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Jewish Journal

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April 18, 2012

Opinion: Riot/Ride

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Last Sunday, my wife, our daughter and I hitched our bikes to our car, drove toward downtown and parked just across from MacArthur Park, otherwise known as Langer’s Deli adjacent.

There, we hopped on our bikes and joined more than 100,000 other bicyclists, walkers, stroller-pushers and roller skaters for the latest CicLAvia.

I’ll try to describe it, but, trust me, you had to be there.

Ten miles of L.A. streets from southeast Hollywood to Boyle Heights were closed to automobile traffic. We were able to leisurely ride toward downtown on Seventh Street, turn onto Spring, through El Pueblo de Los Angeles and Little Tokyo, and then over the Los Angeles River.

A sea of L.A. humanity flowed with us — of all colors, shapes and sizes. Occasionally we’d pass DJs blasting trance music, or mariachi bands, and even groups playing giant games of street chess. For several hours we got to take in the unhurried beauty of L.A.: the boat-like Coca-Cola Building, the art deco Oviatt Building, the view of the snow-capped San Gabriel Mountains from atop the Fourth Street Bridge. 

If the Los Angeles Riots, whose 20th anniversary we mark on April 29, realized the darkest vision of what L.A. could become, CicLAvia represents the brightest.

“Twenty years ago, we were rioting in the streets,” Aaron Paley, president of Community Arts Resources (CARS, ironically) and a founder of CicLAvia told me, “and now we’re riding bicycles through them. It is radically different. That’s why I am so inspired by how things have changed in 20 years.”

The idea for CicLAvia originated in Bogota, Colombia, where Ciclovia (Spanish for “bike path”) is now a weekly event that takes over some 80 miles of city streets and draws a million people. Paley first heard of it in 2008 and joined forces with another group to try to bring it to Los Angeles.

Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa got behind the project after one meeting, and his support smoothed the way for the ultimate car city to host the first CicLAvia on Oct. 10, 2010. Today, it is the largest open-street, car-free event in America.

For Paley, it was the realization of a lifelong dream to find the one event that would bring together the city he loves. For years he imagined calling on all Angelenos to gather by the Los Angeles River. Then, he realized, “The river is just one place, but the streets are everywhere.”

Yes: The streets that so often divide us, annoy us, frustrate us — on CicLAvia, they entertain and connect and amuse us.

“We proved that we can all come together,” Paley said.

That, in a sentence, is the story of post-riot L.A.

In our compelling panel discussion put together by Executive Editor Susan Freudenheim and excerpted in these pages, Joe Hicks and David Lehrer cite a study that named Los Angeles the least-segregated city in America.

But most of the other panelists argued that while that may be factually true, L.A. often doesn’t feel that way. Our lives butt up against one another, but they do not intersect.

“It depends on where you’re talking about,” countered civil rights attorney Connie Rice. “It’s gotten more complex. Have we desegregated? Yes, we’re probably the best-desegregated big city, other than New York — but there are very few what I would call integrated communities.”

One possible solution, Rice suggested, is for the private and public sectors to engage schoolchildren in drama, arts and music together, across geographic boundaries:

“You learn music at symphony hall or the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion,” Rice said. “But you have a school from Granada Hills, a school from El Segundo, the South Bay, from Watts, and those four areas learn music together.

“When kids learn together something that’s fun — art, theater or they do sports together or mix up the debating teams, the decathlon teams, by income and by neighborhood — you naturally get a mix that exposes them to one another, and a lot of the walls come down.

“I’ve never understood why we don’t use the rich civic and arts infrastructure that we have to help our kids learn about one another and really achieve integration.”

In other words, a kind of educational CicLAvia.

Meanwhile, Paley and the organizers of the street-level one plan to build on its success to make it a monthly event, rotating among different L.A. neighborhoods. 

Paley, by the way, is also the organizer of Yiddishkayt LA, the annual citywide festival celebrating all things Yiddish. What’s the connection between bicycles and Yiddish?

“Me,” Paley said.

That, I suppose, and the idea of connection itself: a people to its past, and people to one another. 

At the end of CicLAvia, I rode back to where our car was parked on Alvarado.

People really need to wake up to the possibilities of this city, I thought. They just need to wake up.

As if my little reverie had an Elmer Bernstein soundtrack, I suddenly heard the blast of a shofar. I thought it must be a weird car horn, but there it was again — definitely a shofar.

I looked around and saw a man not 20 feet away, on the sidewalk. He was Latino, short and squat, and dressed in a too-large cheap blue suit. And he was blowing a long, twisted Yemenite shofar. He let loose a chain of staccato bursts, sounding more Herb Alpert than Yom Kippur, then he let the thing fall to his side and shouted in Spanish, “Wake up! Jesus is coming. Wake up!”

Except for the Jesus part, I had to agree with him. We do need to wake up, and CicLAvia is a great beginning. Let it be only the beginning.

The next CicLAvia is Oct. 14. For video and more information, visit this column at jewishjournal.com.

