February 4, 2009

Would you sell off your precious family jewels to save your house?

That’s how Brandeis University in Waltham, Mass., is presenting the quandary it’s in these days.

Nearly two weeks ago, the university announced that because of a severe budgetary crisis, it would be closing its art museum and selling its 6,000-piece art collection, including major works by Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns, Roy Lichtenstein, Robert Rauschenberg and more — great works by many of the greatest masters of 20th century art. The Brandeis collection could be worth as much as $350 million, according to initial estimates.

What those first reports didn’t say is that such a sale might be illegal — that many of those art works may have been donated to the school under binding agreements that would not allow them to be sold. The initial reports also didn’t mention that the art market stinks right now, so it would not be the best time to sell even the best pieces.

They also didn’t say that Brandeis has tried this before — selling its art that is — and failed because of community outcry.

So now the Massachusetts attorney general is reportedly looking into the conditions on the sale of Brandeis’ artworks, and meanwhile various revelations about the university’s plans have been dribbling out, even as petitions to save the art and to save the school’s Rose Art Museum — a small jewel in and of itself — have been circulating madly.

Hearing the call, Jehuda Reinharz, Brandeis’ president, has pulled back somewhat, saying that because the trustees are aware there may be some restrictions and that the art market is down, the school may not immediately sell all of the collection. What might go first, though, has not been revealed. Nevertheless, he said that the museum will close permanently this summer — its annual attendance, according to a report in The New York Times, is just 13,000 to 15,000, small by any museum standard. The space, argues Reinharz, could be better used for classrooms and a smaller gallery.

But it was in a statement quoted in The Times, that Reinharz showed his hand:

“Choosing between and among important and valued university assets is terrible, but our priority in the face of hard choices will always be the university’s core teaching and research mission.”

And that’s where he lost me.

When I think of Brandeis’ art collection, I am more than sentimental. I am fiercely protective, because for me — and many others like me — it was a revelation. I am a child of the Rose Art Museum. As an art history undergraduate, I served as an intern there, cataloging a part of the collection that had been recently donated. The works I inventoried weren’t masterpieces, but getting to hold those fine artworks in my hands, to measure them and examine their conditions, left a lasting impression. It set me on a path that led to a graduate degree in art history, several years as a museum curator and, ultimately, more than two decades as an art writer and editor.

I learned about art hands-on, in the way that a student working with mice in a lab might learn about medical science.

And this is why I believe this matter needs attention, even here in California. Because university art collections — be they at UCLA, USC or Cal State Long Beach or many others — all offer students and outside visitors alike a doorway into one special world of creative genius otherwise unfathomable on the college campus. To experience real art — not from a slide, not from a book, not from the Internet — is a visceral experience we cannot afford to lose.

And what’s most troubling here is that even in the hallowed halls of a top school like Brandeis, art is being treated as a commodity, as dollar signs divorced from the heart and soul it was intended to reveal.

But, what’s a school on the precipice to do?

Brandeis was badly wounded by the Bernard Madoff Ponzi scam. Some of its major donors were hit. One philanthropic couple, Carl and Ruth Shapiro, reportedly lost $545 million. The downturn in the stock market also has left the school’s endowment radically diminished, and Massachusetts law restricts the school to spend only gains, not capital, from its endowment.

So Brandeis says it is searching for a way to survive.

Last week, Peter French, Brandeis’ chief operating officer, gave an exclusive interview to the online journal, The Daily Beast, in which he said that the school has been “faced with the prospect of closing 40 percent of the university’s buildings, reducing staff by an additional 30 percent or firing 200 of its 360 faculty members.” Selling the art, he stressed, was a better option.

But is this dire situation really without any other recourse? Two days later, Reinharz told 200 students that he had no mandate to sell quickly, and that an upturn in the stock market, or generous donations (a hint?) might overturn the decision on the art, though he plans to close the museum, regardless.

In a climate of tough choices — and without fully reaching out to his community (why didn’t I get an alumni call?) — Reinharz has put his cards on the table.

Other institutions are no doubt also taking painful measure of their options. Yeshiva University lost an estimated $140 million from the Madoff fund collapse. Will it sell a precious treasure to close the operating gap?

Hadassah lost $90 million and already has let go most of its esteemed magazine staff. Will the publication survive?

Brandeis, without its art, would still be a good school, albeit diminished. Much of the collection was purchased long before the artists were famous, and the works have accrued in monetary value over a long period of time. But more than just assets on the balance sheet, they have added tremendous value to the school and its students. Many have been displayed in exhibitions worldwide, in addition to being used as teaching tools. All that would be gone.

So, let us all listen to the outcry against Brandeis and remember, as we look to cut our losses these days, that our decisions about what or who shall stay and what or who shall go will reveal much about our priorities and values as a community.

