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December 10, 2013

Bibi’s Boo-boo

Leave a Comment / Entertainment, Film, Hollywood, Is Featured?, Mobile, Mobile-Homepage, News /

If you believe that the Jews are a small people and a large family, then consider the various familial roles that Israeli prime ministers have played in our global mishpacha.

There was Golda Meir, the ultimate Jewish grandmother.

There was Menachem Begin, our pugnacious great-uncle who sometimes embarrassed us.

And then, there's Benjamin Netanyahu. Interesting to note that, of all Israeli prime ministers, he's the only one who has an endearing, even childlike, nickname — Bibi. That's the way we feel about him. In our family drama, Bibi is the cousin who sometimes behaves as a boor, the cousin who has elevated the faux pas into a form of ballet.

Oh, like, let's see — skipping Nelson Mandela's memorial because of a cash flow issue.

It’s not as if Netanyahu does not admire Mandela – this, despite Mr. Mandela’s often-conflicted relationship with the State of Israel. “Nelson Mandela was one of the outstanding figures of our time,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said. “He was the father of his nation, a man of vision, a fighter for freedom who avoided violence. He was a humble man who provided a personal example for his nation during the long years he spent in prison.”

Far be it for me to lecture the Prime Minister of the state of Israel on social and political niceties, but here are a few things that Mr. Netanyahu should have considered when thinking about his travel plans.

Israel is the most isolated country in the world. Don’t add to it. In the book of Numbers, the pagan prophet, Balaam, called the Jews a “people that dwells alone.” But that was not supposed to be a blessing. I have never appreciated the bellicosity of some Israeli leaders (and others) who seem to relish our pariah status. For every other important world leader to have been at the memorial, and for the prime minister of the Jewish state to sit it out, is both bad form and bad public relations. 

The Prime Minister of the state of Israel represents all Jews. Yes — like it or not. Here's why. The State of Israel is the Jewish state; ergo, the head of the government of the Jewish state is perceived to be the “king of the Jews.” Prime Minister Netanyahu’s decisions in such matters of state, and as a representative of the State of Israel, reflect on all Jews. You can't say “we are one” without knowing that. 

Appearing to “boycott” the memorial service of the most important black person in the world looks racist. It's not, of course — but tell that to Israel's critics, who form a line to micromanage everything that Israel does or appears to do.  Woody Allen said: “Ninety percent of life is just showing up.” Appearances matter. 

And now, for me, the most important reason – and the most overlooked.

Prime Minister Netanyahu should have gone to South Africa for Nelson Mandela’s memorial – simply because it is in South Africa.

Let’s remember the role that a certain place in South Africa has in contemporary Jewish consciousness. I am referring to the United Nations anti-racism conferences in Durban. The Durban conference in 2001 seemed to have one purpose – to brand Israel and the Jewish people as being racist. Jewish delegates faced vulgar anti-semitic intimidation. Some hid their badges out of fear of being attacked. There were exhibits of anti-semitic hate literature. There were pamphlets that caricatured Jews and posters in which the Star of David was overlapped with the swastika. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion was available for purchase.

In the words of Robert Wistrich: “Durban became the tipping point for the coalescence of a new, virulent, globalizing anti-Jewishness reminiscent of the atmospherics that pervaded Europe in the 1930s.”

Durban was the Woodstock of contemporary Jew hatred.

That is precisely why Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu should have attended the memorial. It would have been its own statement: “In a country whose doors have been open to those who would make the Jews into the ultimate Other, this Jewish leader, representing the only Jewish state that exists in the world, is here to say that you will no longer demonize us. We are part of the world. We are part of the coalition of the decent.”

If only Bibi had gone.

He would have been carrying the reputation of the Jewish people with him in his suitcase. 

Bibi’s Boo-boo Read More »

Wilshire Boulevard Temple’s musical Shabbat

Leave a Comment / California, Mobile, Mobile-Homepage, News /

If Disney Hall has competition for beautiful acoustics in a magnificent setting, it is Wilshire Boulevard Temple. 