Opinion: Riot/Ride Read More »

Care about Iran? You’re more likely to vote Romney

Leave a Comment / Iran Trend SUB, Is Featured?, Israel, Middle East, News, Rosners Domain-mobile, United States /

Take a quick look at the following two tables from PEW’s recent report on the politics ‎of Election 2012. These are the topics voters think are important by order:‎

Photo

And these are the same priorities divided by party:‎

Photo

Note these things:‎

‎1.‎ While voters preferring Obama say they care about foreign policy more than ‎Romney-leaning voters (+6%), all of the issues Obama voters really care most ‎about are domestic issues.‎

‎2.‎ Weirdly, while Obama-leaning voters say they care about foreign policy, ‎Democratic voters are the least interested in foreign policy. Forty-nine percent ‎of Democrats list this topic as “very important” compared to 58% of ‎Republicans (and 50% of Independents).‎

‎3.‎ ‎ Foreign policy aside, those who care much more (+14%) about Iran would ‎vote for Romney.‎

‎4.‎ But the real gap on Iran is not between Republicans and Democrats. He least ‎interested group is Independents (43%, compared to 56% of Republicans and ‎‎47% of Democrats).‎

‎5.‎ In fact, Iran is the only significant “foreign” and “security-related” topic on ‎which there’s a meaningful gap between Obama-leaning and Romney-leaning ‎voters. Terrorism, as the pollsters of PEW report, “has declined in importance ‎as a voting issue… As recently as August 2010, 79% of Republicans and 71% ‎of independents said the issue of terrorism would be very important to their ‎vote in that fall’s midterm election. Today, 66% of Republicans and 52% of ‎independents rate terrorism as very important. Democrats also view terrorism ‎as somewhat less important than in previous campaigns (60% today, 68% in ‎‎2010). ‎

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Orthodox group’s ethical seal gains ground

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Before Gilberto Escobar, the head baker at Bibi’s Bakery and Cafe, starts preparing the pita, cinnamon rolls, challah or anything else that comes out of the kosher bakery’s ovens, first he has to get through what he called the hardest part of his job.

“Levantarme” (getting up), Escobar said.

Starting a shift at 3 a.m., six days a week, doesn’t sound easy, but at least the 27-year-old baker knows he’ll be treated fairly when he gets to work.

In March, the Pico Boulevard bakery became the 100th kosher-certified business in North America and the 10th in Los Angeles to receive the Tav HaYosher, an “ethical seal” issued by the five-year-old Modern Orthodox Social Justice organization Uri L’Tzedek.

Food earns the kosher designation for the ingredients it contains and for following strict laws of preparation. The Tav, on the other hand, is something different — the seal indicates how a kosher-certified restaurant, caterer or supermarket treats its employees. The Tav is awarded only after the staff and volunteers of Uri L’Tzedek ensure — through interviews with a business’ owners and its employees, and by inspecting its records — that workers’ hours are tracked accurately, that they get to take the breaks to which they’re entitled, are paid overtime when they work more than 40 hours in a week and are generally treated in accordance with the laws of the land.

“It’s the Jewish community’s way of saying that we don’t only care that the food is kosher,” Rabbi Shmuly Yanklowitz, president and founder of Uri L’Tzedek, said. “We also care about the workers’ welfare.”

While California law mandates both the length and number of breaks bosses give their workers, many restaurants — including kosher restaurants — don’t comply.

“Meal breaks and work breaks are issues” in the restaurant business, said Michael Feldman, an attorney who specializes in labor law and is a member of Uri L’Tzedek’s Los Angeles Advisory board.

According to a 2011 survey of more than 500 restaurant employees in Los Angeles, 54 percent reported having worked more than eight hours without a break; 44 percent reported having been denied overtime payments.

“The bigger the business, the less chance that you’re going to have some of the more egregious stuff, like minimum-wage violations or overtime violations,” Feldman said.

But the kosher-certified eateries and caterers that are considered for the Tav are all small businesses. For these owners, paying workers time-and-a-half for every hour worked each week beyond 40 hours can seem an expensive proposition.

Dan Messinger bought Bibi’s at the beginning of this year from an owner who did not pay workers overtime.

“I did the math — it’s going to cost me more money, there’s no question,” Messinger said. “But I didn’t think that I would feel good about the business I was running if, for X hundreds of dollars a month, I’m not willing to run it the right way.”

The Tav is modeled on a similar program run by an Israeli social justice organization and is intended to become a guide for consumers, to encourage them to patronize businesses that adhere to ethical standards.

This is not the first effort to bring an increased awareness of ethical treatment of workers to Los Angeles’ Jewish community. In 2008, the raid by federal immigration officers on the Agriprocessors kosher meat-processing plant in Postville, Iowa, brought attention to numerous health, safety and labor violations that had been ongoing at what was then the country’s largest kosher slaughterhouse. In response, a group of Orthodox rabbis in Los Angeles attempted to launch an “ethical labor initiative,” called Peulat Sachir, a name drawn from the directions in Leviticus for the proper treatment of workers.

The program was very similar to Uri L’Tzedek’s Tav. The rabbis sought employers in the Jewish community — in businesses and nonprofits, as well as synagogues — who would sign a pledge to treat their workers fairly. In exchange, the rabbis would give the place of business a Peulat Sachir mark of distinction. 

But the program didn’t catch on.

“We got a few — a handful — of institutions on board,” said Rabbi Yosef Kanefsky of B’nai David-Judea, who helped spearhead the short-lived initiative. “But we couldn’t get beyond a handful.”

