

Says Ellen, “I’ve always been proud to be Jewish, without apologies. We opted for public schools, but I always thought of my kids as little ambassadors, good examples for people who didn’t know much about Judaism.” Adds Roy, “We told our kids from the beginning — marriage is tough. Choosing a non-Jewish mate simply adds problems down the road. “

Asking young people to look down the road often brings such answers as, “It’s just a date.” “I won’t be getting married for years.” “We’ll bring up our children with no religion/both religions.” Parents who engage their children in discussions about interdating often confuse a frank and clear articulation of their values with seeking to win an argument, says Rabbi Alan Silverstein. “The absence of immediate victory,” he cautions, “should not be mistaken for failure. “

For Aileen Cooper of Washington, D.C., such discussions challenge parents to guide their children respectfully, to articulate values without angry prescriptions. “Judaism was always a strong underpinning for me and for Dave, who had a strong religious education. There was never a question about whether I would marry a Jew. It was never an issue.”

Cooper raised her children, Mitch and Amy, in Minnesota, where they were the only Jews in their elementary school class. She and her former husband, Dave, were active in the Reform synagogue, and the children went to Hebrew school at different stages of their lives. The family later moved to Alexandria, where the schools had a larger population of Jewish children.

“I never explicitly told my children not to marry a non-Jew, Cooper says. “I’ve tried not to undermine my kids’ ability to make their own decisions, especially by the time they reached college.” When her daughter’s relationship with a non-Jew was getting serious, she sat down with her and turned the discussion to consequences. “Believe it or not,” she says, surprise still lingering in her voice, “Amy and Carter had not talked about children. When they did, it turned out he didn’t want his children to be Jewish. The relationship ended.” The imponderables of Jewish identity and parent-child relations raise questions about the future of every young person. The story is hardly over for young people who interdate, says Aileen Cooper, reminding herself and others that teenagers need to stretch their wings, to experiment. “Interdating need not be a predictor for lifelong patterns of living.

Heather Levy, who dated primarily non-Jewish boys, and dropped out of B’nai B’rith Girls with the first press of high school activities, is a case in point. Powerful emotional connections link her to her early traditions. The satisfactions of working toward her bat mitzvah, and the flickering yahrzeit candle her mother has lit annually for her grandmother are among her cherished Jewish memories.

When she looked toward the time that she would leave the warm embrace of her home on Huckleberry Lane and depart for the University of Delaware, she pictured herself going to temple, “this time by her own choice.” Now that she is out on her own for the fir
st time in her life, she is dating a Jewish boy. She also attends Hillel — a place where everyone has a common history, values, traditions, yes, even stories and jokes. There she has found the community she all but deserted after her bat mitzvah.

Five Steps to Better Ensure a Jewish Marriage

1. Tell your children you expect them to marry someone Jewish. Explain why.

2. Let them know that this standard applies even to dating.

3. Start talking to them about this when they are very young. Don’t wait until their first date.

4. Create a strong, positive Jewish environment at home. Cook Jewish foods, practice Jewish rituals (especially child-oriented ones), participate in Jewish communal experiences, sing Jewish songs, use Jewish ritual objects, engage in Judaica arts and crafts, play with Jewish educational games and toys and create a Jewish family tree.

5. Enroll your children in Jewish activities, such as youth groups and summer camps, so that they have the opportunity to meet Jewish peers.

Excerpted from “It All Begins With a Date” by Alan Silverstein

Interfaith Dating Read More »

Mantle’s Home Run

Leave a Comment / Old Stories, Rob Eshman /

Spin the radio dial in any direction and most of what you come up with is just plain junk. One clear exception is Larry Mantle’s “Airtalk,” weekdays on public radio station KPCC. The show deals in a serious, accessible way with local issues, arts, culture high and low, even — gasp — ideas.

From the station’s new studio on the campus of Pasadena City College, producers Ilsa Setziol and Jackie Oclaray line up topics and guests for the program, then turn their legwork and research over to the show’s host. Mantle is in many ways ill-suited to be a radio talk show host in the nineties. He thinks before he speaks. He reads the books his guests have written. He grinds no political ax, and is careful to air opposing views. He asks startlingly perceptive questions.

