Emanuel, born to an Israeli doctor who married a local woman after he moved to Chicago in the mid-1950s, speaks Hebrew and fondly recalls summering each year in Israel as a child – including just after the 1967 Six-Day War. He attends Anshe Sholom, a Modern Orthodox synagogoue in Chicago, and sends his children to Jewish day school.
His rabbi, Asher Lopatin, recalls Emanuel approaching him just before Rosh Hashanah this year, telling him that an effort to put together a bailout package for the hard-hit stock market before the holiday had failed and asking whether it was permissible to take conference calls on the holiday in order to salvage the bill.
"I asked, ‘Is it as serious as people say it is?’ " the rabbi recalled. "He said, ‘Without this bill there could be a meltdown of the financial system.’ "
Lopatin considered the effect such a failure would have on children and the poor.
"I felt it was a case of ‘pikuach nefesh,’ " the commandment that places the saving of life above all other commandments, Lopatin said, and gave Emanuel the OK.
The somberness of the request couldn’t quell Emanuel’s acerbic wit. Lopatin recalled Emanuel’s teasing, wondering whether the status of the rabbi’s 401(k) investments wasn’t also behind the hechsher.
When Barack Obama appointed Rahm Emanuel as his chief of staff last week, a bunch of old stories went back into circulation, clues, perhaps, to how he’ll run the White House: Emanuel wrapping up a dead fish to send to a pollster who’d made him angry; Emanuel stabbing a table with a knife while shouting the names of people who’d betrayed Bill Clinton; Emanuel saying “Don’t fuck it up” to Tony Blair. These are memorable moments, but Rabbi Asher Lopatin, Emanuel’s rabbi at the Anshe Sholom B’nai Israel congregation, in Chicago, pointed out that they don’t capture the whole man. “I don’t know him in a political way,” Lopatin said, “but I wish all our congregants were as loyal to the synagogue and as engaged as he is.” Lopatin said he tries not to get involved with politics, since this can lead to trouble (see Wright, Jeremiah; “Sometimes we spiritual leaders say things we don’t mean,” Lopatin said), but he’d taken the liberty of leaving “a couple messages” on his congregant’s voice mail. “I didn’t push him one way or the other,” he said. “I just wanted to congratulate him and tell him it’s a good opportunity.”
Emanuel, Lopatin emphasized, is “a genius at balancing things.” A few weeks ago, Emanuel consulted Lopatin about working on the financial-bailout package during Rosh Hashanah. The rabbi gave his approval, citing the principle of pikkuah nefesh—“To save a life, you can violate almost any commandment,” he said. “There’s no doubt that somewhere in the world there would be a serious risk to lives and personal survival if the financial system melted down,” he reasoned. So Emanuel tiptoed out of the service to take a conference call. But the rest of the time he was in synagogue. “This year, I’d asked Rahm to open the ark,” the rabbi said. “We had to make sure we gave him an ark-opening time that didn’t conflict with the conference call, so he could get down from the bimah in time.” (Lopatin said that he had missed the episode of “Entourage” in which the character based on Emanuel’s brother, the Hollywood agent Ari Emanuel, sneaks out of Yom Kippur services to talk to a studio head on his cell phone. “That is so funny!” Lopatin said. “I like Jewish characters on TV. I think it’s a good thing.”)
Josh: was rahm’s appointment to chief of staff a way of placating us yids, or does obama really value his advice
YourMoralLeader: i think latter
Josh: i’ve heard rahm is gay
ChaimAmalek: With 80% of the Jewish vote in his pocket, he has no need to placate the Jews
YourMoralLeader: i feel calm about obama
Josh: he’s tall, thin, and dances ballet
ChaimAmalek: gay? He is married
ChaimAmalek: married a hot shiksa who converted
ChaimAmalek: The goyim have reason to complain
Josh: chaim, how many married men secretly harbor their gayness
ChaimAmalek: He volunteered to serve in the armed forces – no, not America’s, Israel’s
ChaimAmalek: A smart Jew might go into ballet just to meet hot shiksas
Josh: let’s see what he has to say when obama calls for the establishment of a palestinian capital in shared jerusalem
ChaimAmalek: Well, he will, and he will say little
Cornfused: personaly I believe we are screwed
ChaimAmalek: Hillary + Bill = wayyyyyyy better than Obama
ChaimAmalek: But liberal whites needed the sort of expiation that only a vote for a seminegro could provide
Cornfused: heard hes blinging out the white house
ChaimAmalek: Woudn’t it be funny if some other things came out about him now?
Josh: little do the 97% of blacks who voted for obama know that obama’s ancestors may have sold them into slavery
Cornfused: putting spinner caps on Air Force one
Josh: white europeans didn’t come to the african jungles with nets and kidnap africans
ChaimAmalek: Bush damn near destroyed the conservative movement and the republican party
Cornfused: taking out the rose garden and planting watermellons
Josh: african tribes who were stronger than other african tribes sold their booty into slavery
Josh: and obama is obviously a descendant of one of those stronger tribes, or else he woulda been born leroy johnson
ChaimAmalek: Luke, got any negro friends yet?
