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Jewish Journal

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February 12, 2015

Lindsay Sloane got a personal bid for role in new CBS comedy

Leave a Comment / Hollywood /

Lindsay Sloane made her acting debut in a TV commercial when she was 8. Her mother had struck up a conversation at a shopping mall with a woman who turned out to be a talent agent, and one thing led to another. “It was a commercial for the Church of the Latter Day Saints,” Sloane said, laughing at the irony of casting “a nice Jewish girl” in the role. But what really stayed with her was one simple truth: “OK, this is what acting is,” she realized. “You get to pretend you’re someone that you’re not.”

Sloane is still happily pretending 30 years later. She has carved out a successful career in films such as “The In-Laws,” “Horrible Bosses” and “She’s Out of My League,” as well as dozens of television shows, both with recurring and guest roles — “Weeds,” “Grosse Pointe” and “The Wonder Years” among them. Her latest role is in CBS’ new version of “The Odd Couple,” playing a new character named Emily, neighbor to mismatched roommates Oscar Madison and Felix Unger and a love interest for the latter. 

Neil Simon’s 1965 Broadway hit about slovenly Oscar and fastidious Felix became a movie with Walter Matthau and Jack Lemmon and a ’70s TV series starring Jack Klugman and Tony Randall. This time around, Matthew Perry and Thomas Lennon have stepped into the roles, and Sloane, who guest starred on Perry’s “Mr. Sunshine” in 2011, received a personal invitation to join them.

“It was so flattering,” she said. “Matthew said, ‘I’m doing this reboot, and I want you to be a part of it. I’m going to send you the pilot I wrote, but I want you to create this character with us.’ I didn’t have to audition. That’s always a lovely way to get a job.”

Emily’s religion has not been established yet, “But at this point, with anything I play, she always is, unless there’s a reason for her not to be. In my mind I never want to fight against my natural instincts,” said Sloane.

Born Lindsay Sloane Leikin on Long Island to New York-native parents, Sloane grew up in Tarzana in what she describes as a “very East Coast” Reform Jewish home. “I went to Sunday school, I was bat mitzvah, and I was confirmed. We went to Temple Judea. But for me it was about the tradition and culture of Judaism, and the neuroses and angst — those things that are inherent, whether we want them to be or not.”

Following her childhood agent’s advice to drop her last name is something she now regrets. “She told my mom that Leikin was ‘too Jewish.’ The older I get, the more [I’m] upset about it. It equated being a Jew with something I should hide. I don’t blame my mom, because she didn’t know enough to say no. But I felt that I was forced into denying my family’s heritage,” Sloane said.

For the last 10 years, she’s been married to Dar Rollins, a partner at ICM she’d met 14 years ago. “He was my agent’s assistant when we met. Now he’s a big macher!” she said. “It’s been really nice to watch him grow into who he is.”

Sloane put off having children until three years ago, when her daughter Maxwell was born. “We were young and just wanted to be married and not have that responsibility. And I’m so happy that I did. I would not have been ready before. Physically, I wish I were younger, because I’m so tired, but I think I did it at the right time.”

Sloane lives in Encino, chosen for its good public schools; her parents live nearby and attend every “Odd Couple” taping. She calls the sitcom’s work schedule “a great gift” for a mom, adding that Maxwell often visits her at the Studio City set. “Everything about it has been a dream come true,” she declared, confiding that she’d wanted to be on TV for as long as she can remember. “I had a neighbor that did it, and I thought that was so cool.”

She has no regrets about beginning her career so young. “I didn’t work consistently enough when I was a kid that I missed out on anything. It was the perfect balance. My grades always went up when I was working, because I had a private tutor on set. So it was nothing but a bonus. All upside, no downside.”

Reflecting on her career so far, Sloane named “The In-Laws” as one of her favorite experiences. “I filmed in Canada for 2 1/2 months, with Albert Brooks playing my dad. I learned comedy by watching this man’s movies, and then I got to act with him; he’s so kind and so wonderful. I was also really proud of ‘Grosse Pointe.’ It was so smart and such a great part to play. It was spoofing ‘Beverly Hills 90210,’ but was on a bit too soon.”

Asked how she envisions her future career, Sloane said she remains “open to being surprised by whatever comes. There are so many directors out there that I would love to work with. I’ve been able to cross a lot of people off my list. I did work with Diane Keaton, but it was such a small part that I would love to do anything with her again. I want to do small, cool indie films like what the Duplass brothers are making, or Damien Chazelle, who directed ‘Whiplash.’ I think the young generation of filmmakers’ voices are so cool and dynamic and interesting.”

She also wants to visit Israel. “I’m bummed that I never did a Birthright trip,” she said. She thinks about taking piano lessons again, something she discontinued, along with dance and gymnastics, to pursue acting seriously. “Now that I have a daughter, I want to encourage her to commit to things, have follow-through, and it’s making me want to put my money where my mouth is,” she said. 

“Maybe we’ll take mother-daughter piano lessons.”

“The Odd Couple” premieres Feb. 19 at 8:30 p.m. on CBS. 

Lindsay Sloane got a personal bid for role in new CBS comedy Read More »

Jewish slave owners and a seder for the ages

Leave a Comment / Culture, Theater /

The son of a Jewish, slave-owning family from the South confronts two of his former slaves just as the Civil War ends in the play “The Whipping Man,” which played at the West Coast Jewish Theatre in Los Angeles, has been produced by theater companies around the country and is now being presented by the Pasadena Playhouse.  

Playwright Matthew Lopez said he has always been fascinated by the human drama of the Civil War and wanted to write a play about it, but couldn’t come up with an original approach. He remembered how one day, when he was visiting with his dad, he told his father that he didn’t want to regurgitate what had already been done about that time in history.