Kanefsky has since embraced the Tav initiative and is a member of Uri L’Tzedek’s Los Angeles rabbinic advisory board.

“The Tav HaYosher is the best thing that could have happened to Peulat Sachir,” he said.

Rabbi Elazar Muskin of Young Israel of Century City, who was also involved in the effort to launch Peulat Sachir, said that even though that program didn’t gain broad traction, it did lead to some increased understanding of the importance of workers’ rights in the synagogues of the rabbis who backed the program.

“We undertook an independent review of the shuls,” Muskin said, that ultimately revealed the staffs were being compensated and treated lawfully.

Not so for some kosher-certified restaurants in Los Angeles.

“We’ve had some owners say to us, ‘Oh, yeah, we don’t meet those standards,’ ” Yanklowitz said of his organization’s work promoting the Tav.

Which is why, for Yanklowitz, Messinger’s decision to bring Bibi’s into compliance is particularly remarkable.

“When an owner changes their standards in order to get this seal — this is where a basic act like consumption becomes an act of social justice,” he said.

Yanklowitz said that the organization hopes to train a new group of volunteer compliance officers in the coming months, but in March, Yanklowitz himself interviewed the workers at Bibi’s.

Standing around a large commercial-grade mixer, he questioned Escobar — who on this day had spent the previous six hours baking hundreds of hamantashen for Purim, which was less than 48 hours away. Yanklowitz also interviewed two other employees, asking about the work conditions at the bakery.

“How often can you take a break?” he asked Escobar.

“He’s the backbone,” said Eric Melendez, another Bibi’s employee, translating for Escobar. “He takes breaks whenever he can.”

Not satisfied, Yanklowitz pressed on. “But on a typical day,” he asked Escobar, “will you take a break?”

Melendez translated the question, then relayed his co-worker’s response.

“It depends on the procedure that he’s doing,” Melendez said.

“And he’ll take a lunch break?” Yanklowitz asked.

“Yeah,” Melendez said. “He will.”

Orthodox group’s ethical seal gains ground Read More »

Holiness in Humility

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Look up the term “unintended consequences” and you’ll find an entire school of thought on the subject. According to one source, consequences of this sort can be classified as positive, negative or, oddly denoted, perverse. How wonderful are those moments when a new discovery emerges from a serendipitous mistake, like the discovery of penicillin in healing the sick, or the discovery of aspirin to help prevent heart attacks. So many lives have been saved from blunders and mishaps; there is a holiness in this type of discovery.

And then there are those actions that are unintentional and innocent yet cause far greater harm than one could have possibly imagined — irrigating a land plot and causing irreparable erosion or the proliferation of cattle-raising for food and the impact it has on the depletion of the ozone layer. The perverse nature of such consequences is even seen in our social sphere where, for example, there was a dramatic rise in “hit-and-run” accidents as a direct result of tougher laws prohibiting drinking and driving. Can there be a dimension of holiness in these situations, too?

This possibility is the focus of the troubling episode in this week’s Torah portion on Aaron’s sons, Nadav and Avihu. The entire affair is brief — a total of three verses (with a couple more explaining how the community deals with the bodies in the aftermath). Two of Aaron’s sons come forward before God in the mishkan and offer fire, “which He had not enjoined upon them.” Nadav and Avihu are consumed by fire themselves, and God then pronounces, “Through those near to Me I show Myself holy/ And gain glory before all the people” (Leviticus 10:1-3). Are we to find in the tragic demise of these two souls a sobering adjuration against improper offerings? Shall we read this as some sort of perversion of holy behavior?

We can’t assume that Nadav and Avihu anticipated or expected that God would engulf them in flames as a consequence for their negligence. Even if their motivations for bringing the offerings were suspicious, as many rabbinic commentaries suggest, there is no precedent or forewarning that their behavior was worthy of a death sentence, a gruesome and harrowing one at that. The mechanics of sacred offerings have been made clear and explicit. Nadav and Avihu must have known them. Yet, it appeared that their actions caused fatally unintended consequences.

Entering into God’s presence should never be unintentional. We may posit that Nadav and Avihu were lacking a certain humility by not adhering to God’s warnings for proper entrance into the tent. The rabbis of the Talmud go further, suggesting that Nadav and Avihu’s punishment was a spiritual death. The fire that was intended to consume their offerings consumed their souls instead, leaving their bodies intact (Sanhedrin 52a). They might have physically walked away from the experience but their souls were scorched in the process.

The path toward holy living is filled with twists and turns that we can never fully anticipate. Still, kedushah is the unmitigated, completely dedicated encounter with Divine Truth. To desire God’s presence is to recognize that our encounter must be completely deliberate. We can strive toward this complete presence in our relationships with loved ones, our professional associations and on our personal quests for meaning. God’s lesson is, “Through those near to Me I show Myself holy/And gain glory before all the people.” Only the God of Israel shows holiness and glory before all the people. If we are humble and dedicated servants of this holy truth, God’s presence will be revealed to us. And that relationship is absolutely intentional.