YourMoralLeader: yeah
YourMoralLeader: an ethiopian movie producer
ChaimAmalek: That’s a start
ChaimAmalek: Although I don’t know if Ethiopians count
ChaimAmalek: Their noses are suspiciously narrow and their lips thin
Cornfused: I heard that he had lost 90% of the black vote when he told them he was getting all of them jobs
ChaimAmalek: I saw an ad on late night cable for the Ron Popiel Self-Circumcizer
ChaimAmalek: Also works as a great JEWcer
ChaimAmalek: The world wants to know: Is Rahm Emanuel gay?
YourMoralLeader: hmm
ChaimAmalek: Is he a poofter?
ChaimAmalek: Are he and Obama living lives on the down-low?
ChaimAmalek: Not that there would be anything wrong with that, mind you.
ChaimAmalek: C’mon Luke, use your gaydar
ChaimAmalek: I think it would be wonderful if he and Obama were and outed themselves.
ChaimAmalek: This would cement America’s acceptance of gays, blacks, and Jews.
Josh: many bukharian marriages are done sans a civil marriage, just religiously
Josh: the husbands then have their wives take welfare, since the state views them as single parents
Josh: some of these marriages end in divorce, and since the couple are not viewed as married according to the state, the wife has no recourse in terms of getting their fair share
Josh: i live amongst these people and have come to the conclusion that the reason they lack normative morals is because communist russia deprived them of judaism
Josh: they build these massive walls around their monstrosities they call homes in order to avoid prying eyes so they can beat their women in private
The struggle to learn English has proven to be a major barrier to economic independence to the close-knit community. Only the more secular Bukharians, like Ms. Simons, who speaks English fluently, interact with people outside the neighborhood enough to take jobs elsewhere.
Paradoxically, the Bukharians’ traditions have kept them from profiting from a technique adapted after centuries of oppression in their predominately Muslim homeland. Ms. Simon said Bukharians learn two professions, which she described as ”one intellectual, one simple.” ”We do this because we are Jews and we can be thrown out of our country,” said Ms. Simon, who was an ecological geneticist in Uzbekistan. ”In another country you are not intelligent anymore. You don’t know the language. But you can still practice the simple profession you learned.”
Rabbi Kaziyev, for example, was a geologist and a tailor before completing his rabbinical studies. He still makes his own trousers.
Mrs. Kasiyeva said her hope is for the children. She has a 9-year-old grandson who has forgotten his Russian and speaks only English. They communicate through their traditions, she says.
Here‘s Rachel’s new book on Amazon.com and here is her website.
I interview her at her home Sept. 24.
She says she’d rather interview than be interviewed.
Rachel: "I teach a lot. One of the things that gives me huge pleasure is drawing people out or letting them have breakthroughs and revealing things about themselves.
"Now I am going to give you all these. There’s nothing left for me to reveal after spilling my guts on the page with this book… Because people do get defensive when being interviewed and aren’t used to be listened to, particularly in this city."
Luke: "Nice place you got here."
Rachel: "When I was a kid, I read Magic Mountain. I always wanted to be sent away to a place like that."
Luke: "How long have you been here?"
Rachel: "Eleven years."
Luke: "I was scared to death driving up here. It was frightening."
Rachel: "Aside from being a love junkie, I’m sure I’m an adrenalin junkie. I like driving fast on curves…"
Luke: "Along mountain roads next to the edge."
Rachel: "Huhhmm."
We talk about sex addiction.
Rachel: "[Singer] Alanis Morriset, her name album Flavors of Entanglement, she proclaimed that she was a love addict. This whole album sprang from a breakup with an actor. She came up with her own cure for being a love addict — have no-strings attached sex for a year… So maybe she’ll start a new rehab center that has that featured…"
Luke: "It’s interesting that in all the people you talked about, it is the men with the sex addiction and the women with the love addiction."
Rachel: "It’s a new addiction that’s coming to light… It’s talked about as a brain disease, which I concur with.
"Women need to have an emotional component, to make it hot, to kick this whole thing into gear."
Luke: "When you were a kid, what did you want to be when you grew up?"
Rachel: "When I was four, I was on the Upper West Side of Manhattan and a fortune teller asked me that and I said, ‘Brain surgeon.’ She said, ‘Great. If you stay on that path, you’ll be successful. If you don’t, you won’t.’
"I’ve never gotten over that…until I thought, ‘Maybe a writer could be considered a brain surgeon.’
"I’m very superstitious.
"The other thing I’ve always wanted to be is a writer.
"My father says that when I was four, I pointed my finger at my father and said, ‘I’m going to write about all of this one day.’
"I was pissed. The opening word for my essay to get into the MFA program was, ‘Revenge. That’s why I write.’