The handful of other fine local radio interview shows — Michael Jackson on KRLA, Warren Olney and Michael Silverblatt on KCRW — don’t have the breadth of Mantle’s subject matter. One segment might explore early Christianity; the next looks at a school bond issue; the last dissects a controversial film. The range is staggering, and listeners might come away knowing more about Los Angeles River politics than they could have imagined, and be gladder for it.

One reason is the Mantle Moment. It seems to happen in every “Airtalk” interview when a guest — who undoubtedly thinks of the show as yet another in an unending chain of promo gigs — is stunned into silence by one of the host’s questions. The listener hears that moment as a distinct pause, like a four-count rest note. Mantle knows when it happens too — he says he can see it in his interviewees’ eyes. “I can see them thinking,” says Mantle during an interview with the Journal in his book-cluttered office. “I can see the wheels churning.” When Tony Hiss, the son of Alger, sat down for a chat about his book defending his late father against an espionage conviction, Mantle unloaded one on him: “Are you psychologically able to admit your father’s guilt if someone presented you with proof of it?” Dead silence. “No one had ever asked him that,” said Mantle.

In sheer numbers, Airtalk’s audience may seem unimpressive. About 25,000 listeners will tune into the program over its three-hour period. That works out to about one-third the audience of large commercial stations in town. But as Mantle unapologetically notes, “It’s quality, not quantity.” An awful lot of listeners who call in with comments and questions seem bright and articulate. Mantle suspects his audience, like that of many urban public radio stations, is disproportionately Jewish. “I think Jewish children grow up talking about issues,” he said.

And he should know. Mantle grew up in Hollywood, the product of deep L.A. roots. His grandfather, Arnold Hubka, was an LAPD detective in the Hollywood division during the L.A. Confidential era. At Hollywood High, Mantle says he hung out with the Jewish kids. “They were talking about the kind of things that seemed important,” he recalled. “If you didn’t know what was happening in the world, then shame on you.”

He attended Fuller Seminary to become a Prebsbyterian minister, but dropped out to follow his passion for radio. At KPCC, in 1985, he proposed the then-novel idea of a local public radio, general interest call-in show. “Why would you forego time with a scholar to put on Joe Average?” a station official challenged him. “Because,” Mantle replied, “Our audience is not Joe Average.”

The show has grown from a half hour to its current three. With Minnesota Public Radio expected to complete its major investment in the station by July 2000, Airtalk could have the extended resources of a 10-person local news team. That would put the gentle, unassuming Mantle, who is also the station’s news director, at the reins of one of L.A.’s top broadcast news sources. Mantle, who is 40 and lives in Pasadena with his wife Kristen, a speech pathologist, keeps his eye on “Airtalk” and stories that elude more mainstream, Hollywood-oriented media. “The Westside entertainment face of L.A., that image has usurped the entirety of the region,” says Mantle. ” There’s such a bigger, more complicated region, and I want to do right by it.”

Larry Mantle’s “Airtalk” airs on 89.3 FM KPCC weeknights from 4-7 pm. Author and lawyer Jonathan Kirsh, one of the Journal’s attorney’s, co-hosts the Book Talk section of “Airtalk” on Mondays at 6 pm; and entertainment attorney and Journal columnist Brad Pomerance co-hosts an entertainment industry segment at 6 pm on Tuesdays.

Mantle’s Home Run Read More »

Kirk Douglas — Bar Mitzvah Boy

Leave a Comment / Entertainment, Old Stories /

The 200-seat chapel at Sinai Temple was crammed with Hollywood luminaries of yesterday and today, when Rabbi David Wolpe called Issur ben Heshel to the Torah for his bar mitzvah reading and speech.

“Today, I am a man,” intoned 83-year-old actor Kirk Douglas in the prescribed fashion, adding, from the perspective of a long and rich life, “But it takes time to really become a man and assume your responsibilities in this troubled world.”

Douglas had decided some years ago to crown his return to his Jewish roots with a second bar mitzvah on his 13th birthday, following the traditional allotted life span of 70 years.