“He brought me into his office,” Lopez said, “and plucked down a book off of his shelf, one of his many, many, many dozens of books on the Civil War.  It was called ‘The Jewish Confederates,’ and he said, ‘This is a fascinating subject. No one really thinks about Jews in the South, particularly during the Civil War. And no one’s ever really written about it, except in this book.  And no one’s certainly ever dramatized it. Maybe there’s a story in that.’ ”

The story Lopez eventually created begins in the city of Richmond, Va., in April of 1865. Robert E. Lee has just surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox, and the slaves are free but the South is in ruins. Caleb (Adam Haas Hunter), a Jewish Confederate soldier, returns to his family’s decaying estate. He is badly wounded with a bullet still lodged in his leg, which threatens to become gangrenous. Everyone has fled and the house is empty, except for Simon (Charlie Robinson), an older man who was one of the Jewish family’s slaves.  They are soon joined by John (Jarrod M. Smith), another former family slave who is closer in age to Caleb, seemingly more opportunistic than Simon, and who has been looting deserted properties to obtain food and supplies.

Diagnosing the gravity of Caleb’s wound, Simon performs an amputation with John’s help, and remains to care for his former owner as the three men struggle to survive under extremely harsh conditions. 

The core of the play is leavened by a little-known piece of history that Lopez uncovered while reading his father’s book.

“I stumbled across what was barely a footnote in the book,” he said, “which was basically the very buried little fact that Passover in 1865, which was the last year of the war, began the day after Lee surrendered at Appomattox. Lee surrendered on April 9, and (on) April 10, Passover began.” 

As the play indicates, it was commonplace for slaves to take on the religion of their owners, so Simon and John have been schooled in Judaism. And, in the second act, Simon, who instinctively understands the meaning underlying the ritual, organizes a makeshift seder.

Lopez recalled one of his favorite moments from an early production when the seder began onstage. “Some man leans over to his wife and says, ‘They’re not going to do the whole thing, are they?’ which I thought was wonderful. ‘We’re going to be here for hours. I hope they feed us when it’s over.’ ” 

The playwright explained that he wanted to express the similarity between the freeing of the slaves and the meaning of Passover, which celebrates the freedom of the Jews from bondage in Egypt. “I just saw this beautiful, sort of historical parallel, the ability to tell the Exodus story again, the ability to put into counterpoint millennia-old stories that, for these characters, are very vitally immediate.”  

He added, “There was a very, very specifically, commonly shared experience of slavery, of bondage, and of freedom that came at great cost. It was not given, it was taken, which, of course, is the only way freedom can really be obtained.  The Hebrew slaves had God on their side — the American slaves had Ulysses S. Grant, the Union Army and Abraham Lincoln.”

Lopez is of Puerto Rican and European heritage and is not Jewish, but some of his relatives have married Jews, and he is familiar with the culture. He views the seder as a powerful metaphorical exercise. “Speaking as a dramatist looking at religious liturgy, it’s great theater,” Lopez said. “It’s a powerful use of words. The fact that it’s survived as a practice for all of these millennia proves that it works, and it’s just a wonderfully effective tool of remembrance.”  

He continued, “What I’ve always found just beautiful about the words in the haggadah and the practice of a seder is that it causes people to think about their own lives and to reflect on freedom, because, essentially, what it comes down to really is freedom of the soul.”  

As the action flows toward its conclusion, secret upon secret is revealed, and emotions are laid bare. Simon has to deal with the fiction that his family treated their slaves well and to face the apparent immorality of the legacy of slavery.  

Lopez maintained that there is no neat and tidy ending to his play because the fallout from slavery is a story we are still living. “If I’m ever asked, ‘Why [is] a Puerto Rican gay man telling this story about Jewish slaves and Jewish slave owners and African-Americans?’ my answer is always that we’ve got to tell each other’s story. We have to collectively own it. We can’t just simply claim our little section of history. We must tell the American story, and the American story is a very broad and very multifaceted story. We have to tell the whole story, not just our own.”

“The Whipping Man” will be performed at the Pasadena Playhouse, 39 S. El Molino Ave., Pasadena, Feb. 3 – March 1

Tickets: 626-356-7529 or pasadenaplayhouse.com

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Ghosts of exile, examined

Leave a Comment / Books, Culture /

Roger Cohen is an observer of Israel and the Middle East whose voice is especially commanding, and not only because he writes for The New York Times. As a former foreign correspondent, he is deeply experienced in the travails and troubles of the contemporary world. In “The Girl from Human Street: Ghosts of Memory in a Jewish Family” (Knopf), he brings his experience to bear in a rich and intimate chronicle that casts as much light on the world in which we live today as it does on the moving story of the Cohen family.

“My life has been spent crossing lines, gazing at the same picture from different angles in order to evoke it,” Cohen explains. “Memory is treacherous, as distinct from history as emotion from form. Every war is fought over memory.”

His family moved from the Pale of Settlement in czarist Russia to South Africa in 1896, thus escaping the mass murder of Jews in their Lithuanian town of origin a half-century later. After World War II, Cohen’s father moved the family to Britain. Along the way, many of their ties to Jewish tradition were broken. “A cultural and spiritual vacuum resulted from this attempt to begin again with the mark and scar of each generational upheaval effected,” Cohen writes. “We came from South Africa and nowhere. Industrious and circumspect, we adopted habits of silence that cloaked the fortuitousness of our deliverance.”

The girl from Human Street, we soon discover, is Cohen’s mother, June. His father, as it happens, was born on Honey Street. “It was love at first sight,” Cohen reports. But the relationship between mother and son, which is the beating heart of this book, was not always so sweet, if only because it was overshadowed by her lifelong depression. “When a parent dies unhappy, there is something unresolved that keeps nagging,” he writes. “It took her death for me to realize the strength of her love and how, in the torment, I had loved her back.”  

But Cohen’s book is hardly a sentimental eulogy. Rather, he seeks to find the impact of history itself on his mother’s mental illness. “It was tied to our odyssey, a Jewish odyssey of the twentieth century, and the tremendous pressure of wandering, adapting, pretending, silencing, and forgetting.” Exactly here is the best measure of the author’s audacity and insight — he wants to place the private woes of one woman and one family into the context of the wider world in which they lived, and he succeeds brilliantly at the effort.