"That’s not why I write now but it was then, 1991."
Luke: "Anger is great fuel for writing."
Rachel: "It can be but not for what I just wrote."
Luke: "What did your parents expect from you?"
Rachel: "Perfection. They were so young. They met in a Shakespeare class. He was at Columbia. She was at Barnard. She got pregnant. They were in their early twenties when they had me. They were not well matched."
Rachel’s parents split when she was four.
Her father makes his living teaching Talmud in New York City. He never completed his PhD at Columbia.
Luke: "Before I read your memoir, I read all of your fiction. When I read your memoir, I was struck by the similarities with your fiction."
Rachel: "There’s no question there are similarities because I write close to the bone. That’s something that fuels my writing also — scraping away all the bulls—. Go for the jugular. I’ve always admired poets the most of all the writers because they just cut through everything. Growing up, everyone was lying… Why was everyone drinking in the morning? I hated denial.
"One of the things I loved about poets was that they were flaying their psyches, they were stripping everything away, they were using themselves, which I think is fair, other people is a whole other question… I felt there were a lot of layers I could draw from that could bring some pulse and beat to what I was writing."
Luke: "In all your stories I read, all the leading female protagonists were love addicts."
Rachel: "Yeah, but I didn’t know that. I didn’t know there was such a thing. One reason that the memoir came into being, it was a door of perception that opened. It opened when I used the word addict for myself, when I felt it, when I walked into one of the rooms for 12 step programs, where they gather people who have issues with sex, distorting it, using it, getting high from it, it’s not about relating to another person. It’s that element of brain disease. A complete distortion.
"I never even recognized the chemicals, the rush that I would get when I was around someone who would resonate, another damaged soul. Yeah! We can really destroy each other. Those ecstatic flames. You recognize that. But I didn’t until I walked into those rooms and identified with everyone who was talking. Goddamnit, I thought it was them. There was that victim thing for years. I would be involved with people who were addicts, alcoholics. Hey, they’re shooting up! It’s not me. I just love them. I’m sticking it out.
"And I was getting off on the whole thing. They’re obsessed. They’re in love. They’re having a relationship with the bottle or with heroin or hookers. I’m focused, addicted and obsessed with the relationship, with the high I’m getting from how twisted it is. I never recognized that. That gets into the distinction between substance abuse and addiction."
Luke: "Why did you keep switching voices in your novel Go West?"
Rachel: "Sometimes you do something instinctively and you look back and go ‘Whoa. A therapist would have a field day with that.’ If you come from a background of trauma, which I never wanted to acknowledge, but that’s one of the reasons writing the memoir has been useful. I’ve flayed my psyche in search of some answers to give to other people. Part of it had to do with realizing that childhood trauma was fueling this addiction… My parents weren’t capable of giving that early attachment thing and if you don’t get that, it does something funky to your brain. You don’t develop right. When I would get that high from falling in love, that brought me up to normal. I had a depressive, alienated ongoing state of being. The cool thing is you can rejigger your brain. You can create new grooves."
"What happens when you have that kind of trauma is that you fragment. The first, second and third person was an illustration. It was unconscious but it felt right. I would break into different pieces. I wasn’t integrated."
Luke: "If a genie said, I’ll give you a lifelong happy stable relationship but you have to become Mormon?"
Des emails: ""Foupe?" Is that anything like "faux pas?" You obviously learned nothing from when I punished your youthful sweet tooth by having you copy page after page out of the dictionary. I should have suck with my initial plan which was to brain you with a rock and leave you for the fair-dinkum wombats. You’re an embarrassment, boy."
Here is the Amazon.com page for the book and here is the website for the author Frances Dinkelspiel.
We did this interview a couple of weeks ago via email. I told Frances to only answer the questions she found interesting. I’ve left in tact all questions I sent her.
* What were the biggest obstacles you had to face in making this book?
The biggest challenge was finding information about early Los Angeles. I really wanted to write about the development of the Jewish community as at least 8 Jews were in the region by 1850. But the LA Jewish community has done a poor job of preserving its history. I went to the Wilshire Boulevard Temple, which is the successor to B’nai B’rith, LA’s first synagogue, and asked to see their old minute books. The director was very helpful but he had to scrounge through numerous cabinets to find them, and then he only found documents from the 1890s onward. All the earliest documents are missing. Apparently, no one realized years ago that these documents were worth preserving.
I got bits of information about the Jewish contribution to the settling of Los Angeles by reading the newspapers of the 1850s, 1860s, and 1870s. I spent weeks and weeks in the basement of the UC Berkeley library scrolling through the Los Angeles Star, Herald, and other papers. Reporters back then covered social occasions, so I found descriptions of events like B’nai B’rith’s first conformation in 1870 at the Teutonic Hall, dances to raise money for the temple, and the dedication ceremony in 1872 for the temple, then located on Fort Street. (Broadway). I also found some really poignant things, like the death of 5 year old Eugene Hellman, the son of Samuel and Adelaide Hellman. He and his brothers were playing on and around a wagon laden with goods. The wagon driver kept yelling at the kids to get off the wagon, but they ignored him. Then tragedy struck. Eugene Hellman fell off the wagon and the horse crushed him. This was in July 1871. It was the first recorded Hellman death in Los Angeles.