Rabbi Joshua Hoffman joined the Valley Beth Shalom (vbs.org) rabbinic staff after his 2003 ordination from the Ziegler School of Rabbinic Studies. He teaches in the greater Los Angeles Jewish community, including as a lecturer in courses on liturgy and essential Jewish texts at American Jewish University, as a teacher in the Florence Melton Adult Mini-School of the Conejo and West Valleys, and as a guest lecturer at Los Angeles Hebrew High School.

Holiness in Humility Read More »

Opinion: Chewable Xanax and the shoe debacle

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I had to look inside myself, which was kind of like looking into my high school locker: moldy half-eaten sandwich, a few loose Starburst candies, heaps of notebooks and burrito-stained gym clothes obscuring the few things of value. Sure, there’s a book of Sylvia Plath poems and a valid bus pass, but good luck finding them while avoiding that festering tuna salad from yesteryear. 

When I looked inside myself, it took a second to clear out the debris. Also, I usually forget the combination to the stupid lock.

All of this inner turmoil was catalyzed by one simple moment, just picking up my 2-year-old from day care. He went to put on his shoes and socks, struggled mightily, finally succeeded, after which he looked at me, paused for a beat and started bawling. He lunged at me for a hug and I knelt down to look him in the eye.

“I’m scared,” he said, sobbing. Me, too, dude. If I wanted to see someone overreact to one of life’s challenges, I could just look in a mirror.

My child, facing a difficult task, got through it only to melt down completely. It’s happening, I thought. This kid needs chewable Xanax.

Hoping his day care teacher didn’t notice, but knowing she had, I grabbed his coat and hustled him out of there.

Driving home, I was baffled. I mean, you would think irrational crying jags related to under-achieving would be right up my dark alley, but this one had me stumped. I knew he put on his socks and shoes after naptime every single day, but I was uncharacteristically early that day, and I happened to be there. Had I thrown off his game? Did he have performance anxiety doing this important task in front of Mom? Have I already passed along some deep, depressing cultural pressure to earn love through accomplishment?  

The day after the shoe debacle, the day care lady snagged me as I turned to exit.

“We have to talk about what happened with the shoes,” she whispered gently. I knew she was right.

According to her, the problem wasn’t in his skill level, but in his confidence. “You need to tell him that you know he can do it. He doesn’t think you believe in him. You don’t trust him, so he doesn’t trust himself.”

That’s when I looked into the rusty old locker of my soul and realized; she is right. I wanted to think it was some Montessori mumbo-jumbo, but I knew it was the truth.

When I saw his little hands struggling with the heels of his tiny socks, it looked so impossible, getting them up, closing the Velcro on his sneakers, the whole thing just looked too hard, and I was pretty sure I was going to have to jump in and help him. The truth is, I didn’t think he could do it, and he sensed that, and he got scared and wept.

“But, you won’t pass the bar,” said my mom to my brother, moments after he announced he would be applying to law school.

He passed the bar on the first try and has been a lawyer for years, but you see how this runs in my family, runs like a kid with inside-out socks.

Since the day care talking-to, I have kept a watchful eye on myself. I convince myself to believe he can hold onto the swing chains without falling, no matter how high I push him. I convince myself that I believe he can spear pieces of broccoli with his fork, or hang up his coat, or turn pages of a book.

Fear of those you love failing isn’t mean or belittling or dismissive; it’s a protective mechanism. That doesn’t make it right. If I don’t have confidence in the little things now, I could project the idea that I don’t trust him to tackle big things later. So, I guess I have to trust myself to at least fake trusting him. Locker closed.

Teresa Strasser is a Los Angeles Press Club and Emmy Award-winning writer and the author of “Exploiting My Baby: Because It’s Exploiting Me”( Penguin). She blogs at ExploitingMyBaby.com.

Opinion: Chewable Xanax and the shoe debacle Read More »

Film Festival spotlights Jewish Hollywood, old and new

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Hilary Helstein, executive director of The Los Angeles Jewish Film Festival, walked into an interview wearing a purple dress, black boots and carrying a buzzing BlackBerry, appearing indefatigable, if a tad weary: The annual festival’s kickoff was only three weeks away, and in the past 24 hours Helstein had flown from New York to Los Angeles, stayed up until 2 a.m. finalizing the festival brochure, then awakened at 7 a.m. to attend to the myriad details involved in screening more than 25 films at 13 venues from Pasadena to Beverly Hills over the course of just one week, May 3-10.

Helstein spent the past year scouring other film festivals as well as the American Film Market for movies, and hundreds of DVDs are stacked in her West Hollywood home, souvenirs of her screenings in the selection process. “Of course it gets tedious,” she said of watching every one of those films. “You do it because you love film and filmmakers and want to create something compelling.”

This year’s festival will spotlight Jewish Hollywood, old and new: It kicks off at the Writers Guild Theater with the documentary “Tony Curtis: Driven to Stardom,” which traces how Bernard Schwartz, the son of impoverished immigrants, became a Hollywood icon. Adding to the festivities will be a panel discussion among celebrities who knew Curtis and appear in the movie, such as Theresa Russell and Mamie Van Doren.