For the Shabbat evening service on Dec. 6, some 70 extraordinary musicians from the Los Angeles Philharmonic squeezed onto an extended bimah in the great sanctuary, whose newly restored vibrancy made this unique public event all the more exciting. 

Following candle-lighting by Brenda Levin, architect for the extensive makeover of the 1929 masterpiece, and Kiddush by the congregation’s leaders, Rabbi Steven Z. Leder and Cantor Don Gurney, conductor Antonio Mendez led the orchestra in three full-orchestral pieces — by Beethoven, Tchaikovsky and Dvorak.

During the first half of the performance, before the intermission, the seats downstairs in the sanctuary were nearly full, with audience members including Los Angeles County Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky, philanthropists Audrey M. Irmas, Robin and Elliott Broidy, Stanley and Ilene Gold, Ambassador Lester and Carolbeth Korn, Elizabeth and Yehuda Naftali, Darcie Denkert Notkin and Shelby Notkin, Nancy and Steve Lovett and many other distinguished guests. By the second half, however, word had circulated that the sound in the balcony was even more dramatic, so many people migrated upstairs to witness the “swirling” sounds, as one audience member put it, that circulated from the stage up and around the 100-foot-high Byzantine dome. Fully articulated and pristine, the music left the audience breathless as it spilled out into the bustling Koreatown neighborhood.

The night was inspired and brought to being by Cantor Gurney, who recalled from the stage a childhood memory of the Cleveland Orchestra celebrating the 100th anniversary of his hometown synagogue. Gurney said he had long hoped to re-create that memory in Los Angeles, and the Wilshire Boulevard Temple, designed for Hollywood studio chiefs, had the theatrical chops to support it.

We should only hope there will be an encore one day.

Wilshire Boulevard Temple’s musical Shabbat Read More »

One man’s crusade to prove Hollywood mogul Carl Laemmle was a hero

Leave a Comment / Uncategorized /

Sandy Einstein is not an easy man to deter.

I first encountered him in August 2012, when he contacted the Journal about a little-known and heart-warming story concerning movie mogul Carl Laemmle, founder of Universal Studios. Einstein claimed that not only had Laemmle saved his father, Hermann, from certain death in Nazi Germany in the late 1930s, he also believed Laemmle had saved hundreds of other Jews as well, issuing affidavits to the U.S. government guaranteeing their passage to and place in America.

The notion of a “Laemmle’s List” is an inspiring tale. And Einstein furnished rigorous documentation trying to prove it. But ultimately, verifying the existence of hundreds of affidavits that, if extant, are probably residing on a dusty shelf in some national archive, proved difficult to fact check. But that challenge notwithstanding, Einstein has an unflinching belief in this mysterious tale, and has tried very, very hard to make it public. His crusade to expose Laemmle’s humanitarian side has met with both disbelief and disinterest, and he has been uniformly rejected by almost every major media publication in the United States. David Remnick, editor of the New Yorker, at least gave Einstein’s pitch a look before having his assistant send a rejection letter admiring its “merit and intrigue.” 

But, as I said, the man is indefatigable. And timing turned out to be on his side: This month marks the 75th anniversary of the Laemmle theater chain’s presence in Los Angeles and a big celebration is on tap for locals, with the attendant gala benefit and commemorative book. While the studio Laemmles are related but not the same as the theater chain Laemmles, the prevalence of the family name gives good reason to delve into its enigmatic past. 

So let’s start with what we know: A few years ago, the now 68-year-old Einstein was suddenly sparked to research his roots. “I don’t know what motivated me to do it,” he said in his rapid-fire spray of speech during a phone interview. “I guess you could say I was curious and probably also bored.”

Einstein is a semi-retired resident of the San Francisco Bay Area who honed his hucksterism managing promotion and publicity for rock bands, including the beloved ’70s band Journey. He was rummaging through an old box his mother left him when she died three decades earlier, when he happened upon a stack of his father’s letters, all scrawled in German and dated in the 1920s and ’30s. 