* I believe this is your first book. What surprised you about the process of publishing/promoting your book?
I was surprised how long it took. I started this project around 2000 and it has taken 8 years for it to be published. But I loved researching the book and meeting people. Who wouldn’t enjoy doing research at the Huntington Library where you get to look at old documents in the morning and then wander the verdant gardens during lunch? I also connected with lots of Hellman relatives I never knew existed. While Isaias Hellman moved to San Francisco in 1890 to take over the Nevada Bank, his two brothers, Herman and James, remained in Los Angeles. There were other Hellman cousins as well (Hellmans first came to LA in 1854) so there are dozens of descendants in the area. They welcomed me and have been very supportive of Towers of Gold.
* Why did you go for that provocative subtitle, "created California" and do you think your book made that case convincingly?
My first title was Towers of Gold: Isaias Hellman and the Creation of California. But my publisher really wanted to get the word Jewish in the title since Jews are avid readers. And while the subtitle suggests that I think Hellman was the only creator of California, I don’t actually think that. Clearly lots of people made this state what it is. But I can argue that Hellman played a pivotal role in the creation of at least 8 industries: banking, transportation, land development, oil, water, wine, electricity and education. That’s a pretty broad swath. He really was extremely important to the development of the state.
* Do you have any thoughts about why Orthodox Judaism did not take off in San Francisco but did in Los Angeles?
It’s important to remember that when the first wave of Jews came to California in the 1850s, they were mostly from Central Europe. And there was no real Reform movement then, or clear distinction between Reform and Orthodox. Hellman and the other early Jewish settlers practiced a traditional Judaism in the beginning. But they had to adapt to America and they fit their religion into the broader society. I regard it as an attempt to survive in a new land rather that a rejection of their religion.
There are Orthodox Jews in San Francisco. My sister-in-law to be is Orthodox and she lives near Boston. She was visiting recently and she said there are thousands of Orthodox families in the Bay Area. Perhaps there are fewer than in LA, but there is a thriving community here.
* San Francisco Jews seem highly assimilated with in general only an attenuated relationship to the tradition? Any thoughts on this?
Jews poured into San Francisco after gold was discovered in 1848. The first services were held in 1850 and they would be considered Orthodox in many ways. These were men and (some) women who had recently fled countries that had only identified them as Jews. They had only intermittently been considered citizens of Franconia or Bavaria or Posen and Alsace. So when they came to the United States they were afforded the opportunity for the first time to be regarded first as Californians. Can you imagine the level of frustration Jews built up over the centuries? Those who came here were allowed to excel without restrictions for the first time in their lives. So they sought to enter American society. Many of them retained their religious affiliations but adapted them for a new country. You need to look at these pioneers through the lens of the 19th century rather than the lens of the 21st century.
However, after years of not being as ardent about their Jewish identity, Jews today in the Bay Area are growing more observant. I am a member of Temple Emanu-el in San Francisco. There are now 2,700 families who are members. The temple introduced something called the contemporary service which is mostly singing in Hebrew. It is now much more popular that the Classic Reform service, with its choir and a top-down direction from the rabbis. Many other temples in the Bay Area have seen similar surges in membership.
* Orthodox Judaism seems largely absent from the characters in this book. I’m guessing it is largely absent from the history of California until recently.
Orthodox Judaism really took off when the third wave of Jews came to the United States in the 1880s. (The first wave was Sephardim, then Jews from Central Europe, and then Jews from Eastern Europe) Hundreds of thousands of Jews came to the U.S. to escape the pograms of Russia and they retained their traditional ways once they arrived here. Most of them settled on the East Coast and those who came west tended to settle in San Francisco.
* The current banking meltdown, you couldn’t have asked for a better tie-in? Does history have anything to teach us? Does it have anything to teach us about our current mortgage/banking troubles?
One of the major issues underlying the economic meltdown is a lack of confidence. No one trusts any one else so banks have been reluctant to make loans to other banks or even to good customers.
There was a banking crisis about once ever 10 years in the late 19th ad early 20th centuries. There was no Federal Reserve of FDIC insurance, so people actually could – and did – lose all their savings during bank panics. Isaias Hellman, in both 1875 and 1893, stopped bank runs in Los Angles because people had confidence in him. They saw Hellman, the president of the Farmers and Merchants Bank, LA’s first successful bank, as making sure there were enough deposits so anyone could get their money any time they wanted. They trusted him to take care of them, and he did. So he could intervene in rocky times and calm people down. The world is way too complicated now for one man to have that type of reputation or influence.