Cohen does not neglect the biographical details that his reader needs and expects. Indeed, he is able to extract huge meanings from seemingly mundane details. “In every old photograph, as Roland Barthes observed, lurks a catastrophe,” Cohen writes, and the same can be said of his fraught account of life in Lithuania, then South Africa and then London. For example, Cohen’s father, a physician, was prompted by his wife’s first suicide attempt to create a family tree with a black dot next to each ancestor who suffered from mania or depression. “Black dots abound.”

Cohen himself follows the same trail of clues. “June Cohen was a woman hollowed out like a tree struck by lightning,” he declares. “She had been blighted. I wanted to know why.” Acting on his own journalistic instincts, he finds his way to the admissions register for the mental hospital where she was confined for electroconvulsive therapy, and he reproduces the column where religious affiliation was noted; all but one is marked “C/E” for Church of England, but his mother’s entry is marked “Jew.” At this point, Cohen enters his own narrative: “I ran my fingers over the page and paused at ‘JEW.’ I wanted to take a soothing poultice to her face.”

It’s a clue to at least one of the afflictions that Cohen detects in his mother’s mental illness. “In mildewed England, there were no more Shabbat gatherings, no more beef on rye, none of that sunny ease where friends from the neighborhood popped in,” he writes. “One of her problems, although she never framed it that way, lay in how to be that whispered word — JEW, as she had been registered in the ledger of that British mental hospital — in the land of Lewis Namier’s ‘trembling Israelites,’ a nation whose message to Jews often seemed to be: Lose yourself to join us entirely, and even then fall just a little short.”

At one point in the saga, Cohen reflects on the tension between remembering and forgetting in Jewish history. “For centuries, in their wanderings, Jews remembered,” he muses. “Rather than disperse anonymously among the nations of the world, they clung with a singular stubbornness to a Messianic dream of return and to the rabbinical injunction: Zakhor! Remember!” And yet the price of sanctuary was the loss of memory: “With Jewish self-improvement had come forgetting, in Europe and in Johannesburg.”

Cohen’s self-appointed mission was to retrieve what had been forgotten in his own family, and in the pages of “The Girl from Human Street,” he has done so with real genius.

Jonathan Kirsch, author and publishing attorney, is the book editor of the Jewish Journal.

Ghosts of exile, examined Read More »

This week in power: Government gaffe and German court

Leave a Comment / Uncategorized /

A roundup of the most talked about political and global stories in the Jewish world this week:

Obama reaction
During a recent interview with Vox, President Obama ” target=”_blank”>wrote Jonathan Chait at New York magazine.

What to make of this small, but telling, saga? “I assume this ghastly episode will be walked back, but the peek behind the curtain cannot be forgotten,” ” target=”_blank”>added James Kirchick at The Daily Beast.

Court stand
“A prominent Jewish group has criticized a court in western Germany for concluding that two men who firebombed a synagogue weren't anti-Semitic,” ” target=”_blank”>wrote James Kirchick in The Daily Beast. This is just the This week in power: Government gaffe and German court Read More »

The safest place for French Jews

Leave a Comment / Opinion /

In light of the recent multiple stabbing on an Israeli bus, and the missile strike on the Golan that killed two Israeli soldiers and wounded seven – an apparent Hezbollah retaliation for an Israeli strike that killed a senior Hezbollah commander and an Iranian General – I found myself thinking in a broader context about the current controversy of Jewish life in France, Prime Minister Netanyahu’s aggressive exhortation to French Jews to emigrate to Israel (an idea that picked up a lot of media steam for a while), and whether or not leaving for Israel would indeed be an emigration to greater safety.

According to JewishVirtualLibrary.org, the number of people killed in Israel by terror attacks since 2005 is 118.  Once could no doubt quibble with the number plus or minus a handful, but this is a significant multiple of the number killed in France by terrorism over the same period.  According to Wikipedia, military deaths, beginning with a the Hezbollah War of 2006, and including the two soldiers killed on the Golan come to 229, with civilian deaths during military operations at 105.  The military and civilian wounded add up to more than 3,000.

Clearly these numbers dwarf any parallel statistics in France, which I visited twice this year.  On both visits, I saw Jews in the airport, the Metro, the buses, on the streets, and in shops wearing kepahs.  While I don’t doubt that post the January attack at the Kosher Market, there is increased trepidation on the streets of Paris amongst Jews who have lived there for generations, but would they actually be buying into a safer situation in Israel, where lone-wolf attacks exceed those of France – killing at least a dozen over the last few months – and where Jews are much easier to find.

Obviously, when Prime Minister Netanyahu encourages French Jews to move to Israel, he’s thinking more than statistics.  Beside the politics, there is the legitimate question of living more openly as Jews, a practice that may be experiencing some increased inhibition in France.  But this is also a man (along with certain ministers) whose pugnacious promulgation of a very aggressive policy on nearly every front, as much as insures a continued, if not heightened, air of conflict in Israel for the foreseeable future.

Chairman of the Labor Party, Yitzhak Herzog, who has recently blamed Netanyahu for a “strong lack of personal security” among Israelis.

“The reality is very clear. There is no sense of personal security. Not in Tel Aviv, not in Jerusalem which is divided by concrete barricades and not (in the communities) near Gaza. This is a real problem and the citizens of Israel will need to make a decision,” he recently told Israel Radio.

Can it be that Netanyahu is more than a little responsible for this lack of security for Jews in and out of Israel.  He was an early persuasive contributor to the American Neo-con dream of ousting Saddam Hussein.  Now the Iraq War has spawned ISIS, which has brought Hezbollah into Syria.  How’s that working out for Jewish security?

In a recent commentary that found favor on the Jewish Right, Thomas Friedman, in a New York Times editorial stated, “…it is not good for us or the Muslim world to pretend that this spreading jihadist violence isn’t coming out of their faith community. It is coming mostly, but not exclusively, from angry young men and preachers on the fringe of the Sunni Arab and Pakistani communities in the Middle East and Europe.  If Western interventions help foster violent Islamic reactions, we should reduce them.”