Once they were translated, one letter from his father stood out. It was addressed to the famous Carl Laemmle and revealed that after some deliberation, Hermann had decided to “go to California” with Laemmle and start a new life. Hermann Einstein and Laemmle had first met almost a decade earlier, when Laemmle went to visit his native Laupheim, where Hermann was a cantor and Hebrew teacher. Based on the correspondence in Einstein’s possession, it appears they took a liking to each other and stayed in touch. “I want to again give you the assurance that I will use all the power of my person to repay my gratitude over there in my new home,” Hermann wrote in July 1937. “You should not ever in your life be disappointed in me.” 

Carl Laemmle

Eight months later, Hermann Einstein boarded the S.S. Champlain to New York as Laemmle’s guest, and, according to an immigration record found through Ancestry.com, had planned to spend the next several months living at Laemmle’s Beverly Hills home in Benedict Canyon. 

As Einstein continued to research this surprising connection, he came across a 1998 paper titled “Laemmle’s List,” written by the German educator and researcher Udo Bayer for the Australian journal Film History. Under the subhead “Carl Laemmle’s affidavits for Jewish refugees,” Bayer acknowledges its inconclusivity: Aside from a verbal mention of the affidavits by a former chief executive of the Jewish Oberrat (supreme council) in Stuttgart, Germany, there exist only 45 pieces of correspondence between Laemmle and State Department officials implicating the mogul’s mission to save Jews. Bayer admits that most of the correspondence is missing — “fragmentary” at best — and that most of the affidavits have never been found. 

Einstein eventually made contact with Bayer, who lives in Laupheim and presides over a high school/junior college named for Laemmle, who attended its sister school from 1878 to 1880. Bayer has become the mogul’s unofficial biographer and sent Einstein a copy of Laemmle’s 1939 obituary from the entertainment trade publication Variety, which mentioned that Hermann Einstein was a pallbearer at Laemmle’s funeral. He was described as a “refugee [Laemmle] brought here from his native Laupheim.”

Despite its “merit and intrigue,” Einstein himself wasn’t much interested in this story while growing up. “Like many Germans, my father did not talk a lot about his past,” Einstein said, “and, to be honest, I didn’t really care. But now that my father is deceased and I’ve done all this research, I really wish I would have talked to him more.” 

Einstein’s regret seems to have fueled his mission to make all this public. “I wasn’t a very good son,” he said, explaining that while growing up, he was one of a handful of Jews in Orange County and wanted to distance himself from his father’s Judaism. “I wanted to assimilate,” he said wistfully.

As a child, Einstein never knew the depth of his father’s relationship to Carl Laemmle, but he does recall periodic meetings with members of Laemmle’s family, especially Laemmle’s daughter, Rosabelle, and her daughter Carol Bergerman. “They lived in this really beautiful place in Beverly Hills,” Einstein recalled. “I was only 5 or 6, but I remember sitting in this beautiful kitchen, looking at a nice backyard. They gave my father a lot of clothing.” 

Einstein’s wish to repay a debt has not been tempered by the lack of media enthusiasm. Pitches to the Atlantic, Harper’s, New York Magazine, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Los Angeles Magazine, the Los Angeles Times, The New York Observer and the New Republic have all failed to fructify, save for a brief mention of Laemmle in the online Jewish magazine Tablet.

But Einstein hasn’t given up. Several months ago, when the Harvard historian Ben Urwand published a controversial book about Hollywood’s business relationship with Nazi Germany titled “The Collaboration,” Einstein took Urwand to task wherever Laemmle was concerned. Acting as Laemmle’s self-appointed defender, Einstein managed to persuade The Los Angeles Review of Books to amend a sentence falsely implicating Laemmle’s “capitulation” to the Nazis.

The whole thing has become a kind of cause. Last October, he traveled to Laupheim to meet with Bayer and tour the town where Laemmle and his father met. And he persuaded author Neal Gabler, whose book “An Empire of Their Own” has become the bible on Jewish Hollywood, to pen an article for publication. But even the accomplished Gabler hasn’t had much success. After both Newsweek and the Smithsonian turned him down, he wrote to Einstein that he was bewildered. “This is a tough sell,” Gabler wrote in an e-mail. “I don’t understand it myself.”