* I was interested that anti-Semitism did not play a big role in the lives of Jewish immigrants to CA until the 1890s and even then seemed far from dominant. Did this surprise you? Have you ever experienced anti-Semitism?
One of the little-known but fascinating aspects of California history is that it was so accommodating to Jews and members of some other minority groups (not the Chinese.) Jews who came to California were able to set up stores and rise to positions of prominence without much opposition. There were Jews on the city councils of Los Angeles and San Francisco soon after those cities’ founding. Hellman was appointed as a regent of the University of California in 1881, and he was the second Jew to be appointed. So the opportunities on the west coast were much greater than those of the east coast. Of course, many Jews in New York and New Orleans had tremendous success as well.
* I often feel like America in general and California in particular is about as close to utopia as one can get in this world. Do you feel that way?
I love California. I love the big open sky, the golden hills, the oak trees of northern California. California is a place where people can reinvent themselves if they want, and I think that is a good thing.
* Why do you think people on the West Coast are less religious than those on the East Coast?
We like to bicycle, jog, walk in the hills, and eat good food more than sit in temple and develop a formal relationship to God. People on the West Coast are more skeptical about organized religion. Many are very spiritual; they just don’t belong to a temple.
* Have you spent enough time out of CA to be able to spot its idiosyncrasies?
Sure.
* How did your feelings about Isaias Hellman change over the course of researching and writing this book? You don’t exactly slop over with emotion in this text. This book feels to me a like a biography by a journalist rather than one by a critic or friend of the subject. Did you struggle with how much emotion to put into the text? With embroidering events or staying strictly journalistic? Did you have to resist an urge to be "novelistic and exciting"?
I have been a journalist for 25 years and my work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, New York Times, People magazine, and other places. Even though Isaias Hellman is my great great grandfather, I wanted to write a book that illuminated the history of California. I went through more than 50,000 pages of archival documents, including letters, contracts, business correspondence, diary entries, and newspapers. It is a serious biography, I hope, but one filled with action and excitement. There is an assassination attempt, a stagecoach robbery, a train wreck, love stories, betrayal, embezzlement, war, the construction of massive mansions, and more in Towers of Gold. I never strayed from the facts but I drew from various accounts to create the vivid scenes in the book.
If I don’t slop over with emotion, it’s because I never knew Isaias Hellman. He died 40 years before I was born. I also had to use the facts that I had culled from letters and diary entries and newspaper articles about him. I could not suggest what he was thinking unless he had mentioned somewhere in his papers what he had been thinking.
* Did you have to overcome your background in journalism to do something different — a booklength biography or was the book a simple extension of your prior journalism?
When I took a leave of absence from my staff position at the San Jose Mercury News, I decided I wanted to write personal essays. Then I decided to write a book. I had to teach myself an entirely new style of writing – more descriptive, more scene-based, slowed down to create dramatic tension. It is definitely different than the inverted pyramid style of newspaper reporting. But the investigative techniques I used as a journalist came in handy during my research.
* Do you come from money? Do you have feelings about "the rich"? Did you have to process any feelings about "the rich and powerful" while writing this or were you always at ease with "the rich"?
* Did you have an elite upbringing? Private school etc?
* Do you believe in the decline of the generations? That previous generations were giants and we are only pygmies on the shoulders of giants?
I don’t believe in the decline of the generations. Many descendants of Isaias Hellman have gone on to do important things and give back to society. Some were regents of the University of California, and many have donated funds to the school. There are doctors, lawyers, artists, businessmen. One grandson, Edward Heller, was one of the founders of Silicon Valley. He was an original venture capitalist. His father started the SF Symphony. A great great grandson Warren Hellman is one of California’s most successful businessmen. Plus, he’s generous. He throws a free, three day concert in Golden Gate Park every year called Hardly Strictly Bluegrass. There are 5 stages, dozens of musicians, and hundreds of thousands of concert goers. So I think descendants of influential men can and do go on to lead productive lives.
Luke: "How do you feel race is covered by sportswriters?"
Santa Rose Press Democrat sports columnist Lowell Cohn: "That’s the hardest question you’ve asked me. I know that African-American athletes feel that they are basically covered by a white press and that there’s some sort of cultural barrier and that we don’t understand them and represent them quite accurately. My feeling is that they are probably right. Because I am a white guy, I don’t understand. I don’t have their point of view, I have my point of view. I do think it is an issue. I think it would be great if there were more African-American sportswriters who weren’t only covering the NBA. They put them on the NBA. That’s a stereotype as well. I wish they were all over the place.
"If you are asking me is there a resentment from white writers to black athletes, I don’t think so. I haven’t seen that. I think there’s conflict between athletes and writers. I don’t think there’s any more from black athletes."
Luke: "I think that one of the biggest, if not the biggest faux pas, you can make in educated society today is to say or write anything that can be construed as racist."
Lowell: "Yes."