Draped around his shoulders was the same tallit he wore on the same date of Dec. 9 exactly 70 years earlier, when Issur Danielovitch, the son of poor, illiterate Russian-Jewish immigrants, marked his coming of age at the Sons of Israel synagogue in Amsterdam, New York.

Now, seven decades and 84 films later, his trademark dimpled chin was still jutting out, though his blond hair had turned to white. His slow and occasionally slurred words were a reminder of a stroke almost four years ago, which had left him literally speechless.

Douglas briefly recounted his movie career, when as a Nordic-looking hero “I killed so many Vikings and Romans, I knocked people out of the ring, and I shot it out with Burt Lancaster.”

He always knew he was a Jew, but kept that knowledge to himself, Douglas recalled, except for one link.

“I always fasted on Yom Kippur. I still worked (on the movie set), but I fasted. And let me tell you, it’s not easy making love to Ava Gardner on an empty stomach” — a remark greeted, in Hollywood fashion, with enthusiastic applause.

Douglas dates his return to Jewish observance and full identification to a helicopter crash in 1991, in which two men died. While lying in a hospital bed with excruciating back pains, he started pondering the meaning of his survival and his life.

“I came to believe that I was spared because I had not yet come to terms with my Judaism, that I had never come to grips with what it means to be Jewish,” he said.

Since then, he has become a conscientious Torah student, under the guidance of Rabbis Nahum Braverman of Aish HaTorah, Robert Wexler at the University of Judaism, and Wolpe of Sinai Temple.

In a second career as a writer, Douglas has turned to Jewish themes. Before the bar mitzvah ceremony, he read excerpts from his latest work, “Young Heroes of the Bible” to a Sinai class.

As any other bar mitzvah boy, Douglas was surrounded by his proud family, including Anne, his wife of 45 years, three of his four sons, and three grandchildren.

Although none of Douglas’s sons are Jewish according to halacha (Jewish law), or were raised as Jews, they increasingly “feel” Jewish, said their father. In a graceful luncheon talk, producer-actor Michael Douglas, the oldest son, easily inserted Yiddish and Hebrew expressions.

Kirk Douglas — Bar Mitzvah Boy Read More »

Connecting the Dots

Leave a Comment / Multimedia, Old Stories, Science & Technology /

A name and date in a yellowing ledger. An inscription on a crumbling tombstone. A birth certificate. A walk along a dusty street in an Eastern European village. A faded family photograph. Sometimes a newly discovered relative.

These are rich prizes for tens of thousands of Jews worldwide who dedicate time, energy, and sometimes considerable amounts of money, to researching and documenting their family history.

Interest among Jews in tracing their roots emerged in the late 1970s, but it has been in the decade since the collapse of communism that Jewish genealogy has come into its own.

For the first time since before the Holocaust, the fall of the Iron Curtain opened up ancestral Eastern and Central European Jewish homelands to travel and research.

Conditions are still difficult in some places, but people now can physically walk in the footsteps of their ancestors, as well as consult local documents such as birth, marriage, death and census records that were long kept off-limits to outsiders.

At the same time, the growth of the Internet opened up vast new resources, enabling roots-seekers to tap into ever-expanding databases and keep in touch via e-mail with fellow researchers and contacts in Eastern Europe, including newfound family.

Last August, for example, more than 1,200 people, the biggest crowd ever, attended the 19th Annual Conference on Jewish Genealogy in New York — and dozens more were turned away for lack of space.

In 1990, there were 39 Jewish genealogy societies worldwide. Today there are 75, with 8,000 registered members. They represent only a fraction of Jews who are interested in tracing their roots, however — some 30,000 people alone are registered with a “family finder” service on the leading Jewish genealogy Web site, www.JewishGen.org.

“I got involved when people started to contact me by e-mail asking me to check information, to do some research,” said Ladislau Gyemant, a Jewish and European history professor at Babes Bolyai University in Cluj, Romania, who carries out professional genealogical work in Romania and Hungary.

Jewish genealogist Miriam Weiner has been a major force in the movement. She negotiated agreements with post-Communist Polish and Ukrainian state archives to allow American Jews on-site access to genealogical data.

