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Jewish Journal

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December 15, 2010

A Yeshiva boy and Christmas

Leave a Comment / Dennis Prager, Opinion /

When I was 20, I spent my junior year in college in England. When classes let out for the last two weeks of December, I traveled to Morocco, where something life-changing occurred.

What happened was that I felt a longing, even an emptiness, I had never before experienced. Something was missing from my life, but I could not at first identify it. I knew it was not about being without friends or family — after all, I hadn’t been with family or friends in England for the previous three months. And it wasn’t about being alone — I had gotten used to traveling by myself.

This sense of missing something kept gnawing at me, until one day I realized what it was: I missed the Christmas season. I missed that time of year in America.

At first I denied it. Growing up in an Orthodox Jewish home and in yeshivas, I had obviously never celebrated Christmas. How could I miss something that I never had? And being so Jewish, how could I miss the quintessential Christian holiday? It seemed religiously wrong, maybe even sinful.

But I could not conjure up any other explanation: I was in a non-Christian country, and therefore I heard no Christmas songs, saw no Christmas decorations, and Dec. 25 was just another day.

I subsequently spent a lot of time reflecting on this. It made little sense to me: Why would a yeshiva boy miss the Christmas season?

I came to two life-changing realizations. First, though my yeshiva world did everything possible to deny the existence of Christmas — for example, we had school on Christmas Day, and “midwinter vacation,” as it was called, was at the end of January, not at the end of December — this yeshiva boy really liked the Christmas season.

And, second, this Jew, whose yeshiva upbringing taught him to think of himself only as a Jew, was in fact an American as well.

Though it took more than a few years to fully realize just how deeply American I was and how much I appreciated American Christianity, it was Christmas in Morocco in 1968 that first opened my eyes. And I was never the same.

My youth in New York had consisted of an Orthodox home, Orthodox shul, Orthodox yeshiva, Orthodox friends and Orthodox Zionist summer camp in which only Hebrew was spoken and which was entirely Israel-oriented. Of course, I was an American, but how was I supposed to feel American? Little in my life reinforced that feeling (except for my father’s stories and picture books from his years as an officer in the U.S. Navy during World War II).

In that Orthodox world, American identity was not denigrated, just ignored. Anything Christian, however, was sometimes denigrated and always avoided — with one exception: Every year, in my home, we four Orthodox Jews would watch the Christmas Mass from Rome. We were fascinated by the pageantry and ritual.

So, until I was an adult, my contact with Christians and Christianity was almost nonexistent — except for Christmas decorations and Christmas music. I remember as a youngster aching to speak to this ultimate Other — a Christian. What were they like, I wondered? Did they really only have to believe in Jesus to go to heaven? Did they not have to do anything? I remember having “Christian-envy” as a child: They could drive every day of the week and eat whatever they wanted and still go to heaven — what a deal!

The Morocco revelations — that I missed something Christian and that I felt quite American, not just Jewish — were, therefore, a jolt.

As the years passed, I not only made peace with my American identity and with my enjoyment of the Christmas season, I came to treasure that season and to fall in love with America and its distinct values (what I call the American Trinity: Liberty, In God We Trust, and E Pluribus Unum). While director of a Jewish institution — the Brandeis-Bardin Institute in Simi Valley — I volunteered to be a Santa Claus for the Simi Valley Rotary Club, of which I was a member. So, during the same week that I led Shabbat activities for a thousand Jews, I also went to my Rotary Club meeting (what is more American than the Rotary Club?), and I played Santa Claus at a local department store.

It is that season now, and I never fail to get goose bumps when I hear Burl Ives sing “Have a Holly Jolly Christmas,” let alone when I attend a live performance of Handel’s “Messiah,” surely the most glorious religious music ever composed. I love hearing people wish each other “Merry Christmas.” When my yarmulke-wearing children were younger, I used to take them to see beautiful Christmas lights on homes.

Those who wish to remove Christmas trees from banks and colleges and other places where Americans gather are not only attempting to rob the 90 percent of Americans who celebrate Christmas of their holiday, they are robbing this committed Jew, too.

And, to think, I first realized all this in a Muslim country.

Dennis Prager is a nationally syndicated radio talk-show host, columnist, author and public speaker. He can be heard in Los Angeles on KRLA (AM 870) weekdays 9 a.m. to noon. His Web site is dennisprager.com.