At the end of all this, when this crunch is over — and we know that even the worst economic crises do end — we will have to ask ourselves this question: In saving ourselves, did we lose ourselves?

“So,” the man in the lilac vest asks me by way of greeting, “Are you making any money these days?”

We’re at a Jewish Federation event at the USC campus downtown. It’s Sunday, and we’ve spent the morning listening to speakers talk about the many ways in which this world could become a better place.

At lunch, senators and City Council members have been introduced and honored, two dozen donors and dignitaries have been praised and appreciated, the mayor, having cut short his own birthday party to be at this luncheon, has delivered a keynote speech about faith and tikkun olam (repairing the world).

The man in the lilac vest is no stranger to the art of making money. And he knows how to give it away, as well. He and I have met only once before, a few months ago when I went to him asking for help on a matter in which we were both involved.

I wasn’t asking for a donation or offering to help raise money for one of his causes. He asked what I do for a living, and when I told him, he decided he wasn’t interested in what else I had to say. He didn’t care what profession I was in; what he really wanted to know is whether I am, to borrow a phrase from the language of the old country, “a person of consequence.”

In Persian, “a person of consequence” is one who has earned and deserves respect because of what he is or what he has done — because of his character, or his accomplishments, or his kindness to others, or any of those qualities that used to matter not so long ago, values that were upheld as cornerstones of a healthy society.

In its original meaning, it doesn’t denote wealth or social class — only what a person has done with that wealth or how humble he has remained, despite his superior station. But in the heady years of sudden wealth and swift ascent of the 1960s and ’70s, many Iranians confused wealth with character, vanity with class.

And because we lived in a place where might was right and in a world where money is might, the word “consequence” became synonymous with “wealth.” “A person of consequence” was someone with enough money to be reckoned with by other people of consequence.

America, too, is a place where might is right and where money can often buy respectability. Only here, “a person of consequence” is referred to in admiring tones by awestruck observers as a “successful person.” Here, within our own community, “a successful person” is someone who has made a lot of money and has the potential to make even more.

It doesn’t matter if he’s content or unhappy, if he’s a good parent, if he’s committed a single selfless act in his life. He can be “a doctor” who’s in Africa treating sick children out of the kindness of his heart (in which case he will be said to be wasting a perfectly good education), or he can be “a successful doctor” who has put eight years of medical training in the service of injecting weird chemicals into the lips of rich women. He can be “a journalist” (in which case he is wasting time till he grows up and finds a real job), or he can be “a successful journalist” (like Geraldo Rivera), who makes a lot of money for making asinine statements on cable television every night.

In America, you can be a person who broke the law and went to jail, or you can be “a successful” convict who robbed little old ladies of their life’s savings, did time and went back to give some of the old ladies’ money to good causes. Tikkun olam, indeed.

But what if, as happened to so many Iranians 30 years ago and is happening to so many Americans these days, the wealth disappears? Do successful people suddenly become failures? Do people of consequence become inconsequential?

Is that why the man in the lilac vest wants to know if I’m still making money before he even says hello to me?

But it’s not the intentions of men with interesting fashion sense or the semantics of the Persian or English languages that interest me (though they are, in a very transparent way, indicative of a people’s ethics); it’s what they imply about our standards as a people and about our culture as a whole.

I’m not concerned about a few hundred sharks on Wall Street or a few dozen wealthy Westside Jews who compete for social acceptance by one-upping each other on spending money on their children’s bar and bat mitzvahs. I’m concerned about a national worldview that reveres wealth and aspires to excess, a society where even the poor revel in accounts of the myriad ways the rich find to waste money. About a country that produces Donald Trump, then gives him permission to, indeed rewards him for and sits down faithfully every week to watch him, berate those who have less than he.

I’m concerned about us — Jews on Wall Street and in Los Angeles and elsewhere — and the extent to which we have bought into those values, adopted the language and the morals of consumerism at the expense of so much that has defined us over time: learning, creativity, kindness to our fellow men.

I’m concerned that we may have come more and more to define charity solely in dollar terms. That so many of us nowadays fail to teach our children that we were of consequence even when we lived in ghettos and were berated by others; that we survived those ghettos because we knew the true worth of a human being, the true meaning of success.

Long before we were rich enough to host luncheons at USC, before we were important enough to hobnob with mayors and senators, before we felt secure enough to form the Jewish federations of the world, we were scholars and artists, soldiers and scientists. We made the world a better place because of who we were and what we did, not because of what we could buy or give away.

I still have a job, yes, and I still make money by writing. But I’m concerned about a future in which, even on a day of community service, even as we preach tikkun olam, we gauge our own and each other’s worth by any measure but our humanity.