Hilary Helstein

On May 6, actress Penelope Ann Miller, of the Oscar-winning silent film “The Artist,” is scheduled to introduce another classic silent film, 1924’s “The Moon of Israel,” which hasn’t screened publicly in 88 years. “Casablanca” director Michael Curtiz made the film when he was still known as Mihály Kertész, and it caught the attention of mogul Jack Warner, who brought Curtiz to Hollywood. Also capitalizing on the success of “The Artist” is the French farce “OSS-117: Lost in Rio,” an opportunity to see Michael Hazanavicius once again direct actor Jean Dujardin, this time in a romp Helstein describes as “crazy, offbeat and raunchy.”

Another highlight will be “Shoah: The Unseen Interviews,” the Los Angeles premiere of a collection of additional conversations and outtakes from the 220 hours of footage Claude Lanzmann shot for his landmark 1985 documentary, “Shoah.”

Helstein put this all together with help from her co-chairs as well as a 12-person screening committee and some 50 volunteers. But Helstein has been the force behind the festival for all of its seven years (this year, for the first time, it has come under the auspices of TRIBE Media Corp., parent company of The Jewish Journal). Pulling off this kind of festival here is no small feat, considering that several past Los Angeles incarnations of Jewish film festivals have come and gone, including one by the Laemmle Theatres in the 1990s that lasted only a few years.

Even though Los Angeles houses the second-largest Jewish community in the United States and certainly the largest element of the nation’s, if not the world’s, film industry, this is a tough festival town. Smaller cities, such as San Francisco and Atlanta, have established Jewish festivals that regularly draw tens of thousands of viewers; Helstein’s effort, which is still relatively young, has increased from 2,000 participants in 2006 to 4,500 last year.. 

Original reels of outtakes from the Claude Lanzmann “Shoah” collection, some of which will screen at the film festival.

“The L.A. Jewish community is so large and diverse that you get this splintering effect, and it’s hard to coalesce around a single event,” said Greg Laemmle, president of the Laemmle Theatres. He praised Helstein for her “tenacity, consistency, knowledge of film and filmmaking, and the community.”

“It’s hard for any film festival to get traction here, and that includes the Los Angeles Independent [Film] Festival and AFI,” said film critic Kenneth Turan of the Los Angeles Times

“This is such a Hollywood-centric city that it’s hard to break through the ‘noise’ and get people to turn out. And there are dozens of festivals here, so it’s hard to establish yourself as a destination where people say, ‘This is special and we have to pay attention.’ ”

Helstein is well aware of these challenges, noting that Los Angeles is also home to the Israel Film Festival and the Sephardic Film Festival, as well as ongoing film screenings at The Museum of Tolerance. 

“There’s a lot of competition and a lot to do in L.A., whether Jewish or secular events,” she said. “The key that has helped sustain us is presenting unique programs and films that haven’t been seen here before, and to be the first to do something in L.A. And there’s always the ‘wow factor’; the fact is that we live in Hollywood and we have to figure out what’s going to be glitzy and glamorous and what we can offer audiences they can’t get someplace else.”

Putting together this year’s program cost about $100,000, a relatively small sum compared to the hundreds of thousands more dollars enjoyed by other festivals, Helstein said. “You have to become the Wizard of Oz,” she said of working on a shoestring. “You make things happen; you put on a big dog-and-pony show; you get donors and community involvement.”

“The Moon of Israel,” a silent film made in 1924 by Michael Curtiz, will screen on May 6.

Helstein’s own involvement draws on an intense love of film that began while she was growing up in a Reform home in Great Neck, N.Y., where she used to bring brown bag lunches to eat while seeing movies such as “The Ten Commandments” and “The Seventh Seal.”

After graduating from the State University of New York at Oneonta, she balanced working in corporate Manhattan with acting gigs — hiring all the middle management as a human resources manager for the then-budding Telemundo television network, for example, while studying performance at the Herbert Berghof Studio and the Lee Strasberg Theater & Film Institute.

Around 1990, she moved to Los Angeles to get into the entertainment business, landing a job in development at Tom Hanks’ company, where, she said, “The script for ‘Forrest Gump’ sat on my desk for two years before it was made.” The three years she worked for Hanks gave her an education in filmmaking from script to set; Helstein learned about production while working on sets in various departments or as an actor with directors such as David Lynch. She moved to Malaysia for five months to serve as a stand-in for actress Patricia Arquette in “Beyond Rangoon.”

Along the way, she began conducting interviews for Steven Spielberg’s Shoah project, eventually becoming one of the organization’s top interviewers, as she met with more than 300 survivors, including those rescued by Varian Fry.

Tony Curtis in the documentary “Tony Curtis: Driven to Stardom,” which kicks off the festival with a screening on May 3.

In the mid-1990s, she drew on her interviewing experience when she began shooting her own documentary, “As Seen Through These Eyes,” about Holocaust artists, which she describes as a “labor of love” that took 10 years to produce.

It was while curating an exhibition on Holocaust painter Samuel Bak at the Milken Jewish Community Center that its then-executive director, Jack Mayer, suggested Helstein put together a film festival in 2005. “So we got a small grant from The Federation to get started, and Jack left me alone in an office and said, ‘Just let me know what’s going on,’ ” recalled Helstein, who is now in her 40s. “And I said to him, ‘I don’t want to make just a JCC festival, it has to be big.’ ”

Helstein promptly met with other festival directors to learn the ropes and find out how to contact distributors, and her first festival began with some 20 films in eight venues in 2006.