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Children’s library in jeopardy

Leave a Comment / Community /

Dozens of children (and their parents) flocked to The Jewish Federation of Greater Los Angeles building on a recent Sunday, drawn to a cheerful corner of the first floor where two performers led a tambourine-studded sing-along about barnyard animals.

Kids settled onto the carpet or their parents’ laps afterward as one performer, a young woman in bright clown makeup, read the story of “Jonah and the Whale.” The afternoon culminated in a “Yellow Submarine” dance party, as children accompanied the performers with toy whistles, trumpets, groggers and kazoos.

Sundays are known as family day at the Slavin Family Children’s Library. Throngs of local families gather at the cozy, colorful space for sing-alongs, story time, origami and the occasional holiday puppet party.

Tucked away past the security desk at the Federation’s Wilshire Boulevard headquarters, the Slavin Library was until recently a part of the former Jewish Community Library of Los Angeles. But it split off when the Federation closed the Community Library and merged its collection with American Jewish University’s (AJU) Jack M. and Bel Ostrow Library last year.

Since then, the Slavin Library has been quietly going about its business, a beacon of Jewish children’s literacy and family entertainment. But as the new year approaches, its future is uncertain.

The Slavin Library was funded by a grant from the Federation in 2010, but the agency still isn’t sure whether it will fund the library in 2011, according to Federation president Jay Sanderson.

“It hasn’t been utilized by the community in the way that we had hoped,” Sanderson said recently.

Getting families from far-flung neighborhoods to take advantage of the library has been challenging, he said. “There is not a tremendous number of young families that live in the general vicinity. If you live in Calabasas, are you going to drive to 6505 Wilshire Blvd. every week? Probably not,” he added.

Most of the Slavin’s 500 to 600 weekly visitors return regularly for ongoing programs such as “Book Time With Your Baby,” said Amy Muscoplat, one of the repository’s two professional librarians. Among the 10,000 items in circulation are books, CDs, DVDs and Jewish-themed computer games including “Shuki” and “Alef-Bet Adventure.”

Parents can check out tomes on arts and crafts for kids, family education, raising moral children and Jewish cookbooks. One wall offers inspirational books and films. For kids, there are colorful stacks of books on the Jewish holidays, Israel and Bible stories — some even in graphic-novel style.

David and Rachel Shirazi, of Beverly Hills, like to bring their infant and their 3-year-old to the library for the Sunday programs. “They have great books and CDs for parents, and the kids come here and have a good time,” David said.

“It’s introducing children to music, dance, reading,” added Rachel. “Education starts here, in a library.”

That’s been the Slavin Library’s philosophy since it opened in 2000. Under the umbrella of the Jewish Community Library, which the Federation founded and has run since 1947, the Slavin Library has held programs and circulated books to thousands of L.A.-area children. At 10 years old, Slavin is still the only free, public Jewish children’s library in Southern California, Muscoplat said.

Federation officials had said the Slavin Library would remain untouched in its current location after signing the deal to merge the Community Library collection into AJU last summer. The deal was signed amid vocal opposition from Community Library patrons calling for an independent library to be set up in a more accessible locale than AJU’s hilltop campus off Mulholland Drive.

The Federation had been cutting funds allocated to BJE (Builders of Jewish Education) to run its libraries for years. In 2008, just as a BJE task force was struggling to map out the future of the Community Library, AJU president Robert Wexler proposed a plan to absorb the books into an expanded public library housed at the university.

AJU’s Ostrow Library took in about 6,000 volumes from the former Community Library’s 30,000-volume collection, Wexler said recently. Many of the rest were duplicates and some had already been gleaned by the BJE staff for its own internal library, he added. An extensive trove of community archives was handed over to the Jewish Historical Society of Southern California.

The Community Library books became available at AJU in December 2009, bringing the Ostrow Library’s collection to 110,000 volumes. And patrons have been responding.

Circulation is up 10 percent since the Community Library merger, Wexler said. Ostrow Library also has 325 new patrons since last year — 40 percent of whom are public users, not clergy or students. Around the same time AJU acquired the Community Library volumes, the Ostrow Library stopped charging a fee for public borrowers.

The university is now raising funds to build a larger facility to house its expanded collection, which would double the space currently available for stacks, display areas and reading lounges. The new, nearly 20,000-square-foot quarters would be Wi-Fi equipped and feature event areas for visiting authors and other programs to get more community members in the door, Wexler said. AJU now has about half the $8 million needed for the project.

Overall, the Community Library merger still feels like the right move, Wexler added.