A former private detective, Weiner began researching her own family history more than two decades ago. She got so involved that she became the first certified Jewish genealogist — and turned her personal interest into a business.

Her home base in New Jersey is crammed with books, publications, maps, foreign phone directories, old photographs and postcards and other material about Eastern Europe. She lectures and writes a syndicated column, and has written and published comprehensive books on Jewish genealogical resources in Poland, Ukraine and Moldova.

Weiner regularly travels to Ukraine, Belarus, Poland and Moldova to carry out research for clients and also takes individuals or groups on research trips. In 1990, she organized the first Jewish genealogy tour to Poland that was officially sanctioned by the Polish State Archives and other state authorities.

For those who can’t make the trip, Weiner brings back copies of documents as well as photographs, souvenirs and videotapes of the ancestral town.

Sometimes, too, she puts American clients in touch with long-lost kin. This happens very rarely in Poland, where few Jews remain, but, she says, it is not uncommon in countries of the former Soviet Union.

Today’s Jewish genealogy phenomenon is part of a general boom. Last spring Time magazine ran a cover story on the genealogy craze, noting that millions of people of all ethnic backgrounds are looking for their roots.

This is related to a burgeoning sense of ethnic identity and awareness in recent years. “Roots” — the book by Alex Haley and the resulting TV mini-series in the late 1970s — played a major role, for example, in showing that genealogy was not the exclusive property of WASPs.

When “Finding Our Fathers” by Dan Rottenberg, the first how-to book on Jewish genealogy, was published in 1977, it represented the first time that many Jews learned it was possible to trace their family heritage — despite the ravages of the Holocaust, and the anonymity of earlier mass immigration.

“There is no question that the Holocaust is a major reason why so many of us want to trace our roots,” said Sallyann Amdur Sack, editor of Avotaynu, the International Review of Jewish Geneology, now in its 15th year of publication. “We have noted a sense of belonging to a long chain of history, one which Hitler came close to severing. In part, genealogical research represents a driven need to deny Hitler a victory.

“As the ‘help desk’ for the project, I have received countless inquiries of all varieties,” wrote Sack in Avotaynu. A woman in Canada “wanted to know why none of what she called ‘the major Jewish organizations’ have done this. Maybe the answer is that organized Jewish genealogy now is MAJOR.”

For more information, see the Web sites www.JewishGen.org, www.avotaynu.com. Miriam Weiner’s Web site is www.rtrfoundation.org

Connecting the Dots Read More »

Errol Morris/Mr. Death

Leave a Comment / Film, Old Stories /

Errol Morris, the pre-eminent documentarian of the bizarre, ambled onstage at the Bing Theater recently, looking scruffy. He was wearing a rumpled blue windbreaker, wrinkled slacks and a wicked smile.

It was appropriate posturing for a director whose films are often wickedly ironic: He has profiled, in turn, people who have hacked off their own limbs for the insurance money; pet cemetery owners; an autistic woman who designs slaughterhouses.

A crowded audience packed the Bing at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art this month to see Morris introduce his latest, acclaimed documentary, which also combines the grotesque with the absurd. “Mr. Death: The Rise and Fall of Fred A. Leuchter, Jr.,” depicts a self-proclaimed execution expert turned Holocaust denier; a geeky, middle-aged man who speaks cheerfully of “humane” executions or chiseling off samples of the crematoria at Auschwitz.

It’s a peculiarly Errol Morris brand of Holocaust film, one that has already earned rave reviews but may not be for mainstream consumption, the filmmaker concedes. “For years, no one wanted to pay me to turn this into a movie,” he told the LACMA audience just before the screening, with another wicked smile, “for reasons that will become obvious.”

During a telephone interview from his office in Cambridge, MA, Morris was more serious and thoughtful. He said he has long wanted to make a Holocaust film, something different from the others. He has been preoccupied with the Shoah since learning of the death of his relatives in the camps; in fact, the macabre has been a recurring theme in his films, in part because of his family’s tragic history, in part because death has been all too frequent in his life.

His father, a physician, died when Morris was 2; his brother died at the age of 40. Perhaps Morris was drawn to Leuchter, because the “execution expert” was, in his own way, trying to outwit death.