As the festival has grown, Helstein has also incorporated word-of-mouth screenings of new films, which take place throughout the year; highlights have included “A Dangerous Method,” David Cronenberg’s period drama about the sexually charged relationship between the psychoanalyst Sabina Spielrein (Keira Knightley), her lover Carl Jung and Sigmund Freud, with Cronenberg appearing for a Q-and-A.

The 2010 festival screened “Holy Rollers,” starring Jesse Eisenberg as a Chasid who becomes a drug smuggler, and premiered a short film by Antwone Fisher. 

The festival has not been without critics. Last month, Helstein drew ire after she declined to screen “Standing Silent,” Scott Rosenfelt’s documentary about sexual abuse within Baltimore’s Orthodox community — and her e-mail warning other festival directors about the film being a “witch hunt” was made public (see sidebar). 

Some critics have accused the festival of attempting to be nonconfrontational, but Helstein disagreed. “We work together as a team to try to bring the best to our community,” she said. “And we certainly do show some of what other festivals show. But our priority is to premiere films that have never been seen before. We do a lot of U.S. and L.A. premieres.”

Helstein declined to comment about the “Standing Silent” affair. But when asked how she balances programming provocative films that will also appeal to a diverse crowd, she said that balance is key. “I don’t see any reason to upset people on the right or on the left,” she said. “There are all kinds of people who have all kinds of opinions, and the goal is to present programs that are balanced and have enough information to support what you’re showing.”

When Turan recently perused a press release of festival highlights, he pronounced them “quite interesting,” particularly the silent film and the Shoah unseen interviews. “It looks like a strong lineup,” he said.

For full schedule, tickets and information, visit www.lajfilmfest.org.

Film Festival spotlights Jewish Hollywood, old and new Read More »

Letters to the Editor: ‘Shoah,’ Iranian-American Jews, Passover

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Lessons Learned From ‘Shoah’

When I read last week’s cover story (“An Indelible Film, ‘Shoah’ Also Reflects an Extraordinary Artist,” April 13), I was reminded of an incident in high school more than 20 years ago. I was one of only a handful of Jewish students attending a Christian school in Atlanta, Ga. My history teacher asked me to read from my textbook, and as I came to the sentence that stated, “6 million Jews were exterminated during the Holocaust,” my history teacher told me to stop reading. She then stated that “6 million Jews” was an “inflated number” as it “included priests, homosexuals and undesirables.” As I pointed to my textbook, I stated to the teacher that the book says “6 million Jews.” She then told me that this was “incorrect” and if I continued to argue with her I would have to leave. To this day, I regret not getting up and walking out of the room.

People, including teachers, will manipulate and change facts in order to rewrite history for their own twisted, selfish reasons. It is imperative that we don’t simply rely on textbooks. We must do more than this. We must continually speak out against those who wish to downplay the Holocaust by showing films like “Shoah” and ensuring that classrooms in both private and public schools are being factually informed of what took place during the Holocaust, especially the fact that “6 million Jews” were exterminated in the death camps.

Gregory Diamond
Los Angeles

“What do you want me to do, cry? As long as I am alive, I choose to laugh!” This quote was conspicuously missing from The Jewish Journal’s article, “An Indelible Film, ‘Shoah’ Also Reflects an Extraordinary Artist.”

This is the bold attitude that we need to see in this world — not the defeatist rhetoric that unjustifiably assumes that evil will have the last laugh, but that the good, the happy, the humorous will have the last laugh, no matter what evil men may perpetrate.

Why cry? I choose to laugh!

Arthur Christopher Schaper
Torrance

Focus on Cultural Differences, Not Denials

Gina Nahai’s efforts to refute the negative characterizations of Persian Jews depicted in the [cable TV] series “Shahs of Sunset” are admirable (“The Myth of the Iranian-American Jew,” April 6). However, I do not believe that the vociferous denial of cultural behaviors, which clearly ring true, will help her achieve her goal of highlighting the many important contributions Persians have made to American society.

Nahai engages in intellectual acrobatics to argue that only a few Iranians arrived in the United States with money or drive BMWs. However, as a professor of Middle Eastern politics as well as the father of three half-Iraqi-Iranian children, I would urge Ms. Nahai to use her formidable abilities to explain the differences between Persian and American cultures, rather than to deny that those differences exist. My children have been taught the cultural reasons why their Persian relatives as well as many others find the BMW a symbol of prestige, along with the (perhaps increasingly irrelevant) reasons why their Ashkenazi father will not drive a BMW, Mercedes or, for that matter, any car of German origin.

The issue is not which culture is better, but rather what factors have caused these various cultures to adopt particular values they hold dear.

Louis Gordon
via e-mail

Rabbi Has Wrong Idea Regarding Bimah Politics

How could I have guessed that Congregation Or Ami in Calabasas was a Reform congregation? Could it be the muddled thinking (which often occurs when you think with your heart instead of your head) that led its spiritual leader to suggest that politics has a place on the bimah (“Politics on the Bimah,” April 6)? Abraham talking to HaShem, Moses standing up to Pharaoh, and Esther and a prophet calling out a king are equivalent to a rabbi preaching economic justice to his/her congregation? I think not. The problem is that Jewish textual tradition takes all sides of every issue and leaves it for the practitioner to decide how best to lead his/her life. For a rabbi to pick policy winners and losers is to deprive the congregant of the obligation to do his or her own homework in accordance with the mitzvot and commandments explained from the bimah and make the right decision. Speaking up at City Hall, the Governor’s Mansion, Congress, the White House — that would be in accordance with the examples cited by Rabbi Paul Kipnes; speaking up from the pulpit can, as noted, only be divisive.