Luke: "What are the implications of that for how people write about race?"
Lowell: "Yes, I think that even what you hear in my answers is that you steer clear of it. There’s probably less candor and less experimentation and less bravery around those issues than around many others. I think, for example, you are afraid that you could write something that could be misconstrued of being disciplined or fired because newspapers are businesses and they have to protect themselves. Sportswriters are more careful and less brave, and that includes me for sure, in those areas than almost anything else. They seem to be verboten."
Luke: "Are there any NFL coaches that enjoy their jobs or do they all suffer as Bill Walsh did?"
Lowell: "I don’t know NFL coaches as deeply as I knew him. He enjoyed part of it because he was very creative and he got to game plan and he got to win. My impression is that NFL coaches have a crummy life. They are away from their families a lot. They lose a lot of sleep. They are under tremendous pressure all the time. They age. One of the things I learned being around a football team is that I could not imagine why anyone would want to be a football coach. It is such a dislocating life."
Luke: "What have you learned from being interviewed on the radio and TV?"
Lowell: "I’ve learned that I’m pretty verbal and I don’t have to prepare in advance because there seems to be a mechanism in my head that is a cause and effect. Ask a question, I have an answer. I’ve learned to have this persona which is very verbal, very colloquial, passionate, funny, informed, bright. I can convey that and I like to do it. One of the reasons I write like I do is that I like to have my say. On the radio, I have my say without the intermediary of a newspaper."
Luke: "Thank you so much, Lowell. This has meant a great deal to me. This is like a dream come true."
Lowell: "That’s so nice of you, Luke. I want to say that I appreciate that you got in touch with me. I always admire people who have enterprise and you really do and in addition you conducted one helluva of an interview. You did great. I don’t know if I could’ve done as well as you did."
(UPDATETruth Wins Out’s Wayne Besen condemns racial intolerance within the LGBT community and says it is "reprehensible to look for scapegoats." People for the American Way president Kathryn Kolbert also releases a statement. Both after the jump.)
Not that this wasn’t expected. The recent passage of California’s Proposition 8 has exposed some of the latent racism of many within the LGBT community—instigated in part by many in the e-telligentsia such as revisionist Andrew Sullivan and sex advisor turned sociologist Dan Savage. Unfortunately the "blame the blacks" meme is being commonly accepted by some so-called "progressive" gay activists. A number of Rod 2.0 and Jasmyne Cannick readers report being subjected to taunts, threats and racist abuse at last night’s marriage equality rally in Los Angeles.
The NJG: I love it The NJG: this is better than our side imploding over Sarah Palin The NJG: wayyy better The NJG: I don’t expect Obama to do anything to help gays The NJG: he’s a Dem but notice he did NOT campaign against 8 The NJG: zero The NJG: that’s bc IF he did, he would not have gotten elected The NJG: the entire election would have been about gays, and elections about gays lose Dems votes The NJG: this site is talking about the protest, kind of funny The NJG: http://www.tigerdroppings.com/rant/messagetopic.asp?p=10636511&pg=1 The NJG: 71% of the blacks an 60% of the hispanics voted for prop 8? The NJG: heheh The NJG: great! The NJG: http://www.topix.com/news/gay/2008/11/listing-of-prop-8-protests-and-rallies The NJG: read the comments here The NJG: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uPAuy8hjSIA The NJG: gays are INSANE The NJG: now they’re hating on obama The NJG: interesting The NJG: thought he was their black savior The NJG: boy did THEY turn on him The NJG: why aren’t gays protesting on Crenshaw and Pico? The NJG: in the South side of LA, like Compton? The NJG: and why aren’t they going there and yelling N-word?
She’s so animated and smart and cute it makes me wish I gave a damn about art and museums.
I have a strong no-looting policy for myself but I don’t want to impose my morality on others, unless they’re gay.
Afterwards, as she’s walking to sign books, I nod at her. She looks at me blankly and turns away. Though we’ve met half a dozen times, she doesn’t recognize me with my beard.
A woman comes up to Bugliosi with tears of earnestness asking, "Can we really prosecute George Bush for murder?"
Joey Kurtzman says (listen): "He kept going on and on about how despicable these people were. ‘People said I should take murder out of the title, but I think ‘murder’ is too good for them. It should be ‘skinned alive.’
"He lambasted Bush for saying what a great day it was during the Iraq war and this just indicates how pathological he is.
"So I said that Alice Walker just wrote a letter to Barack Obama advising him to take care of himself no matter how tough things got. What good would it do for George Bush to put on a sad face in public all the time?
"He said, ‘You’re asking me what George Bush should think or do?’ He acted like it was ludicrous.
"Then afterward I told him about my uncle Mel Albaum. He said, ‘Oh Mel, I hope he’s alive.’ I said, he’s not."
Mel was a defense attorney on a case Bugliosi was prosecuting.
Joey asks me if I want anything from the food stand.