“We’re very pleased with the way it has gone, and people will really feel a difference when we have the new facility,” he said.

Meanwhile, the Slavin librarians don’t know what will become of the children’s collection if they don’t get funding next year to hold onto their Wilshire Boulevard space. The Federation supported the Slavin Library with a grant of about $75,000 in 2010.

The library is utilized not only by local Jewish families, Muscoplat said, but also as a resource for Jewish day school and Hebrew school teachers.

“There’s a real sense of community here,” she said. “Moms and dads and nannies all get to know each other, and children make new friends.”

Federation committees are still weighing different ways to engage young families in 2011, according to Sanderson.

One of those options is expanding a partnership with the PJ Library program, which sends Jewish children’s books and music to families by mail. The Federation is already offering that program to families in the San Fernando Valley. Sending out books by mail makes more sense than asking people to brave dense Westside traffic to reach one central location, Sanderson said.

“We’re constantly looking at the programs we’re doing based on the needs of the community,” he said.

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New Community Jewish High School buys Milken JCC campus

Leave a Comment / Community /

New Community Jewish High School (New Jew) has reached an agreement to purchase the four-acre Bernard Milken Jewish Community Campus in West Hills from The Jewish Federation of Greater Los Angeles.

Details of the deal, including purchase price, have not been released, and the purchase agreement is contingent upon the school renovating the campus and receiving the necessary permits from the city that will allow it to use the property as a high school.

The school hopes to move in by fall of 2012, though many details are still being worked out.

The JCC at Milken will continue to reside at the campus, leasing space from New Jew. The Federation’s Valley Alliance and various agencies currently on the campus have not yet determined if they will lease space at the facility, according to Mike Greenfeld, the president of the school’s board of trustees.

New Jew is returning to the home it first occupied when it was founded in 2002 with 40 students in a few classrooms. Today, the school has 400 students and for the past seven years has been renting space at Shomrei Torah synagogue in West Hills, and using sports and other facilities at the JCC at Milken.

Greenfeld believes the move will allow the school to attract an even wider audience.

“We’ll be able to enhance our art, music and science programs, as well as having on-site athletic facilities and an auditorium for dramatic productions and musical theater, all of which will enrich the academic experience for our students,” Greenfeld said.

The school will make significant renovations to the existing building footprint but does not plan to add new buildings right now. Greenfeld says a capital campaign will be rolled out within the next month.

Operation of the West Valley campus had been a source of tension for several years between Federation and the JCC. The West Valley JCC purchased the site in 1976, and it was later deeded to Federation, which in 1987 put $15 million into the new campus, and then more to restore it after it was badly damaged in the 1994 earthquake.

But in 2007, the pool was shut down because of an impasse between the JCC and The Federation about sharing the cost of operations for the campus. In 2009, they hammered out a deal in which the JCC would phase in to footing 65 percent of the operating costs and remain the primary occupant as long as it paid its share.

The JCC, as well as The Federation and New Jew, called the new agreement a win-win.

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Foxman talks ‘Jews and Money’ in Hollywood

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At the start of his remarks to the Los Angeles World Affairs Council on Dec. 8, Anti-Defamation League National Director Abraham Foxman acknowledged that his new book, “Jews and Money: The Story of a Stereotype,” (Palgrave Macmillan) might not be the best stocking stuffer. After all, the old idea at the book’s heart — that Jews are motivated primarily by money, that they use it to manipulate and control others — has roots that are completely intertwined with the origins of Christianity itself.

In addition to the charge of deicide — the misconception that Jews, not Romans, killed Jesus — the second pillar of anti-Semitism is rooted in the question of why Judas betrayed Jesus. Judas, Foxman pointed out, was no ideologue, nor was he a defender of the Jewish faith. “He sold [Jesus] out for 30 pieces of silver,” Foxman said.

The history that Foxman recounts in “Jews and Money” may be millennia old, but what inspired him to write this, his third book, was the torrent of anti-Semitic invective that emerged in the wake of the Bernard Madoff scandal. “All of a sudden, people forgot that Ponzi was not a Jewish name,” Foxman said.

Foxman explained that he hopes his book will help encourage those witnessing prejudicial and hate-filled speech not to stand idly by. It is the same reason he has spent nearly 25 years working at the helm of ADL. “The good news is,” Foxman said, “you’re not born a bigot; the bad news is, you learn to be a bigot. The second bad news: It’s much quicker to learn to be a bigot than to unlearn to be a bigot.”