If that’s true for “Western interventions,” perhaps it’s also true for certain Israeli policies and practices.  Israel has referred roughly 100 incidents of the most recent Gaza war for legal investigation.  Perhaps it’s time for Jews to stop putting their heads in the sand about the fact that Israeli actions and policies probably do have some inciting relationship to attacks on Jews outside Israel.  The simplest tracking of anti-Semitic incidents in France, for example, shows that the number of such incidents spikes significantly during Gaza wars.  Fifty years of occupation is going to inject not just a philosophical, but an emotional component into some people’s attitudes, motivations, and actions.

Right now safety for Jews in many places seems to be at a low point.  To ascribe all of the threat as stemming from innate anti-Semitism, to take no responsibility whatsoever for actions or policies that are clearly contributing to that lack of security, only ensures that risk will increase, not be mitigated.  If Israel wants to truly encourage emigration, it should worry more about putting its own house in order and becoming a magnet for Jews who seek a bit of calm from the worldwide storm.

Mitch Paradise is a writer and producer living in Los Angeles and teaches in the Los Angeles Unified School District.

The safest place for French Jews Read More »

Punch-card love: Finding a match before personal computers

Leave a Comment / Culture /

A generation before JDate, there was the Jewish Singles Computer Service. In the 1970s, the days when the mainframe computer ruled (do you remember punch cards?), eons before there was “an app for that,” a citywide, cross-denominational computer program helped single Jews of all ages find their match. For single Jews, Los Angeles can be an achingly lonely town. Spread between valleys, mountain ranges and freeways, it’s a diaspora within a diaspora, and its mountain-to-sea geography has always presented a challenge for co-religionists who wish to co-mingle.

According to The Jewish Federation of Greater Los Angeles’ 1977-8 “Jewish Los Angeles — A Guide” around 500,000 Jews were living in L.A. at the time. “Unfortunately,” it also pointed out, “difficulties abound for the Jewish single.”

The Jewish community, the guide concluded, saw “the single, regardless of the reason for their marital status,” as a “loser or a misfit, who is incomplete.”

Could the cold, calculating “brain” of an IBM computer recalculate that conclusion?

Rabbi Edward M. Tenenbaum (1918-2010), who served as the executive director of the United Synagogue’s Pacific Southwest Region from 1964 to 1983 and again in 1989 through 1990, had more training in performing weddings than in computer programming; yet he attempted to alter the hard math of Jewish matchmaking by leading an effort to create the West Coast’s first Jewish singles computer dating service.

In 1960, Tenenbaum had moved to Los Angeles from Pennsylvania, where he served as a rabbi at three synagogues; in 1977, he told the Valley News that his goal was “to bring Jewish singles together, encourage a stronger sense of Jewish identity, and introduce singles who might otherwise never come to know each other.”

“In a little village, the matchmaker knew people intimately — better than a computer could,” he added, but “the matchmaker was limited to the people he knew and how many people can one person know?” Tenenbaum is also remembered as having been the rabbi at Temple Beth Zion on Pico Boulevard from 1965 until his death.

As it turned out, the need for a Jewish single to expand his or her potential list of other eligible Jewish suitors was brought home to Tenenbaum in a very personal way.

As Susie Nusbaum, one of Tenenbaum’s three daughters, tells it, in 1975, “I was young, and my personal life was very static.” At the time, she was the only unmarried Tenenbaum daughter.

“You get out of college, and you start losing the ability to meet people, except at bars,” Nusbaum said. Adding to her difficulties in meeting people was that in 1971, she was in a terrible car accident and was no longer able to work at her job as a court reporter.

“My mother, Florence, was very worried about me,” explained Nusbaum, who recalls a conversation her mother had with her father.

“OK, Eddie, under your auspices in United Synagogue, you have a Women’s League, a Men’s Club and a camp for children,” Nusbaum’s mother said. “You don’t have anything for an adult Jewish single. Eddie you’ve gotta do something,” she said, recalling a computer dating program she had heard about on the East Coast.

“What she really wanted was for me to get married,” explained Nusbaum, who was in her 30s.

Her father, after responding that he “didn’t know anything about computers,” soon approached his daughter, who he thought had a head for it, with the prospect of starting a program.

She agreed.

But the original program used in United Synagogue’s Metropolitan Region “was not written very well,” Nusbaum said. “People were not matched up well.” 

Volunteering her time, Nusbaum got to work creating a new approach. Beginning in 1974, she interviewed psychiatrists, lawyers, educators, teachers and social workers to develop criteria for the dating program. She sought out “anyone who could give me some input as to what a good matching program would entail,” she said.

Along with areas that have become the norm in dating programs, such as occupation, income, education and whether you smoke, the questionnaire asked the respondents to define themselves, as well as their desired match, by Jewish background — whether they were affiliated with a denomination, level of kashrut, whether they had converted and which of their parents were Jewish.

This was prior to 1983, when Reform Judaism changed its definition of a Jew to include patrilineal descent — and while the Federation of Reconstructionist Congregations and Chavurot had already passed a resolution on this issue in 1968, self-definition nevertheless presented an issue. “People always didn’t think you’re Jewish if your mother was not Jewish,” Nusbaum said.

“Some people were very upset. And I understood that,” she said, and she explained to those whose only Jewish parent was their father that she felt obligated to operate under Conservative guidelines. “I had to take their applications out of the mix,” she said.

While she was developing the questionnaire, her father found a programmer, Myron Berliner.

Berliner, who grew up in Lakeview Terrace, was a football star at UCLA in the 1950s and is in the Southern California Jewish Sports Hall of Fame, was a programmer who had gained experience with computers working in the aerospace industry.

Berliner recalls meeting Tenenbaum while working as “a volunteer for the Southern California Jewish Federation,” he said. Berliner partnered on the project with programmer Mel Kaye, who helped with the coding and processing.

“It took two and a half years to develop the questionnaire and the program,” Nusbaum said.

To gather participants, Nusbaum visited dances and various Jewish groups, including ATID, United Synagogue’s college-based organization, to speak and hand out brochures.

“You will be matched to those people with the highest degree of compatibility with you,” read the brochure, which promised the applicant would receive a list of “up to 5 names and phone numbers” for a six-month service fee of $18, which covered three computer match runs.