"No, I don’t trust the kashrut," I say. "The Conservatives are half goyim."
"The Reform know they’re goyim," says Joey. "The Conservatives are the real threat."
The second speaker I catch is Nathan Englander. He’s interviewed by Beverley Seehoff. (Listen)
When I hear her described as graduating from college in South Africa in 1983, I’m expecting a crone. Oy, to have to look at all that age for 45 minutes. It’s too much. Then she comes out and she’s totally hot. She has gleaming black hair and shining white teeth and long legs. She gives an adulatory introduction to Nathan Englander. She’s all quivering with excitement over him.
He shambles on stage with his hands in his jeans. He’s short with stumpy legs.
She has him read a section of his book. He does for five minutes with feeling.
"I love that you chose that scene," she gushes.
She loves it! She loves it! She loves it!
She asks him questions like he’s God Almighty and she’s HaShem’s number one cheerleader.
I fear she’s going to hurt her neck the way she nods so vigorously whenever Nathan completes a phrase. It’s like his words are nectar from the gods and she’s slurping them up and asking for more.
"Yes, yes," she sighs and flashes her white teeth and shakes her black hair and stretches her long legs and sighs again in sheer Nathan Englander-drunk ecstasy.
Nathan says he moved to Israel [circa 1993] to "make peace."
"I began to understand that there are multiple realities in this world and governments create their own reality."
"Bibi worked out at the same gym I did. George Bush has his own treadmill. Not for long!"
"We all choose stories. I got interested in good and evil and black and white and all the gradations in between. I chose Argentina [for his novel The Ministry of Special Cases] because it was extreme. It was pure evil. We made up the war to invade Iraq. We made up facts that were sold to us… Argentina declared war on themselves. They didn’t even pick an enemy. That to me was supreme."
"There’s a middle class in Argentina which there isn’t in many South American countries. People want to move up, they don’t want to move down."
Beverley asks him about symbols in his novel.
Nathan says writing "is a form of monkishness…. When you write, you have an obligation to the text. When I’m writing, I don’t get to go outside… It’s what the book demands. It becomes all-consuming… I’ll write a 40-page speech that I might crush it down to a single line."
"My next book will be wholly different from first two. I’m always obsessed with boundaries. When you fly around the country, you look down and everything is in perfect squares."
"Every community is based on boundaries. The man in Austria who kept his daughter locked in his basement for 20 years and had babies with her. Why is that a story after day one? There’s no group that’s pro enslavement. Because we’re obsessed with these extreme things, that this is not OK… That’s the line and you’re on the wrong side of it… I’m obsessed with failures in community. I always picture myself as a historical coward. I’m the guy in World War II who says, ‘The Jews are behind the book case.’"
"I’m interested in getting into that mind… The failure of society to keep up… I’m living that. Habeas Corpus [you hear the charges against you] is the most important thing in the world to me and I still went on tour, I still finished my book, I still went to yoga. Our government says, it’s not about us, it’s about terror. We should’ve been flipping cars in the streets and I should’ve been setting fires… The greatest shame we have known, we are living right now. People have a right to challenge their detention."
Nathan says Jews became pimps and prostitutes in Argentina to survive. "There can’t have been a more miserable job. We think of prostitution as like Pretty Woman… It was a crappy job…. These women were Jews. They wanted to go to shul. They wanted to be buried as Jews. And the community says, we’re ashamed to be buried with you. To look at another Jew and say, ‘I won’t be buried with you,’ that to me is a failure of community… For someone to feel so pure and to judge others in that way.
"It’s like when some Russian immigrant to Israel dies in defense of Israel and the rabbis say, ‘He can’t be buried as a Jew.’ He died as a Jew, he should be buried as a f—ing Jew."
Applause.
Nathan did not visit Argentina until after he wrote the novel.
I ask the first question. "Why do you write first and research later?"
Nathan: "That’s the shortest first question I’ve ever received. Normally when someone shoots up their hand they’ve got a long speech to give over."
At the end, Beverly says to Nathan, "We are so grateful…"
I eat four granola bars and sit with a friend in the sun.
She agitated against Prop 8.
"Do you find two men hooking up aesthetically pleasing?" I ask.
She laughs.
"Two women yes, a man and a woman yes, but two men? No.
"Anyway, you can’t be expected to think rationally about these things because you’re a woman and you’re emotionally unstable. You have the curse every month. You’re ruled by your hormones. According to Jewish law, a woman can not be a witness because they are too emotionally unstable."
"You would do well in Iran," she says.
"They know how to handle their women."
"No gays in Iran," she says.
"They know how to handle their gays. You won’t find gays rioting in Tehran."
"Shut up," she says.
"See how emotional you’re getting? You’re not rational."
"You’re horrible," she says.
"You need a firm disciplining hand… You must be happy that we’ve got a black socialist Muslim for a president."
