From "A Taste of Limmud" Sunday night in Valley Vilage:
Danielle Berrin rose to give her talk. (Listen)
Danielle spoke about her cover profile of director Brett Ratner. She said that she did not publish the worst things he did to her. Damn, I’ve got to know what that was. Men can be such bastards.
Here are excerpts of Danielle’s class:
"I did not study journalism. So it’s only natural that my education would come at the hands of a big Hollywood director. About a year ago, my Editor said to me, ‘Danielle, we’ve never had Hollywood in our paper. It’s really important. There’s this massive Jewish community at our doorstep and we don’t know who they are and we’re not accessing them and there’s all this mythology about Jews running Hollywood and what’s that about?’ I said, ‘Hollywood? No problem.’ Who cares that I am from Miami and that I am probably the least connected person here.
"I met Brett Ratner. He is a high-profile successful Hollywood director. He makes big popular commercial films such as Rush Hour. His films have grossed over a billion dollars at the box office. He’s also from my home town of Miami.
"He gave me his phone number. I said, this is going to be my big Hollywood entre.
"I ran into him again. I had enough of the cat-and-dog chase. I said, ‘I’m not going to take no for an answer.’ He said, ‘OK, come to my home tonight.’
"He has this mythology where he got into Hollywood by not taking no for an answer and talked his way into the upper echelons of Hollywood.
"I showed up to his house with pad and paper and tape recorder. Over the course of four hours, I had an interesting conversation with him. He was forthright and candid with me. As he got more comfortable, he started making some come-hither comments about how I looked or what he wanted to do with me. Then he offered me a tour of his house… He starts in the underground disco basis, which is like a Las Vegas nightclub.
"Over the course of the evening, he became more and more comfortable with me as his companion. He got strangely touchy. I walked out there feeling really deflated. I had to ask myself, did I compromise my integrity to get this interview? It was so important to me. Nothing severe happened, but as a woman, it was a humiliating experience.
"This was my first lesson in journalism.
"As I went to write the story, it was really difficult. It took me two weeks to get it down on paper. I asked myself, do I write it as a straight profile or do I tell the fuller picture of what my experience was when I went to interview him?"
"I wrote the story as it happened. There was a lot of discussion of whether that would be the right thing and the potential consequences to me as a brand new journalist and especially because I am endeavoring to get into the Hollywood scene, to shame a Hollywood director who could potentially help you out, but I realized I couldn’t write it any other way.
"It was written about in the LA Times. The LA Times called Brett Ratner to see if it was true. My journalistic integrity was challenged… Sure enough, I had the facts to back it up. I recorded the entire evening.
"I didn’t even write the worst of what happened."
Whoa! I wonder what that means. Did he pull it out and scream, "Interview this!"?
Danielle: "I was pretty nice. In the end, Brett’s comments to the LA Times reporter were fair, he knew I was being kind to him in more ways than one."
Danielle’s AJU rabbinic student says: "Proust says about Rembrant that when Rembrandt came into the world, you couldn’t help but look through the world but with the eyes of a Rembrandt. Once something great comes around, it changes the way people see things… Jewish journalism is [seeing the world] through Jewish eyes."
I know I have not been the same since I read Danielle’s journalism. It evokes Rembrandt and Proust, but Rembrandt and Proust at their best. Their highest selves, not the swill they’d churn out for the masses.
Speaking of Proust, Joey Kurtzman said: "I did that for two-and-a-half years [at Jewcy.com]. Jewish journalism. Jewish content. Content looked at through the lens of a Jewish sensibility. But what is the Jewish sensibility? I can report that I am no closer to the answer after two-and-a-half-years."
My friend Danny, who majored in journalism, tells Danielle: "I’ve noticed that the Jewish Journal tends to focus [its reporting on] scandals among the Orthodox."
Danielle disagrees.
Danny: "The non-observant Jews put the Orthodox under a magnifying glass just like the non-Jews put Jews and Israel under a magnifying glass."
Danielle: "We could go on all night about who we cover more…"
She gives an example of a story the Jewish Journal found out about and she asks us it the paper should report it: "A young woman (around 18yo) comes to a rabbi for counseling (he’s married with kids) and ends up having an affair with him. What do we do?"
Bloke: "Who’s catering?"
Danielle: "The claim was that a prominent rabbi took advantage of his position with vulnerable young woman who came to him with some real issues."
"We had another example where a rabbi was just having an affair with another married woman. We determined not to report it because it was an affair between two consenting adults."
Woman: "You have an advantage. You don’t have to sell on sensationalism whereas most other publications do. People don’t read the Journal for scandal."
Danielle: "But you know when there is scandal? You know how many more hits we get on the website? As opposed to when I interview another Hollywood executive making another Holocaust film, no one cares, they want to hear about the Brett Ratners taking advantage of the little amateur journalist."
"It is important to be provocative and interesting without crossing the line to ‘Alien Jews From Milky Way Land Set Up Shul On Pico And Take Over.’"
Patrick Goldstein writes for his LA Times blog:
Ratner has been on the receiving end of a lot of snarky press over the years, but what made this startling was that it ran in the Jewish Journal. I couldn’t help but wonder what Brett’s reaction was to being painted as a Lothario in L.A.’s leading Jewish newspaper. What did he think?
I called Ratner on Sunday, just to make sure Berrin didn’t make this all up–or was wildly exaggerating. He’d read the story, but was surprisingly unperturbed. "Some of the stuff she did was unfair, like the part about the books," he told me. "I didn’t brag about how expensive the books were. She was the one who asked me how much they cost. I was just answering her question. But she’s pretty smart, because she didn’t have a pen and she wasn’t recording anything, so I don’t know how she remembered everything so well."