“$18, ‘chai,’ was my father’s touch,” said Nusbaum, who, after collecting 1,051 profiles was ready for the first run.

Except there was “a bug” in the program, said Berliner, and it wouldn’t run correctly.

Wanting to make good on her promise to get results back to the applicants within two months, Nusbaum came up with an unlikely solution — turning her family into a digital computer.

In November of 1977, she gathered together her sisters, brothers-in-law and parents and announced, “We are going to hand-match these people based on the program,” she said.

“I explained exactly how the program would work,” said Nusbaum, who told the assembled group how certain categories, such as levels of kashrut, age and whether an applicant would date someone who was “handicapped,” had to be “absolute matches,” she said.

With her family seated around a large table, she recalled starting with a large pile of questionnaires, and then category-by-category, as the forms were passed to the next person, resorting the shrinking files, until finally, each form was matched with at least one other.

While they were sorting, however, a glitch in even this method occurred.

“‘Where is your application?’” Nusbaum remembers her mother asking her.

“I don’t really believe in this stuff,” Nusbaum responded. “I don’t want to be matched by a computer.” 

“ ‘We are not sending these out until you put your application here and we match you up,’ ” her mother insisted.

Succumbing, Nusbaum filled out the form and became application 1,052.

With the “computer Tenenbaum” humming again, the matching took a week. Letters were then typed up and sent out.

Soon, Nusbaum began getting feedback.

“I was shocked. People called up with all kinds of responses,” Nusbaum said. It ranged from things like “I had such a good date,” to  “You didn’t send me what I ordered.”

For the people who were unhappy, she would look up their application, often finding that the applicants had not been exactly forthright in their responses, especially in describing their weight.

By the second run, in 1978, the programmers had gotten the program up and running well on an IBM 1401 mainframe computer located in the Bay Area. “I actually had some pretty good dates,” said Nusbaum, who was becoming a believer in the system she had created.

It was on the third computer run, in 1978, that she was matched with Bob Nusbaum. Bob said it was his first run, although he’d already gone out with two matches. “I was a believer,” said the computer salesman, systems analyst and programmer.

Bob said he called her up and the two went on their first date — on April 1 — to a Pico Boulevard restaurant and then to a Flamenco show at a Spanish restaurant. The two began dating.

However, there was another glitch. Susie Nusbaum, at the same time, was dating another match. “I dated both Bob and this other guy for a year and a half,” she said. Then, the “other guy” asked her to marry him. But “I really wanted to marry Bob,” she said.

Explaining the situation to Bob, she asked: “What do you think?”

Bob, who had been married before, asked for some time to think. “All the check marks were in the right place, but it didn’t work,” Bob said of his first marriage.

Finally, he proposed.

“The one thing nobody can predict, nobody can program, is the chemistry that two people have,” Susie said.

After only a three-week engagement, “I hardly had time to call my matches,” Susie said — a chuppah was spread in 1979. And theirs were not the only one. According to a list compiled by Susie, by August of 1981, the program, had found matches for “4,400 Jewish singles” resulting in “88 subscribers’ marriages.”

“I would like to know how many children and grandchildren came from all this?” asked Susie, who ran the service until 1983, when Roz Gidan took over.

The program, which was also run for Jewish singles in Seattle, ended its run in 2000 — JDate began in 1997. In 1998, the Jewish Journal reported that as a result of the service, “at least 150 couples have met and married,” though the number of offspring is a question best left for the demographers.

As for Bob and Susie Nusbaum, they have two children and one grandchild — and counting.

Edmon J. Rodman will be giving a presentation titled “Who Knew? The Remarkable Inventions and Innovations of Jewish Americans You Never Heard Of” on Feb. 22 at 2 p.m. at the Merage Jewish Community Center in Irvine. Tickets are $10 for JCC members, $12 for non-members. Call (949) 435-3400, ext. 303 for more info.

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Decorating to improve your love life

Leave a Comment / Culture, Home /

Admit it. The first time you visit the home of someone you’ve just started dating, don’t you love to snoop around the place to get some clue about this potential mate? You might look at the pictures on the wall, the books on the shelves, maybe the style of furniture to get an idea of their interests and tastes. But a home speaks volumes more about a person than that.

A home reveals your personality. It says where you are right now in life. And it reflects how ready you are for a relationship.

So what is your home saying about you? Is it saying you’re a real catch? Or is it telling the world you’re stuck in the ’90s? 

Even if your home is sending out distress signals, you can decorate and accessorize to invite love into your life. Here are just a few tips to boost your home’s romance quotient. Because when you make a few changes to where you live, you’ll be making big changes to how you live. 

Get rid of white walls

If you ask people why they have white walls, they’ll probably say, “I don’t have time to paint” or “I didn’t want to pick a color and then see that it was a mistake.” Think about it. Don’t these excuses sound like reasons people avoid relationships? Write this down and put it in your fortune cookie: If you can’t commit to a color, how can you commit to a relationship? 

You’re probably a pretty good judge of color already, you just don’t know it. Go into your closet and pick out your favorite items of clothing. What do you wear over and over again? Which outfits do people always seem to compliment you on? If you look so good wearing these colors, you’ll also look good with these colors surrounding you. 

Sampling colors on your wall doesn’t have to be risky. Many companies like Home Depot sell little jars of their paint colors that you can try out. Don’t be afraid of making a mistake. If you don’t like it, try another, and then another. It’s just like dating. If it doesn’t work out, just move on to the next one. And you don’t have to worry about hurting the color’s feelings because you didn’t call back.

Lose the clutter

Before you get into a relationship, you need to get rid of your emotional baggage. The same thing goes for the unnecessary physical baggage that’s cluttering your home. From the looks of all their out-of-date magazines, you’d think some people were dentists. Throw all the junk away. This goes especially for items that remind you of a past relationship. That stuffed bear your ex won for you at the arcade? Dump it. Those maracas from that party you threw together? Hasta la vista! From this day forward, you are starting with a clean slate, so let your home reflect that. Then you’ll be open to filling your home with new souvenirs, new memories and new relationships.