Is it because these publications doubt the legitimacy of Einstein’s claims? Or because another Schindler’s List-type tale isn’t sensational enough for modern media? Since May 2013, the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York has been featuring the exhibition “Against the Odds: American Jews and the Rescue of Europe’s Refugees, 1933-1941,” offering detailed stories of American Jews who offered help to the imperiled Jews of Europe. Laemmle is among them. According to museum curator Bonnie Gurewitsch, when the Stuttgart consul stopped accepting Laemmle’s affidavits, Laemmle turned to family, friends and associates to provide even more. 

Is Carl Laemmle an unsung hero of the Holocaust? At the very least, he is the reason Sandy Einstein lives today. And as Judaism famously teaches, if you save one life, you save a world.

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Yiddish swing

Leave a Comment / Culture /

During the 1930s and ’40s, even as young people across America were swing dancing to the beat of such Jewish bandleaders as Benny Goodman, Artie Shaw and Harry James, a vibrant musical subculture dubbed “Yiddish swing” was flourishing in an L.A. enclave, according to Tali Tadmor, a local pianist, composer and vocal coach. Tadmor’s homage to that Yiddish subculture comes to Hollywood this week, in a musical show she created after being awarded a prestigious Six Points Fellowship for Emerging Jewish Artists. 

“I’m mostly a classical musician,” Tadmor said, “but I do a lot of work in the Jewish music world as well, and I’ve done a lot of Yiddish programs before, of traditional Yiddish music, so I knew I wanted something in that vein. And the fellowship required it to be brand-new music — original — as opposed to a remaking of something old.

“A lot of times with Jewish music, it tends to focus on the Holocaust and a lot of the trials and tribulations of the Jewish people. And, to me, Yiddish swing and that whole era in the ’40s is unusual in the sense that it was happy music and happy dance — of course in the midst of a lot of other things that were going on. But that’s really what drew me to that musical genre in particular.” 

While most people associate Yiddish music and theater of that era with New York, Tadmor said the youth of Boyle Heights, quite independently, created a very original form of Yiddish music, dancing and even theater.

“From the interviews that I’ve done,” Tadmor said, “what struck me the most was this idea that Los Angeles had always been an open-minded place … and that a lot of Jews found New York, especially, to be kind of a ghetto of its own. And when they wanted to escape that and do new things, and try new things and not have everybody in your business all the time, they tended to go west.”

Tadmor, a native Israeli, came here 18 years ago, and, while she has performed at Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center and other venues around the world, she considers Los Angeles her home.

“I always joke and I say I love Israel like a mother, and I love Los Angeles like a lover. It’s a different kind of love, but it’s very intense, and I don’t see myself ever living anywhere else,” Tadmor said. “This is really where I honed my skills and was given opportunities by many, many people and organizations. So it was exciting for me to write a show that was a tribute to that.”

Tadmor’s proposal earned her a place alongside eight other Six Points fellows in the first L.A. cohort; she is the only musician in the group. She hired Jonathan Maseng, a frequent writer for the Jewish Journal, to collaborate with her on the book that serves as the anchor for her original score.

They named the project “Ella Fitzgeraldberg,” because, Tadmor explained, “Bei Mir Bistu Shein,” the Yiddish swing hit originally made famous by the Andrews Sisters, was also covered by the legendary jazz singer Ella Fitzgerald.

The cabaret-style show will be performed Dec. 14 at the M Bar in Hollywood, where the club will re-create a posh nightspot of the late 1930s with newspapers of the day strewn on tables, and, in one corner of the room, a silent film will be projected on the wall. Audience members are asked to dress in the style of the period. 

The evening begins with drinks and dinner, followed by a pre-recorded broadcast, in English, of a fictitious radio program called “Talk of the Town,” in which host Janice Howe (Connie Nelson) interviews 90-year-old Esther “Estee” Gerson (Annie Korzen), the last surviving member of the famous Gerson Girls trio, composed of two sisters and a cousin. Estee now lives in a Florida retirement community and is mourning the recent passing of her sister, Gilda. The story unfolds in flashback, as Estee, who has become a virtual recluse, relives the girls’ glory years as well as their dark days involving alcoholism, scandals and suicide. She also reveals, for the first time, what really caused the breakup of the trio. Her memories are inextricably bound up with the Depression era, World War II, the Holocaust, Jewish assimilation and the founding of the State of Israel, among other issues.