Gina Nahai is an author and a professor of creative writing at USC. Her latest novel is “Caspian Rain” (MacAdam Cage, 2007). Her column appears monthly in The Journal.

Names make a difference, and names must be used with precision, or they are abused.

Naming is the most human of deeds. It was how Adam ordered the animal world; it is how scientists control disease and identify phenomena.

I fear that we have spent a generation building up the moral capital of a word that signifies an event, and just as we have done with our monetary capital, we are in the process of expending moral capital with nothing to show in return.

Naturally, I am thinking about the word “Holocaust” and the assault on its meaning in contemporary times. A few examples:

• The International Association of Genocide Scholars has been going back and forth furiously about whether Israel committed genocide in Gaza.

• A Jewish member of the British Parliament has compared Israelis to the Nazis.

• The president of Iran denies the Holocaust. The president of Germany affirms it.

Over the past few months, I received urgent e-mails from my Jewish activist friends: “Help stop a second Holocaust,” they read, followed by an assignment:

– Send an e-mail to Israeli politicians not to join the government.

– Write President George Bush to halt the Annapolis Peace Talks.

– Vote for John McCain and not a Muslim friend of radical anti-Semites for president.

Again and again, Jewish activists portray us as on the brink of a second genocide, as if nothing has changed over the past decades, nothing has been learned, nothing has been done.

Permit me some words of clarity to preserve that moral capital. Permit me to speak frankly.

To those on the left, which is my natural political habitat, I must say bluntly Israel has the power to commit genocide. The imbalance of power between the Palestinians and the Israelis is overwhelming.

Israel has the provocation. If rockets were falling on homes in Bangor, Maine, or San Diego, I wonder how restrained the United States would be. If our cities were being bombed and our children killed, how long would we wait to respond overwhelmingly, disproportionately?

Israel has not committed genocide. It is really as simple as that.

Why do some want to depict Israelis as Nazis? Let us seek to understand their strategy, not to condone it or accept it.

For the Europeans, it is an alleviation of guilt and a soft-core denial of the Holocaust. If Israelis are Nazis, then the behavior of Europeans in World War II is less objectionable, less morally reprehensible.

Holocaust denial in the Muslim world is different from Holocaust denial in the West. The latter seeks to rehabilitate the good name of Hitler and to cleanse fascism of its bad name.

In the Islamic world, denial of the Holocaust seeks to undo what it regards as the most important outcome of the Holocaust, the establishment of the State of Israel. Its Holocaust denial is not about history, it is about wishing away, imagining away, a country that some would wish out of existence.

It combines two of the three elements that distinguish legitimate objections to Israeli policies from anti-Semitism — delegitimization and demonization. If Israel is Nazi-like, it is demonic; if the Israelis are the new Nazis, then Israel itself is illegitimate.

The Holocaust was the systematic, state-sponsored murder of millions of Jews that emerged as the sustained policy of the Nazified German state over 12 years and implemented as a national priority between 1941-45 in some 21 countries that were controlled or allied with Germany.

Whatever the events in Gaza are, they bear no resemblance to the Holocaust and the Israelis no resemblance to the Nazis. That does not make everything Israel does just or wise; it is merely restating the obvious.

There are questions to ask, important questions, ethical questions that must be faced in a new series of battles:

How are the Israeli government and its army to respond to an irregular force that hides within civilian institutions — schools, mosques and hospitals among them — and behind civilians precisely because it knows that the possibility of civilian deaths restrain the actions of a democratic state?

It is not sufficient to say that it cannot be done, because if that were the case, one would cede to these forces an unimpeded victory.

The conventional categories of warfare, the battles between armies, do not apply; conventional definitions of appropriate military behavior must be reapplied under these new circumstances. Some evidence is impressive. The Israelis made more than 90,000 calls. They also dropped leaflets and gave warnings to civilians in Gaza.

Some mistakes were also made. The Israeli army must be more precise; targeting must be more specific.

As to the Jews and our fear of a repeat of the Holocaust, I have a deeply uncomfortable feeling that Jews, committed and serious Jews concerned with the survival of the Jewish people, are increasingly responsible for trivializing the word “Holocaust” by using it as a rhetorical political tool, with little regard to its appropriateness or the consequences of its misuse.

I neither wish to condone or to minimize contemporary anti-Semitism nor to presume for a moment that Jews are not vulnerable today. To state that something is not the Holocaust, that a second Holocaust is not pending, is merely to restate the obvious, not to prescribe complacency.

The word “Holocaust” must be guarded, lest we undo the moral capital that we have accumulated and its importance to moral discourse.

It must be guarded from misuse by our enemies and from trivialization by some of our most ardent supporters.

Michael Berenbaum is director of the Sigi Ziering Institute: Exploring the Ethical and Religious Implications of the Holocaust and a professor of theology (adjunct) at American Jewish University.