Get comfy

Male or female, everyone loves a softie. How inviting is your furniture? Does it allow people to kick their feet up and stay a while? Without having to make big purchases, just incorporating some pillows and throws with luxurious, soft textures can help make up for a lumpy sofa. Area rugs will warm up a space, especially if you have hardwood floors. And soft lighting not only makes you look better, it casts a glow that puts everyone at ease.

Buy housewares in complete sets

When you’re buying dishes, buy the complete set for eight with the salad plates and those cups and saucers you’ll never use. When you’re buying towels, buy the whole set with matching hand towels and washcloths. (And buy more than one set.) Why? First, it shows that you are now an adult. You’re not a college student anymore, so don’t accessorize your home like you’re still in a dorm. 

The most important reason, though, is because it used to be that people waited until they got married before they got these items (and usually they were gifts). But by owning them before you’re married, you’re telling the universe that you are comfortable as a single person. You have a life. You are not waiting to get married to feel complete. And, ironically, it’s usually when you accept that you’re already a whole person that you happen to find your other half.

We spend so much effort on new hairstyles, clothes and teeth-whitening kits when we hit the dating scene that we forget it’s our homes that are the true reflection of ourselves. So the next time a date comes over, remember that your home is an open book.

Make it a book with a happy ending. 

Jonathan Fong is the author of “Walls that Wow,” ”Flowers that Wow” and “Parties that Wow,” and host of “Style with a Smile” on YouTube. You can see more of his do-it-yourself projects on Decorating to improve your love life Read More »

What Ida gets right, and wrong

Leave a Comment / Hollywood /

A Polish farmer standing shoulders-deep in a hole he has dug in wet, black dirt, searching for Jewish skeletons. As Poles uncover and handle Jewish bones, past sins, dirty conscience, betrayal, and buried grief return and have to be faced. In Paweł Łoziński's Miejsce urodzenia (Birthplace) (1992) the inhumanity of what the scene represents and the despair it bespeaks awake repulsion and grief. It was easier in Władysław Pasikowski's Pokłosie (Aftermath) (2013), where it is a Pole overwhelmed by compassion who digs up the bones of the Jews murdered by his neighbors. Finally, in Paweł Pawlikowski's Ida (2013), returns the murderous peasant of Birthplace – guilty, cruel, and sly, but somehow also crippled by what he did, and so more multi-dimensional – therefore, more human somehow, than the perhaps innocent grave-diggers of Birthplace.

Witnesses to German Nazi inhumanity and to Jewish, as well as their own, virtual helplessness in its face, yet freed in turn to rob, abuse and murder Polish Jewry, Poles were brutalised by the experience, and while indifference and fearful passivity may have remained the most common reactions to Jewish suffering, in many the anti-Jewish prejudice soured and turned to passionate hate: they joined in the German Judenjagd, becoming the hunters of Jews (see e.x. Jan Grabowski, Hunt for the Jews: Betrayal and Murder in German-Occupied Poland). Poles may have killed Jews anywhere during those terrible war years, but in film the murders invariably occur in an area on the edge of human habitation, within the liminal zone where there lurks a werewolf in man. Be these portrayals true or false, they have now entered the language the cinema uses to talk about the Poles and the Jews during World War 2. The motif has become a myth: it means more than the Poles and the Jews, and must recur to help us make sense of historical events whose common sense explanations we cannot accept.

Set during the Stalinist regime, in the 1960s, Ida recounts a short period in the life of Anna (Agata Trzebuchowska) – a young woman brought up in a convent who, on orders from her Mother Superior visits her aunt Wanda (Agata Kulesza) and is told her real name is Ida Lebenstein. Pawlikowski's film shows Poland through associations of bleakness, emotional evisceration, and life lived on ruins of the past. While I do not know first-hand what the sixties in Poland were like, my parents' photographs from the times of their youth show a world nothing like the Poland of Ida. Pawlikowski's scenography is a construct arguing for the film's final conclusion: escaping this hopeless and desperate landscape is the only reasonable solution. On the outskirts of one of these gray places inhabited by boorish farmers Ida's parents were hidden and then murdered. It is there that Ida and Wanda meet the cadaver-digging Pole.

The protests of Polish Roman Catholic groups who demand that the film be amended with information on the realities of Poland under German occupation are misguided. Idais not about the exigencies of German rule in occupied Poland, and invoking the trees in Yad Vashem adds nothing to the viewers' comprehension. The film requires a context, but not the context of Polish righteousness; rather, a much broader Bloodlands context – and then more. Such knowledge seems to be too terrible for the Polish protesters to admit.

Anti-Polish Ida certainly is not; if anything, with its main Jewish characters a nun-to-be caring not a whit about her Jewishness and an inebriated, promiscuous once-upon-a-time aparatchik aunt who had sent (we assume – innocent) people to their deaths as a Stalinist prosecutor, one may wonder whether the film is not anti-Jewish. If the protesting Poles are so intent on telling the truth, why don't they demand that Ida be prefaced by an incisive analysis explaining the historical and social reasons for the overrepresentation of Jews in the structures of communist party in post-war Poland? While they're at it, I suggest an explanation of why the Jewish children saved by the undoubtedly heroic Catholic clergy in Poland rarely grew up to be Jews. There is a scene in Yurek Bogayevicz's Edges of the Lord that provides a counterpoint to Ida: when the Catholic priest who helps a Jewish boy posing as a Pole distributes the holy wafer to his congregation, he hands to the boy the cut-offs left over after the white rings of wafer had been taken out to be blessed: a considerate and selfless gesture, the sharing of the edges of the Lord. No such empathy in Ida.

The plot rests upon a juxtaposition of the two female characters, both Jewish: Ida and her aunt. Where Ida is a beautiful china doll who takes life in well-measured steps, her aunt, broken and disheveled middle-aged, is fire and a love of life whatever it may be -until she loved Ida, quite literally, to the death of her own. Ida, in contrast, focused on herself, is impervious to her aunt's pleadings and sarcasm, her lover's endearments, the sight of her parents' and her brother's faces, and learning of their tragic deaths. Not even when the murderer hands her their skulls – an event one imagines uprooting the foundations of one's world – does nothing to rearrange her concept of who she is. The double discovery – of an identity and a death- is never addressed. All that stoicism so that Ida -Anna, rather- can return to the convent with her self-image undisturbed.