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Foundation gives teachers respect

Leave a Comment / Community /

The Milken Family Foundation and BJE (Builders of Jewish Education) awarded four Jewish day school educators $15,000 prizes at their annual Jewish Educator Awards Luncheon last week, a feel-good event that brings out the Jewish community’s top brass and a wide swath of the denominational spectrum.

“This is a great day to be a teacher,” said honoree Dalia Golan, chair of the Hebrew department and a teacher at Harkham Hillel Hebrew Academy. In accepting the award, she described her role as a teacher to be helping children write the stories of their own lives.

Deborah Cohen, who teaches second grade at Abraham Joshua Heschel Day School, saved her biggest thank you for her students. “They’re the ones who cause me to love every day and reward me with each of their successes,” she said.

Louis “Coach Sam” Schwerdtfeger, dean of students and athletic director at Valley Beth Shalom Day School, offered a taste of the energy and warmth he brings to his students. As he described how he encourages his students to take risks and discover themselves, he stopped and asked, “How am I doing? Am I doing all right? I couldn’t get through this without crying when I rehearsed at home!”

Debra Sokolow, visual arts teacher and founder of the Architecture and Design Institute at Milken Community High School, thanked the school for recognizing the educational value of artistic expression — from video documentaries to a mosaic glass ark wall in the new middle school chapel. “There is no greater joy than watching a person learn the creative process,” she said.

Richard Sandler, chairman of The Jewish Federation of Greater Los Angeles and executive vice president of the Milken Family Foundation, described, with the help of slides and videos, the emotional impact of the surprise announcements of the prizes at the four schools.

The foundation also recognized two students who won the first Jewish Educator Award Student Essay Contest. Ilan Atri, an eighth-grader at Harkham Hillel Hebrew Academy, won in the middle school category for the essay he wrote about his Jewish hero — his father. Menny Chazanow, a 10th-grader at Yeshiva Ohr Elchonon Chabad, won in the high school category for an essay that highlighted compassion as the defining attribute of a Jewish leader.

The students received $500 each to distribute to a charity of their choice, and their schools won $1,800 unrestricted grants.

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Spielberg’s righteous foundation helps fund the Library Foundation’s ALOUD Interfaith Series

Leave a Comment / Community /

In 2008, Steven Spielberg’s Righteous Persons Foundation donated $100,000 to the Library Foundation of Los Angeles to buy a collection of Jewish books for the Los Angeles Central Library.

Recently, the foundation gave the Library Foundation $30,000, to help pay for a speaker series that brings together clergy and prominent members of the Jewish, Muslim and Christian communities for free, public discussions through ALOUD at Central Library’s Interfaith Series, which the Library Foundation, an independent nonprofit, holds at the downtown library.

The ALOUD interfaith series started in April 2010. One recent event featured Rabbi Laura Geller of Reform congregation Temple Emanuel of Beverly Hills in a panel discussion following a screening of excerpts from the documentary “Finding God in the City of Angels.”

On Jan. 12, Dr. Izzeldin Abeulaish, a Palestinian physician,  will be featured. He is best known for his call for reconciliation between Israel and the Palestinians, despite losing his daughters in an Israeli attack in Gaza.

Louise Steinman, director of Cultural Programming for the Library Foundation, said the ALOUD interfaith events, which typically feature a lecture and Q-and-A, help build understanding between people of different faiths.

“There are so many conflicts that stem from religious misunderstanding,” Steinman said, “so [we like] the idea of putting people together in a public situation where we can hear each other’s point of view.”

Spielberg founded the Righteous Persons Foundation in 1994, shortly after directing “Schindler’s List.” According to the foundation’s Web site, the grants support “efforts that build a diverse and vibrant Jewish community in the United States. The foundation awards grants typically from $25,000 to $50,000.

Other recent recipients of the foundation’s funds include the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival and “Israel: Portrait of a Work in Progress,” a photography project.

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Calling all Jewish boys: Scarlett Johansson will divorce

Leave a Comment / Uncategorized /

As it turns out, hasty Canadian weddings do not make for long and happy marriages, as Scarlett Johansson has learned. The blonde bombshell married actor Ryan Reynolds that way little more than two years ago, and TMZ is now reporting that the couple will divorce.

Bad news for the broken-hearted; good news for Jewish males who can now at least fantasize that a newly single Scarlett is back on the market.