The director actually “discovered” Leuchter in 1990, when the “Florence Nightingale of death row” was featured in the Atlantic Monthly and in a front page article on capitol punishment in The New York Times. The story described Leuchter’s work on gas chambers and gallows but buried his Holocaust denial far down in the piece, “as if the two didn’t mix, like milk and meat in a kosher kitchen,” Morris, now 51, recalls.

The director went on to learn that Leuchter had traveled to Auschwitz in 1988 at the request of a notorious neo-Nazi, to “test” the crematoria for poison gas residue. Leuchter’s sloppy science found none, and his ensuing “Leuchter Report” became the Bible of the neo-Nazi movement. It also made him a pariah with prison wardens around the country, who canceled their orders for electric chairs and lethal injection machines. Leuchter subsequently lost his business, his money, his marriage and went into hiding. Morris, in fact, had to hire a private detective to track him down for an interview.

From the beginning, the director agonized over how to present Leuchter: He did not want to legitimize a Holocaust denier. Rather, he hoped that Fred would help him explore the mystery of the Holocaust — not whether it happened but how it could have happened. For Morris, vain, clueless Leuchter sheds some light on the mystery: He is, after all, a man who performs evil deeds but perceives himself as a hero, a humanitarian.

The filmmaker had to rework the documentary, however, after a disturbing screening at Harvard University more than a year ago. The original version included only a lengthy interview with Leuchter; after the screening, some of the students said they believed Fred’s theory, while others regarded Morris “as a Nazi, albeit a Jewish Nazi.”

The shaken director realized he had to add a number of interviews to the film to refute “The Leuchter Report.” Like “The Thin Blue Line,” in which Morris solved a murder mystery to save a man from death row, “Mr. Death” presents several investigative coups. With Robert Jan van Pelt, co-author of “Auschwitz: 1270 to the Present,” Morris traveled to the Auschwitz-Birkenau to discover a rare, explicit reference to the gas chambers in Nazi documents. He interviewed the Cornell-educated chemist who tested Leuchter’s crematoria chiselings, who proves Leuchter’s theory all wrong. He also found hatches to the gas chambers moldering in an abandoned Auschwitz storage room, but elected to leave those out of the film. “There is already overwhelming evidence about what happened at the death camps,” he explains. “I don’t need to ‘prove the world is round.'”

Even so, Morris acknowledges that not everyone will approve of his movie. There have been one or two complaints at every screening, he says, including the Polish non-Jew at LACMA who angrily admonished Morris and the audience for “laughing” at the Holocaust. Several people loudly called out to her that they were not laughing at the Shoah, but only at Fred.

Then there was Aaron Breitbart, senior researcher at the Simon Wiesenthal Center, who feared that viewers of “Mr. Death” might get the wrong idea about Leuchter. “Errol Morris portrays him as a simple, naive, even foolish man who was perhaps duped into being a tool of the Holocaust revisionists,” Breitbart says. “But in fact, Leuchter is intensely involved with the Holocaust deniers and has a real Holocaust denial agenda.”

The Center’s Museum of Tolerance passed on a chance to screen “Mr. Death,” in part, because of Breitbart’s critique; Morris bristled at the news. “The charge is that I provide a relatively benign Fred Leuchter for public consumption, but that’s just wrong,” he said, adding that “Mr. Death” screened at a Holocaust center at Clark University. “I think that what disturbs some people about my movie is that they don’t come out hating Fred. They don’t see him as Satan. They see him as a human being, if a vain, pathetic, confused human being. Maybe there’s a great need to see him as a monster, but to me, that’s just a mistake. Because then, what have you learned from Fred? You haven’t learned a thing.”

“Mr. Death” opens Dec. 29 in Los Angeles.

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The ADL Is Not Amused

Leave a Comment / Entertainment, Old Stories, Television /

The Anti-Defamation League is not amused by a “Saturday Night Live” satire in which cast members, posing as pop stars, said that Jews own all the banks and that Christians have forgiven them for “killing our Lord.”

And NBC has promised not to air the sketch again — maybe.