The New Yorker  calls Ida a journey of identity; indeed, the film posits such a choice at its center: to be a nun or to go for a pair of uncomfortable heels, a string of pearls, vodka straight from the bottle, and a one-night-stand – the appearances Ida mistakes for the modes of secular morality. The film expresses Ida's emotions not by the actress's face or body language, but by stand-ins: the vocal and bodily gyrations of her fiery aunt, the Polish murderer Ida only speaks to once, asking: Why not me?, and the young man whom she meets, beds, questions Then what?, then discards. These emotional mirrors reflect also what Ida is not: she is not her Jewish aunt, she is the one child whose regular features and light hair were less likely to get a Pole killed and thus she survived, but neither is she at one with her Gentile friend. So the question of and then what? is easily answered: either way, there is nothing at all. Because, first and foremost, Ida is a study in rejection.

And another, more important choice, is never voiced, and another question never asked. The story of a Jew discovering his or her Jewish identity has at this point grown stale on me; I need to know, to paraphrase Ida, now what? Why doesn't Ida ask herself what her being Jewish may mean to her? She has a go at the secular life; why does she not at least try on her Jewishness, the way she tries on the pearls and the vodka? It may have been difficult if not impossible to be a Jew at that time in Poland in any other sense than that of an internalized, partially hidden identity, of memory, or of faith; but it was certainly possible in those ways. For Ida, though, Jewishness is inconsequential. Had she at least explored the appearances, she would have to ask herself what it is like -if it is not possible to learn what it actually is – to be a Jew; she would have to assess the viability of her Jewishness; try to make meaning out of her family's death; attempt to understand the significance of the virtual disappearance of Jewish communities from Poland; finally, she would have to critically appraise the Poles and their Church. She does none. The return to the convent is Ida's best, in fact her only choice.

There are scenes in Ida that are pure genius: Wanda's suicide, the murderer's confession. In just three words: So I – killed, delivered face-on, unadorned of excuses or explanations, he delivers a broken truth that is almost unbearable: there is a murderer in men. The grave-digging Pole, a calculating thief and bully, a murderer of the helpless and of the innocent, can admit his guilt, but not explain how it can be that he has done it and lived. It is a genuine, gripping and painful moment. Ida gathers up the bones of her family and withdraws into the frame. No unnecessary gestures, neither is there confusion in Ida: a veritable porcelain Madonna.

There are in this film also scenes whose banality and pretension makes one whimper with embarrassment. The scene where Ida and her aunt are burying human remains is utterly unconvincing. So are the scenes that cater to a nostalgia about the seemingly secure economic system of the 1960s. Finally, why does the camera repeatedly ponder objects like a bit of a rug and a slipper? It is not, as is the case in some films, that in that interval we are given space in which to think: in Ida, nothing points us to what we may need to think about. When another interminable shot presents the viewer with Ida's conventionally pretty face, one remembers Liv Ullman as she outstares the viewer in Bergman's Persona and the storm in her face is enough to last the viewer a lifetime of thoughts. Whether the director meant it as such or not, Ida's face is smooth white porcelain; there is emptiness there. There is little life. Is Ida dead? If so, did she die in the forest, together with her mother, father and brother? Did she die at the parish, left there by her family's murderer for the priest to do with what he would? Or did it happen later on, at the convent? Deadness of feeling is excellent protection against pain; unfortunately, it also prevents one from growing. 

Ida shirks the responsibility that there is in the terrible knowledge imparted to its main character. In today's Poland, whose practising Jewry could probably fit inside one American synagogue, the question of whether Ida is or is not Jewish is a fundamental question. Still another issue is who are the Jews in Ida? In Birthplace, the Jew is a visitor return to tell the truth, calling out  j'accuse!; in Aftermath Jews are dry bones and an Israeli flag incongruous in a field of rye; Polish Jews in the 1960s were mostly unmoored and adrift, with few Jewish spiritual options but in Ida, the Jew can only be three things: a corpse, a Christian, or a suicide. That is why, with all her choices, Ida is not an identity movie. Ida's identity is fixed before the plot takes off, and remains such through other characters' despair, incomprehension, confusion, and love. Hers is a meaningful story wrecked by retelling.

Joanna Auron-Górska, PhD, just finished “Describing Who?”- an examination of the images of Jews and Poles in Western photography, published with Peter Lang, http://www.peterlang.com/download/datasheet/80210/datasheet_264702.pdf

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How to Not Compare Your Children

Leave a Comment / Culture /

It was ten minutes into my daughters swim class when it hit me: by the time she was one I had exposed her to quite a few things already. She had already taken a swimming class. She was in daycare and was learning to walk and knew her way around a playground. She was in music classes. My son? Nada. Poor second kid, I thought. He really is getting the short end of the stick. Thus launched a game of comparisons in my head that is hard to stop. Is the first child better off because you’ve had more time to dedicate to them? In my case, I went back to work when my daughter was 3 months old so she went to daycare. My son has benefited from me working part time and has gotten much more one on one time with me than my daughter did in her first year. Sadly, this has not translated into me exposing him to more of the world outside of the house.

What do you do when your first had advanced gross motor skills by the time she was one and your second born still has a funky crawl? What do you do when your first born spoke in full sentences at 10 months and your second born babbles well into his first year? Its hard not to compare when they are this young, and presumably harder as they get older and the things to compare mean much more than walking or crawling.

For example: we threw our daughter a big first birthday party with all her little baby friends, and at the party presented her with her first ever chocolate cupcake. She looked at it, licked her lips, and dug in. She demolished that cupcake. We were so proud. We did not throw our son a big party for his first birthday party but just had family over. We did present him with his first ever chocolate cupcake. He looked at it, poked it, and proceeded to throw it on the ground. We were so disappointed. And this was only about cake!