At key points in the story, live musicians and singers will perform a song from the Gersons’ repertoire. Tadmor herself will be on piano and will also be part of the vocal ensemble. Her original score is accompanied by Yiddish lyrics (with English translations provided in the programs), because, as Howe tells the radio audience, the Gersons sang exclusively in Yiddish. Tadmor took her lyrics from a Yiddish magazine called Keshbn, published between 1946 and 2007. “There were about 150 issues,” she said. “It was community generated, so people would send in poems, short stories, jokes and whatever. 

“I took things that looked like poems, that looked like they rhymed, and I went to the Jewish Home for the Aging, and a couple of people there just sat and translated all these poems” into English, so she could understand them before using them in their original Yiddish. 

“That was the starting point for the whole show, those lyrics. And then I set about 10 of them to music. That was the basis of the show, and then the story was written around that and connected one song to another. 

“I hope,” she said, “that people appreciate the richness of Yiddish culture — the language, the humor, the arts — and that they see that there are still young people who are interested in it and wanting to create new works and keep the language alive. 

“It’s not that the language is dying,” she said. “Enclaves of Orthodox Jews will always keep speaking Yiddish, but the secular Yiddish culture is in danger of being buried, and I think this show is just an example of how many people, young people, were excited to take part in this, from the writers, to the performers, to everyone who shows up. And I hope it gives hope for all of us that this beautiful, funny, sarcastic, creative culture will live on.”

“Ella Fitzgeraldberg,” Dec. 14, 7 p.m. (dinner), 8 p.m. (show) at M Bar, 1253 Vine St., Los Angeles. $15, plus $10 food/drink minimum. For reservations, call (323) 856-0036.

Yiddish swing Read More »

Biden pledges aid for poor Holocaust survivors

Leave a Comment / Uncategorized /

Vice President Joe Biden announced a new White House effort to aid aging Holocaust survivors living in poverty in the United States.

Speaking on Dec. 10 at a luncheon in Washington, D.C., Biden said the Obama Administration will appoint a special envoy at the Department of Health and Human Services to act as a liaison for Holocaust survivors and the nonprofit community organizations that serve this vulnerable population.

“This will make the government more responsive to a Hungarian survivor in the Bronx who needs a wheelchair or the elderly woman with memories of the Warsaw Ghetto who needs a ride to the doctor,” Biden told attendees of a luncheon celebrating the 100th anniversary of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC), according to a transcript obtained by The Journal.

The White House will also establish a partnership between community organizations and the AmeriCorps VISTA program, so that some of the 8,000 volunteers taking part in that federally funded program can work to aid Holocaust survivors. Biden also pledged to explore possible public-private partnerships to address funding shortfalls impacting the community organizations serving Holocaust survivors.

An estimated 120,000 Holocaust survivors live in the United States today; three-quarters are over 75 years old and two-thirds live alone. Many survivors saw their families decimated in Europe during the Holocaust, leaving them with few relatives to rely upon in their old age.

The new initiative comes after years of conversations between the White House, members of Congress, and representatives of the Jewish Federations of North America (JFNA) and Jewish Family and Children’s Service agencies about ways to mitigate the ongoing plight of aging survivors.

Michael Siegal, chair of JFNA's board of trustees, welcomed Biden’s announcement.

“Today our country took a major step forward toward addressing the needs of many Holocaust survivors,” Siegal said in a statement.  “We are looking forward to working with the Special Envoy to raise awareness and help ensure that Holocaust survivors receive the support of programs to help them live with dignity and comfort.”

Biden also told attendees at the JDC luncheon that the U.S. remained committed to counteracting efforts to delegitimize Israel.

“The preservation of an independent Jewish state is the only certain guarantor of freedom and security for the Jewish people,” Biden said, according to CBS News.

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