Warren Scheinin
Redondo Beach

Kudos for Journal’s Passover Edition
Reading your Passover edition, I was quite moved and impressed. I am fearful of being too complimentary to any Jewish organization, along with many non-Jewish organizations, out of concern of adding to the often already-over-inflated egos. In this case, I will risk such a side effect, because I think you guys can handle it and deserve to be complimented.

Keep up the excellent work, and keep fighting the good fight.

Richard S. Levik
via e-mail

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The Endless Madness of Mel

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Mel Gibson makes a strong case for the return of a Hollywood blacklist.

Not what bears the name today, an insider online database of coveted unproduced screenplays, but the blacklist as it was mid-20th century, a politically charged ignominious register of the do-not-employ. Gibson’s multi-hyphenate talents as a misogynistic, anti-Semitic, raving lunatic deserve to rank on an index of shame. His film credit should read “persona non grata.”

So why, oh why, is he still getting work? Why must we continue to endure the madness of Mel?

Last week brought yet more stunning accusations that Mel Gibson is — can you believe it? — an anti-Semite. This time from screenwriter Joe Eszterhas, who was hired to pen the script for Gibson’s already much-maligned Maccabee movie. When Warner Bros. put the film on hold because of a bad script, Eszterhas, whose own father was a Nazi collaborator, pulled a Freudian transference on Gibson, in the form of a scathing nine-page missive.

“I’ve come to the conclusion that you never had, or have, any intention of making a film about the Maccabees,” Eszterhas wrote in a letter published on TheWrap.com. “I believe you announced the project with great fanfare … in an attempt to deflect continuing charges of anti-Semitism which have dogged you, charges which have crippled your career.”

Eszterhas went on to recount, in sordid detail, some rather horrifying incidents that occurred while he and his family were guests at Gibson’s Costa Rica home. He described Gibson as “wild,” “crazed” and “explosive,” and how, one day, Gibson went surfing with Eszterhas’ 15-year-old son, Nick, and told him a rape fantasy he had of killing his ex-girlfriend, Oksana Gregorieva, also the mother of his child. Eszterhas also claims that Gibson’s choice descriptors for Jews are, alternately, “Hebes,” “oven-dodgers” or “Jewboys.” The Holocaust is “a lot of horses—-,” and what Gibson really wants to do with his Maccabee movie is “convert the Jews to Christianity.”

It’s a fun read, but about as revelatory as an episode of “Real Housewives.” At this point, the only thing more shocking than the fact that Gibson’s mania has drawn him closer to Britney Spears than to Jesus Christ is the fact that his remaining Hollywood friends refuse to call him what he is: a stark-raving anti-Semite.

Last fall, when the Maccabee project was first announced, I interviewed several of Gibson’s former colleagues (all Jews). Not a single one — including Rabbi Irwin Kula, director of Clal and a consultant on the film — was willing to scarlet-letter Gibson with the definitive label. When I asked: “Is Mel Gibson an anti-Semite?” this is what I got in response:

“Mel has never, ever said anything anti-Jewish on the record. He’s never said anything against the Jews,” Dean Devlin, producer of “The Patriot,” said.

What saddened Devlin was not that his friend launched into a Jew-blaming tirade during his 2006 drunken-driving arrest, but that it made him realize Gibson’s sobriety had lapsed.

“For me it was more about being heartbroken, about knowing that something must be horribly wrong with my friend because [to say] something that outrageous, you know something’s wrong,” Devlin said. “It was clearly not in character.”

True, Gibson is an actor. But how many times must something happen for it to be considered “in” character? 

Richard Donner, director of four “Lethal Weapon” movies, offered some psychoanalysis, saying Gibson had been “brainwashed since infancy” — by his giddily anti-Semitic father — but stopped short of a diagnosis. “He’s nuts,” Donner admitted. “He’s truly one of the nuttiest guys I’ve ever met in my life. He’s off-the-wall.”

Donner said he finds the Jewish community “very narrow-minded” when it comes to dealing with Gibson.

“The Jewish community has gone through hell all their lives, and [anti-Semitism has] been part of it all their lives, and I guess they’re overly defensive of it. And maybe rightly so. But my feeling is: Give somebody a chance.”

How many chances? Gibson remains gainfully employed by big studios like Warner Bros., run by Barry Meyer (one guess) because Gibson is a talented filmmaker whose films have made heaps of money and won Oscars. It is why, as Los Angeles Times columnist Patrick Goldstein pointed out in his 2006 headline about Gibson’s drunken-driving debacle, “The shame is that so few say ‘shame.’ ”

And, as Atlantic journalist Jeffrey Goldberg wondered, “Why do you go to the one guy who made a movie that blames devilish-looking Jews for the murder of Jesus Christ, and who, when drunk, and possibly when sober, just lashes out at Jews with all kinds of stunning invective? Why would you do that?”