 

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L.A. leaders join Rabbis Without Borders

Leave a Comment / Community /

Three Los Angeles rabbis are participating in Rabbis Without Borders, a national program aimed at helping rabbis find innovative ways to make Jewish wisdom relevant to people who may never enter a synagogue.

Rabbi Tsafreer Lev, director of the Jewish studies department at New Community Jewish High School; Rabbi Anne Brener, a psychotherapist and grief and spiritual counselor; and Rabbi Sherre Hirsch, author of “We Plan, God Laughs,” all attended the first of four seminars in New York in October. More than 80 rabbis applied for 22 spots in Rabbis Without Borders, a two-year-old program sponsored by the New York-based Clal, The National Jewish Center for Learning and Leadership.

“Clearly, rabbis recognize the need to apply their skills in new ways to reach a wider audience, and make the teachings and tools from Jewish wisdom more accessible,” said Rabbi Rebecca W. Sirbu, director of Rabbis Without Borders. “This unique program offers that kind of support, helping rabbis to better communicate in both familiar and new venues, and to make Jewish thought and practice a real resource for the American public.”

Lev said the program gave him tools he can immediately apply within his setting — a nondenominational high school that values pluralistic thinking and novel approaches to Jewish engagement.

“For Judaism to be effective, it needs to speak to everyone. There is great wisdom to share, and if you share it outside of your usual spaces, it can do wonderful things by adding to the body of wisdom in the world,” said Lev, who previously served at the Conservative Temple Aliyah in Woodland Hills.

Brener, who is a faculty member at the transdenominational Academy for Jewish Religion, California, and author of the book “Mourning and Mitzvah,” said she is grateful for the opportunity to brainstorm with others who, like her, do not operate within a conventional rabbinic framework.

“Given the economic times and given the changing demographics, we need to be looking at what the Jewish community might look like in the future, and how do we service it,” Brener said. “There is a subtext of how do we keep people in the Jewish fold, but I also think it’s a question of how do we serve these people who are outside the boundaries of the community for whatever reason.”

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Student raises $3,500 for Vista Del Mar

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Jack Ginsberg, a student at Paul Revere Charter Middle School and Magnet Center, raised $3,500 collecting coins in jars to help buy sporting equipment at Vista Del Mar, a social service agency that offers community programs for children and families, including foster care and psychiatric residential treatment.

Ginsberg first raised $500 for Vista Del Mar as his bar mitzvah project last summer, which took place at the Reform Leo Baeck Temple.

When his current school year started, he wanted to continue helping the agency.

“I kind of slacked off during the bar mitzvah project,” Ginsberg said. “I was upset about that, and I wanted to do something to help out my community more.”

Ginsberg sought approval from school administrators and teachers to put a collection bottle placed in each of the 88 classrooms at his school,  and the student council member routinely made announcements on the school’s PA system to spread the word about his efforts.

Vista Del Mar’s annual budget — an estimated $36.5 million, according to Linda Karchem, director of volunteer programs — comes mainly from state and federal agencies, including the Department of Mental Health and the Department of Children and Family Services. Karchem expressed gratitude for the gift and said Vista Del Mar had already used some of the funds to buy basketballs for the center’s residential program, which provides 48 beds for children ages 12 to 18 with emotional and psychological issues. The rest of the money will go to other sporting goods, she said.

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History of Hollywood Jews to show in Vienna

Leave a Comment / Entertainment, Hollywood, Hollywood Jew /

Werner Hanak-Lettner, a curator for the Jüdisches Museum Wien (the Jewish Museum Vienna) has lately been asking a lot of people the question, “Does Hollywood feel like a Jewish place?”

The simple answer could be “not really.” But according to Hanak-Lettner, who is organizing a major European exhibition on the first 100 years of Hollywood, that response would be a superficial reading; the impressions made by movies and celebrity magazines tell only part of the story of how Hollywood created a new paradigm in the American mythos.

“Hollywood is really one of the main cultural histories of the 20th century,” Hanak-Lettner said over breakfast at Hillcrest Country Club, itself a bastion of old Hollywood mystique. “And it is something that is big here in Los Angeles, but it is also big in the world.”

The impetus behind the exhibition, “Bigger Than Life: Hollywood’s First 100 Years,” stems, unsurprisingly, from post-Holocaust contrition. “After the Holocaust, there was a commitment made by the states of Austria and Germany to tell the Jewish history of the various cities, so a wave of Jewish museums was created,” he said.