Following widespread protests by viewers, ADL head Abraham Foxman dispatched a letter to Rosalyn Weinman, NBC’s head of broadcast content policy, blasting the skit for reviving “anti-Semitic stereotypes at their worst” and called it “a lame attempt at humor.”

In her response, Weinman pledged to take the offending portion out of the sketch in reruns. However, in a subsequent statement, NBC said that the entire matter is “currently under review.”

Lorne Michaels, “Saturday Night Live” executive producer, also joined the fray, telling the Washington Post last week that he opposed Weinman’s pledge and charging that the ADL “trivializes the important work they’re supposed to be doing with this kind of nonsense.”

Whichever way the decision goes, Foxman said in a phone interview, “We won’t go to war with NBC and SNL, but we hope they will be more sensitive next time.”

The gradually evolving brouhaha started Dec. 4, when SNL parodied an earlier CBS special, “And So This Is Christmas,” with a mock promotion for an imaginary CBS show, called “And So This Is Chanukah.”

Featured in the CBS Christmas special were Celine Dion, Ricky Martin, Gloria Estefan and Babyface singing carols and recalling their childhood holidays.

In the SNL Chanukah skit, cast members and guest Christina Ricci appeared as faux pop divas Dion, Britney Spears and Mariah Carey singing fake Chanukah songs.

In the next scene, the faux Dion, played by SNL regular Ana Gasteyer, said that as a child she was told that Chanukah “is a holiday celebrated by the people who own all the movie studios and the banks.”

Ricci, as Britney Spears, said that at this time of the year, “We, as Christians, take time out to think about forgiving our Jewish friends for killing our Lord.”

The following Monday, Foxman said, “all the lights on our switchboard lit up. So we got a transcript of the skit and felt that it had crossed the line of legitimate satire.”

In his letter to NBC’s Weinman, Foxman noted, “We have worked with the Vatican and others for the last 50 years to educate against this poisonous doctrine and for SNL, in a lame attempt at humor, to revive this notion is unacceptable.”

At the same time, the ADL director recognized that SNL is a series designed “to poke fun at institutions and individuals in society.” He added that other parts of the Chanukah sketch, while perhaps offensive, “would fall into that legitimate irreverent category.”

In his counterblast last week, Michaels told the Washington Post that “what satire is supposed to do is provoke discussion.”

“We are not pro-drugs, but we make jokes about drugs,” Michaels said. “We’re not pro-ignorance, but we make jokes about ignorance, and the only way you can do it is by showing ignorance. The idea that any discussion of these ideas is out of bounds is idiotic to me.”

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Barak’s Political Life Depends on Syria Referendum

Leave a Comment / Israel, Old Stories, Worldwide /

The interviewer’s question to Prime Minister Ehud Barak on Israeli television over the weekend was clearly one Barak would have preferred to do without.

Yet, as he must have known, it was one that has been on everyone’s minds and lips here since the long-stalled Syrian-Israeli peace track suddenly burst back into life in Washington last week, when Barak held two days of talks with Syrian Foreign Minister Farouk al-Sharaa.

During the interview, Barak replied confidently that he would bring back from the negotiations with Syria “the kind of good, solid, advantageous agreement that will win a sweeping majority” in a referendum.

That, said the premier, was the only kind of agreement he would be prepared to sign.

On Sunday, Barak told his Cabinet that in early rounds of negotiations he would seek a core agreement with Damascus that covers the main issues facing the two sides. He also expressed his determination to pursue the Syrian and Palestinian negotiations simultaneously.

Despite his show of optimism during the television interview, there are many in the pro-peace camp who are concerned over the prospect of the looming referendum — the first ever in Israel’s history.

Barak’s supporters all recognize that the vote will in fact be tantamount to a mid-term election — and if Barak fails, he will have to resign.

Some in the premier’s camp feel, though few are prepared to say so publicly, that he will need a substantial margin to achieve a credible win in the referendum — something like the 56-44 percent edge by which he defeated Benjamin Netanyahu in the election last May.

This way he would not be prone to accusations from the right that his victory would be based on the votes of Israeli Arabs, while losing among the Jewish vote.