It is also worth wondering whether Eszterhas would have come forward had things not gone awry with his pending Maccabee paycheck. Gibson’s other friends in the industry — among them Jodie Foster (not Jewish, but who once told me she lights candles each Friday with her family) and Robert Downey Jr. (part Jewish) — have urged their Hollywood colleagues to forgive Gibson. Forgiveness is a nice thing — a core Jewish value, in fact — once someone has repented.

“Mel Gibson knows for sure what it would take,” said Rabbi Marvin Hier, founder of the Simon Wiesenthal Center. “Maybe I should take a course about the Holocaust, about anti-Semitism; maybe I should visit a concentration camp, maybe I should make it a point to speak to the Jewish community, maybe I should say, ‘I want to apologize.’ ”

Hier maintains that if Gibson made an effort toward genuine repair, “A lot of Jews would say, ‘You know what? The guy made a mistake. He seems to have learned something from those lessons. Why not give him a shot?’ But Mel Gibson didn’t do any of that.”

Still, Hier would like to see Gibson make amends. “Everybody would rather see Mel do big teshuvah. But he’s had a long time to do it — the man has had a very long time to do teshuvah. And it’s never too late.”

The Endless Madness of Mel Read More »

On learning how to embrace my grandson and my ghosts

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My first grandchild drew his first breath in a birthing clinic in Frankfurt, Germany. Just three weeks earlier, he had been on stage at the Lyric Opera of Chicago.

Chicago, turning somersaults in the womb to the thunderous applause greeting Richard Strauss’ wondrous opera “Ariadne auf Naxos.” He kicked when the tenor hit his upper reaches. But when his mom’s silver voice spun diamonds in the air with the German libretto, he settled in quietly. Strauss and Mozart were his evening bedfellows in his natural sound environment for months.

He entered the world on Jan. 3. We received the news of his imminent birth in a predawn phone call from Germany. My husband, a very pragmatic Israeli, hugged me, turned on his side and went back to sleep. “This could take a while,” he mumbled.

I couldn’t sleep. Like moms the world over whose daughters are giving birth for the first time, the images in my mind rotated like a kaleidoscope, magically chaotic, happy and bright. From across the ocean I imagined I could time my breath to hers as I remembered her entry into the world at the Sanz Medical Center-Laniado Hospital in Israel — then a small maternity hospital at the end of a dusty road near the cliffs of Netanya — whose founder from the Chasidic Sanz dynasty had lost his wife and children in the Holocaust.

My grandson waited patiently to be born after the Christmas and New Year’s rush in Frankfurt. I watched him open his eyes and heard one of his first cries of life via Skype. “Born on a Tuesday. Paamayim ki tov. He is doubly blessed,” I told my daughter.

He will be a German citizen. He will carry an American passport and an Israeli passport if he so chooses. His mom will sing him sweet Hebrew lullabies when her voice is not dancing up the scales in Italian, German or French. His dad will speak to him in the hushed tones of Hochdeutsch German, a language his great-grandfather David spoke and then discarded when he picked up his Borsalino felt hat and left Berlin in 1933. He sensed the incoming storm. He saw the writing on the walls. He returned to his shtetl in Poland, chose a bride and journeyed to Palestine. Never looked back. And then there was nothing to look back to. He never returned to Germany or Poland. But, a few years back, I had the chance to visit those places where the family had perished. I walked on that hallowed ground wearing a pair of black-and-pink Adidas running shoes I will never throw away. And I heard a story. When the death camp of Treblinka was turned into a memorial site in the early ’60s, one of its first visitors wrote an inscription in Hebrew in the memorial ledger. “Hazarnu,” it said. We have returned.

My grandson is born to two Jewish parents in Germany. Like a flower that grows in the desert, he will thrive. He will live in a Germany searching for its own identity in the sunlight of the 21st century. As a Jew, he will walk the alleyways and avenues shrouded by the shadows of a civilization gone monstrously mad. The ghosts of our people may cause him to wonder where the light ends and the shadows begin. He will grow up with children who have no shadows on their heels, who see only the light. But he will know who he is. And he will not be alone. He will carry with him the weight of our ancestral memory as well as a promise. A promise that is born to every Jewish child from a covenant delivered in a desert 4,000 years ago; a covenant that transformed us into a people. An entire generation was lost over the course of 40 years in that desert, but a young, new generation walked out with a mandate to exist, the promise of a homeland and a spiritual contract to build a more just civilization. He can lay claim to that new generation, in part, because, whether he realizes it or not, he stands on the shoulders of the Jewish state and a generation in Israel that made his life in Germany possible. His birth is more than a testament to our endurance. It is a testament to the strength of our people, a blessing and a harbinger of our future.

“What will you name him?” I asked my daughter. “You had so many beautiful names on your list — all the angels, Michael, Gabriel …”

“We hope he’s an angel,” she said with a laugh. “But we are naming him Amiel. ‘People of God.’ ”

Somehow that seemed just right. 

“Ring the bells that still can ring. … There is a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in.”
— Leonard Cohen, “Anthem.”

Deborah Riemer is a former broadcast journalist who covered the Middle East. She now expects to be on a first-name basis with the flight crew flying the Newark-Frankfurt Lufthansa route.

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