Realizing each kids’ strengths and weaknesses is what helps cease this comparison game.  The last thing you want is to have your kids know that you are comparing them! This leads to bad memories of sibling rivalry and extreme competitiveness and resentment among everyone. Even saying something as innocuous as “your sister is eating all her broccoli- why aren’t you?” can have lasting damage to their psyches. I have to remind my husband all the time to not compare them (at least not out loud in front of them) because it is so tempting to do. 

In order to not compare, I have to repeat a stop comparing mantra to myself.  It hasn’t helped much yet, but I’m hopeful one day it will kick in.

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Moving and shaking: Live painting, Limmud, LAMOTH and more

Leave a Comment / Los Angeles, Movers & Shakers, Moving & Shaking /

Cheder Menachem held a Feb. 3 banquet in honor of its donors at Neman Hall in West Hollywood.

The evening for the all-boys Orthodox school, which serves students from pre-kindergarten-eighth grade, celebrated the approximately $1 million raised in 2014, according to Rabbi Mendel Greenbaum, Cheder Menachem principal and an attendee at the dinner.

The event drew approximately 100 attendees and also honored Chana Arnold, a Cheder Menachem preschool teacher.

Live painter Dan Dunn performed, painting before the audience portraits of the late Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, also known as the Rebbe; “The Fiddler” from “Fiddler on The Roof”; and more.

Rabbi Yossi Lipsker, president of the Cheder Menachem board of trustees who attended with his wife, Gila, and daughter, Batsheva, bid $1,800 for the painting of the Rebbe. He praised the school, saying, “It’s a great school that accepts all children regardless of what they can pay.”

Greenbaum, a recent Milken Family Foundation Jewish Educator Award recipient, told the Journal that the school’s mission is to train its students to “be beacons of light, not only to their homes but to their surroundings as well.”

Wise School, formerly Stephen S. Wise school, announced Tami Weiser as its next head of school on Feb 3. Weiser is the school’s current principal and will officially succeed current Head of School Rabbi Yoshi Zweiback on July 1, as he takes on the position of senior rabbi of Stephen Wise Temple. 

Tami Weiser

Weiser, 51, says her current goals in her new leadership position are to continue the trajectory of building up the day school and to create an innovation lab. The school received a generous donation that will help bring the lab to a reality, and Weiser said she is looking forward to “developing a space that builds future thinkers.” She also plans to reach out to alumni of the school.

“I’m excited to be on this journey and to be taking this next step,” she said.

Weiser has been the principal at Wise School for the past five years, and at this time, no replacement will be hired for the position of principal. The tasks of principal will be filled by the current administrative team. 

Her background includes time as an administrator for public schools in Los Angeles and as head of school at the former Heschel West Day School, now known as Ilan Ramon Day School, in Agoura Hills. 

Wise School, which was founded in 1977, has an early childhood center with 157 children and an elementary school that goes up to sixth grade with 314 students.

— Leilani Peltz, Contributing Writer

The fifth annual Yom Limmud (“Day of Learning”) at Leo Baeck Temple on Feb. 7 attracted 300 people to the Reform congregation for 45 sessions on a diversity of topics. 

Leo Baeck Rabbi Ken Chasen addresses Limmud attendees. Photo by Larry Sterling

Event co-chairs Ted Cohen and Terri Oppelt and a committee of 12 organized the gathering, which featured issues as wide-ranging as arts, nature, politics and Judaic studies, congregant and event publicist Lois Littman said in a phone interview. 

Baeck Assistant Rabbi Lisa Berney presented “on the audaciousness of prayer, and how difficult it is to pray and the meaning of prayer and getting into the mood,” Littman said, describing a personal highlight of the day, which kicked off at 9:15 a.m. and wrapped with Havdalah.

The Rt. Rev. Alexei Smith of the Archdiocese of Los Angeles and Amir Hussain, a Loyola Marymount University professor of theological studies whose specialty is Islam, shared a panel.

Current events were in the mix, as well, with Rabbi Stephanie Kolin, co-director of Union for Reform Judaism’s Just Congregations initiative and Baeck Rabbi Rachel Timoner discussing separate police killings during a panel titled, “What Do Michael Brown and Eric Garner Have To Do With Us?”

Leo Baeck Rabbi Ken Chasen and Cantor Linda Kates; Allison Lee of American Jewish World Service; and Lee Broekman, a communications professor at American Jewish University were among others who presented, according to an event program. 

3G at LAMOTH (Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust) raised more than $1,300 to assist local, Holocaust survivors in need through Jewish Family Service of Los Angeles during a community gathering at the museum on Feb 5.

3G at LAMOTH executive board members (from left, top row) Galit Prince, Guy Lipa and Jon Steingold and (from left, bottom) Rachel Hamburg, Becca Katz, Jordanna Gessler, Caitlin Kress and Samira Miller. Photo by Gina Cholick

“My first and foremost goal is to help the remaining survivors who are living below the poverty line. While some effective action has already been taken, there is still a lot of work to do. It’s absolutely critical that we, as a community, do whatever we can to take care of these individuals since time is running out,” Jon Steingold, 3G at LAMOTH executive board member, said in a statement.

“The purpose of the event was to come together, basically a community-building for 3G at LAMOTH, for family and friends,” fellow board member Samira Miller, who is also the museum’s director of community support, told the Journal.

Other attendees included executive board members Galit Prince, Guy Lipa, Rachel Hamburg, Becca Katz, Jordanna Gessler and Caitlin Kress. They were joined by more than 80 of their family and friends, 

Attendees enjoyed wine and sushi and toured the museum during the event, which was titled, “A Night of History and Humanity.”

3G at LAMOTH, founded by the grandchildren of survivors, describes itself on the LAMOTH website as “a museum-based community for young professionals who want to play a direct role in shaping the future of Holocaust remembrance and education by actively engaging the Museum community, survivors, and the larger Los Angeles public.”  

 

Moving and Shaking highlights events, honors and simchas. Got a tip? Email ryant@jewishjournal.com. 

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