Though his supporters are buoyed and comforted by Barak’s own air of confidence, many cannot shake off their anxiety as they survey the opinion polls and the perilous state of the governing coalition.

The polls show the country divided fairly evenly on the issue of withdrawal from all of the Golan Heights in return for a full peace with Syria.

If anything, the anti-withdrawal camp seems to have the edge at this time.

Meanwhile, the National Religious Party has given notice that it will secede from the coalition the moment a land-for-peace accord is signed.

The assertion has come not only from the hard-line party leader, Housing Minister Yitzhak Levy, but even from a relative moderate like legislator Zevulun Orlev.

“The minute it’s signed,” Orlev said Sunday, “we quit.”

Barak has courted the NRP believing that its presence within his government gives him invaluable moral and political backing in the ongoing negotiations with the Palestinians.

The fact that the pro-settler NRP was recently prepared to swallow the dismantlement of several settler outposts in the West Bank in the context of the ongoing interim accords with the Palestinian Authority was seen as an important success for Barak in his effort to represent as wide a constituency as possible in his peacemaking efforts.

The NRP may well not be alone when it secedes over the Golan.

Yisrael Ba’Aliyah, the Russian immigrant party led by Interior Minister Natan Sharansky, is likely to leave, too.

Sharansky’s No. 2, Yuli Edelstein, is chairman of a pro-Golan lobby of Knesset members and is close to the West Bank settlers, too. And Sharansky himself has voiced profound misgivings over the evolving accord with Damascus.

Worse still, from Barak’s viewpoint, Sharansky has gone on record with the prediction that the accord will not win a majority in the referendum. Sharansky said over the weekend he believes the Russian immigrant community, many of whom live on the Golan, will vote against it.

It they do, it would make Barak’s task enormously harder.

After all, it was a significant swing within that community away from Netanyahu in the month or so before the election that gave Barak his convincing victory last May.

The conventional wisdom is that most of the Russian immigrants are hard-liners when it comes to territorial concessions.

Coming as they do from a huge country, they see no reason why tiny Israel should willingly divest itself of the geographical advantages provided by the Golan.

Nor do they have much respect for the peace promises of Moscow’s former client, Syrian President Hafez Assad.

If Sharansky comes out unequivocally against the accord, that in itself would presumably affect the votes of a considerable number of the immigrants.

These uncomfortable cracks within his coalition make it all the more important for Barak to ensure the solid support of his single largest coalition partner, the fervently Orthodox Shas Party.

Shas’s spiritual leader, Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, is thought to believe that the Golan is not part of the biblical land of Israel and, moreover, that land-for-peace is a worthy policy if it results in the saving of Israeli lives.

Without a doubt, Yosef has the religious and moral authority to ensure that all 17 Shas legislators vote in favor of an accord with Syria — if he himself decides to support it.

But can he ensure the votes, in a national referendum, of the much more disparate constituency of some 400,000 people who gave Shas their votes in the May election?

Not all of these people are fervently Orthodox; some are barely traditional and voted for Shas more for its platform as the party of the poor than for its religious message.

And as the party of the poor, Shas has pretty little to show its voters for the half-year it has been in Barak’s government.

With the prime minister trying this week to pass his budget bill into law before the year’s end, Shas leader Eli Yishai, the minister of labor and welfare, warned Monday that the budget, poverty statistics and the Syria referendum were all intimately linked in the minds of the many ordinary Israelis who are hard pressed to make ends meet.

The minister spoke just hours after the National Insurance Institute released figures showing an ongoing increase in the number of citizens living below the poverty line.

Granted, the figures refer to the Netanyahu years; however, as Yishai and his party contend, Barak’s economic policies have changed nothing in the lives of the worst-off sectors of the population. While the rich-poor gap in Israel continues to grow, the poor continue to get poorer.

Barak’s reply, echoed by Finance Minister Avraham Shohat, is that returning to economic growth is a long and painful process — one that can be dramatically accelerated by the early achievement of a comprehensive peace.

This reasoning, though theoretically impeccable, lacks cogency for many people, including many Shas supporters, who need to feel an immediate economic boost.

Barak’s Political Life Depends on Syria Referendum Read More »