And what about him hitting on her? "I didn’t hit on her," he says. "I was flirting, but it wasn’t as bad as she made it out. I don’t remember being quite that aggressive. I mean, flirting is just flirting. I think she exaggerated a lot of it, maybe because she was trying to get her boyfriend jealous. We talked about a lot of serious things in the story, but I guess that’s not what anyone’s going to write about when they write about me."
UPDATE: Berrin just emailed me, wanting to clarify the issue of how she reported the story. She says: "I had my tape recorder in plain view when I interviewed Brett, which would confirm everything he said. I also took handwritten notes."
Black Jewish Relations
Here’s a report on a former Los Angeles rabbi (at the Conservative shul near LAX) and a very sweet man:
"I am over the moon. I’ve never been happier."
That’s Rabbi Michael Beals, of Congregation Beth Shalom, on Barack Obama and the promise he holds for strengthening Jewish-black relations.
But long before Obama inspired Beals, the rabbi was touched by the appreciation that the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. had for the Jewish faith.
Respect flowed the other way too. Jewish Freedom Riders were an important part of King’s civil rights movement. In fact, Rabbi Abraham Heschel, a leader in the conservative tradition that Beals shares, marched arm in arm with King during the 1968 Selma, Ala., protest.
"I felt my legs were praying," Heschel said.
CHAIM AMALEK EMAILS: "Luke, as one of the few people on this site who has met me, you know that I too, marched with Dr. King (we Jews don’t like limiting him to the Christian honorific "Reverend") in Selma. But since then there has been a falling out between the Jews and the Blacks, to the indifference of the latter but not, mysteriously, the former. Indeed, Jews seem to be the only ethnic group whose religious leaders fret about the state of their relations with Negroes. One never hears Polish Americans so concerned, or the Irish, or the Mexicans, Koreans, etc. Just Jewish Democrats. Why this should be, I simply do not know, even though I was there with them in Selma, fighting for the rights of Mankind as a liberal Jew."
ONE OF MY FAVORITE JEWISH AUTHORS IS DEAD. JTA REPORTS.
Rabbi Alan Lew, the Rabbi for fourteen years at San Francisco’s Congregation Beth Sholom and a leader with Religious Witness With Homeless People, died suddenly on January 12. Lew, a pioneer in the field of Jewish Meditation, collapsed while on a Meditation Retreat. The funeral service will be Thursday at 12:00 pm at Congregation Beth Sholom, 301 14th Avenue. Rabbi Lew told me at a September event honoring Sister Bernie Galvin that he was feeling better than he had felt in some time, though he was not someone to complain about his health. I had the honor of working closely with Rabbi Lew on a number of local and national housing campaigns. He was a giant of our time, a profoundly visionary spiritual leader, a tireless advocate for the homeless, disenfranchised and dispossessed, and a true mensch. His death comes as a terrible shock, and he will be deeply missed.
YEHUDA BERNSTEIN WRITES FOR THE YU COMMENTATOR:
He’s a prominent Jewish studies professor at Harvard University and Bar-Ilan University, who has authored award-winning scholarship on the Bible, and draws hundreds of students to his classes. And a recent lecture at Stern College which drew roughly 140 YU students proved he was pretty popular at Yeshiva University as well. Kugel’s visit raises an interesting set of questions: should someone with his beliefs on Biblical authorship be allowed to speak at Yeshiva University? Should YU be featuring guest speakers who have publicly identified with principles that may be antithetical to Orthodox or Orthoprax Judaism?
On Thursday, December 11, 2008, gathered at Yagoda Commons at Stern College to hear Dr. James Kugel. He spoke about the development of early Biblical interpretation as seen through several Midrashim in Genesis, as a large crowd of YU undergraduates hungry for knowledge and Shabbas food (the refreshments included three varieties of kugel) listened-on. The event, coordinated and sponsored by the student group TEIQU, spanned over an hour. As the lecture came to an end, Dr. Kugel took students’ questions on topics ranging from discrepancies in particular Midrashim to whether he was a follower of Julius Wellhausen.
The latter question refers to a 19th century German scholar who pioneered modern Biblical criticism, and points to Dr. Kugel’s most recent book, How to Read The Bible, a voluminous digest of the major modern critical interpretations of the twenty-four books of the Hebrew Bible. Among many other issues, the book presents the documentary hypothesis, a source-critical theory which maintains that the Five Books of Moses is a composite texts authored by several individuals over the course of the late First to early Second Temple periods. Unlike most works of modern Judaic scholarship, this book has had a more pronounced impact on the Orthodox community, partly because Kugel seems to have written it for a larger lay audience and it was reviewed by the New York Times. What is perhaps most controversial about the work is not its heretical subject matter, but rather the epilogue, in which Dr. Kugel briefly presents how he reconciles the various theories of Biblical criticism with Jewish faith and practice.
Since the publication of How to Read the Bible, objections to Dr. Kugel have surfaced in the American Orthodox community. Dr. Kugel joked with the crowd on Thursday night that he would never pray in Teaneck again. Behind the humorous comment lies a real issue in the community, highlighted by a statement from YU alumnus and prominent blogger Rabbi Gil Student: "I believe that Jewish Studies in Yeshiva University should be taught [or lectured] by people full of not only knowledge but also Yiras Shamayim… Studying Jewish Studies is in many ways a fulfillment of the mitzvah to learn Torah and should be treated as the religious experience that we expect it to be." When asked about the importance of diversity of discourse, Rabbi Student said, "Our religious outlook certainly includes the existence of multiple, valid views under the rubric of Eilu Va-Eilu. However, they must still be within the framework of Orthodox beliefs and not attempt to undermine Divrei Elokim Chayim."