The nascent Jewish cultural revival is an attempt to reclaim a lost history, but, also, a history that was never fully acknowledged to begin with. “[In high school] we were taught about the Holocaust, but we were not taught Jewish history. When you were talking about Jews and Judaism, it came in the moment when history class was talking about extinction and murder; and if you learn about Jews only in the moment when they are dying, they remain dead bodies for you.”

So Hanak-Lettner, who is not Jewish, came to Los Angeles to track down the progeny of Hollywood legends. He met with a Laemmle, a Zukor and a Warner, and he was desperately looking for a Marx — that is, Groucho’s son Arthur. He also told me he wanted to find the bat that the Bear Jew used to pummel Nazis in Quentin Tarantino’s “Inglourious Basterds.” That would be a hit item for the exhibition.

Hanak-Lettner is one of five curators at the Jewish Museum Vienna, where he has been a presence since its inception in 1993. He received his doctoral degree from the Universitat Wien (University of Vienna) where he studied history, film and theater. Hollywood has always captivated him, he said, because it is about “immigration, integration and new media” — themes as relevant today as they were 100 years ago, when a bunch of Eastern European Jews well versed in the textile business traded in their shmattes for movie stars.

Hollywood’s founders went West, Hanak-Lettner said, because the East Coast was code for Jewish emigration. Way out West, they could not only become American, they could envisage the ideal of what it would mean to be American.

“They created not only a whole history, a whole industry, but they also recoined the American myth and gave images to it,” Hanak-Lettner said. “It isn’t very often that somebody comes from the outside and has the eye for what is the core of the society and can make [it into] a narrative that then is accepted by the whole.”

But that’s the classic Jewish story, isn’t it? The tale of the outsider struggling to get in; the plight of the few overcoming the powerful. And it’s biblical: Joseph’s rise to prominence in Egypt is an apt parallel for what Hollywood meant to American Jews. Hollywood turned the Joseph story into the quintessential American tale; after all, who is more “American” than Joseph — that rugged individualist who is cast out, friendless and penniless, but who emerges the Grand Vizier of Egypt? It is the American dream co-opted by Jewish legacy.

But as much as Hollywood’s founders tried to hide their identities, they couldn’t escape the contents of their kishkas. So they simply refashioned the Jewish story as an American one.

“It is not only that immigrants came here and made movies,” Hanak-Lettner said. “It’s that these films were made for immigrants and taught them how to behave in America.”

Hollywood’s first sex symbol — the original femme fatale — was Theodosia Goodman, or Theda Bara. She was born in Ohio to a tailor and his Swiss wife, but Hollywood sold her as an exotic Arab princess: the Egyptian-born daughter of a French actress and an Italian sculptor.

All of which is a faint echo of the truth. But it was the only way for Jews to go from the gas chambers of Europe to the golf course at Hillcrest.

From his non-Jewish, European vantage point, Hanak-Lettner marvels at the existence of a Hillcrest. “Do you have the feeling … do you feel somehow European in this place?” It would be deliciously ironic if Hillcrest’s Jewish founders re-created European opulence to assert their new power. “[Hillcrest] is really a story of Jews gaining place here in Los Angeles, you know, getting more important.”

There is something undeniably tribal — and paradoxical — about Hillcrest, which was founded, and populated mostly by Hollywood Jews, in the 1920s, when no other social clubs in Los Angeles permitted Jewish membership. Today it requires prestige to “belong” — the outsiders become insiders.

“Hollywood helped Jews find a place in America, and it is a very special cultural life that Jews gave to Hollywood and to Los Angeles: Just look at the historic sight of Wilshire Boulevard Temple with the murals inside. Nobody else in the world, even in a Reform synagogue, has murals like that. There you feel [a sense of] some sort of kingdom that was once here.”

It was Warner Bros. chieftain Jack Warner who commissioned the biblically inspired murals in 1929, and they are emblamatic of Hollywood’s importance to the Jewish community, a reminder that the Kingdom of Hollywood was a Jewish response to the modern world.

“A guy once said to me — a musician working in TV — ‘It would be interesting to work in Hollywood, but you have to be a Jew.’ I said, ‘I don’t believe that, because I know other musicians in Hollywood who aren’t Jewish; you just have to face [the fact that] they invented it!’ ” Hanak-Lettner said.

From his perch in a chandelier-bedecked dining room overlooking Hillcrest’s magnificently manicured golf course, he concluded, “I don’t feel bad if lots of producing people are Jewish here. I mean, they came here and did all this, so why should it be different after 100 years?”

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