She giggles. "I didn’t vote for him. I voted for Bob Barr. I was considering voting for McCain until he selected Sarah Palin who’s against abortion."
"That Wasilla hillbilly?"
"I was dating this guy," she says, "but he got mad at me for my political views."
"A real man," I say, "doesn’t care what a woman thinks about politics as long as she’s hot."
At the bookstand, I introduce a friend to Nathan.
Afterwards, my friend says, "I really need to f— someone."
I go to the memoir panel (listen) because I want to lay eyes on Benyamin Cohen. What kind of guy could erupt as he did after our interview in 2004?
I get to the panel and see he looks like a young Larry Flynt — only more Jewish — and all my questions are answered.
After the panel, Benyamin says hi and we shake hands and act all cordial for a few minutes.
David Matthews (wrote the memoir ‘Ace of Spades’) has a Jewish mom — a psycho who left him as a baby and disappeared — and a black nationalist father who was a journalist and raised him in the mean streets of Baltimore. David says ‘The Wire’ is the greatest TV show and that’s what it was like where he grew up in the 1980s.
He says his great grandfather was the leading American Jewish scholar of the 19th Century and wrote "The Ethics of the Fathers."
That’s weird. "The Ethics of the Fathers" is a part of the Mishna and was compiled almost 2,000 years ago. His great grandfather must’ve written a commentary.
Also on the memoir panel is Jessica Queller. She’s stunning, all dark and alluring, with a low cut top. I have all these lustful thoughts about her until she reveals that she got a genetic test that says she has a high chance of getting a horrible disease. Then I wonder if she’s still so sexy and are those breasts real, did she cut them off for prophylactic reasons and what a shame that would be, and could I look her in the eye and kiss her knowing that death and decay might be so close, and if I could, could I then perform as a man? Would I want to invest in a relationship with someone with such a high chance of getting cancer?
At age 34, while writing on Gilmore Girls, Jessica learned she had tested positive for a BRCA genetic mutation, otherwise known as The Breast Cancer Gene. The test gave her up to an 87% chance of developing breast cancer and up to a 44% chance of ovarian cancer. Jessica’s mother had suffered from both diseases and ultimately died of ovarian cancer. Shortly after testing positive, Jessica wrote an Op-Ed piece for the New York Times about the burden of knowledge that comes with testing positive for The Breast Cancer Gene. This article was the launching point for her first book, a memoir, called Pretty Is What Changes: Impossible Choices, The Breast Cancer Gene and How I Defied My Destiny.
My friend says her likelihood of dying doesn’t reduce her attractiveness. It makes her even hotter. I disagree. We launch into a passionate discussion.
Friend: "I can date a girl who I won’t stick."
Jessica: "Considering that I spend 90% of my life destroying society by writing for Gossip Girl and corrupting young minds, it was only right that I do something good."
David: "I have not seen anything in common between blacks and Jews."
"It all comes down to women. I’ve had women tell me that their [Jewish] parents would rather them marry someone Catholic [and white] then marry me [who’s half black]."
Joel Stein does the introduction in place of some chick on the side of the stage named Abby. (Listen)
We wait to hear how wonderful Obama is.
I swap outrageous comments with my friends and finally tell them: "Tell us how wonderful he is when he’s herding you into camps and sending you up chimneys."
Robert Wexler does his homework and is a superb questioner. He’s funny, wise, and empathic.
Jonathan: "The problem with writing only two books is that they are not representative… I wrote these books at very specific times in my life and surrounded by very specific circumstances… I don’t see how I could’ve written anything else for my first book."
He cites "The rhyme is smarter than the poet" to describe his muse.
Abby stands on the side for the whole show. She runs through a dozen different types of smiles. Near the end, she waves at some kid.
Jonathan looks forward to Obama’s reign. He’s someone who cares about words.
Jonathan: "For years my writing felt like a correction to Americanism."
"There are people dying of hunger near where I live. I’m a college-educated person. I’m competent. Shouldn’t I be doing something about it? Instead I’m writing, which seems like the most useless thing."
“Until now, my identity as a writer,” Jonathan Safran Foer, who wrote “Everything Is Illuminated,” said last week, “has never overlapped with my identity as an American — in the past eight years, my writing has often felt like an antidote or correction to my Americanism. But finally having a writer-president — and I don’t mean a published author, but someone who knows the full value of the carefully chosen word — I suddenly feel, for the first time, not only like a writer who happens to be American, but an American writer.”
When a friend sent that quote to me, I thought I was going to hurl. I didn’t realize by American was such a bad thing, that following in the tradition of Saul Bellow and Philip Roth and Michael Chabon was such a handicap.
Foer’s comment reeked of the same elitism as when the permanent secretary of the Nobel Prize committee fallaciously explained the lack of American Nobel laureates in literature by saying: “The U.S. is too isolated, too insular. They don’t translate enough and don’t really participate in the big dialogue of literature. That ignorance is restraining.”
Does this blog post illustrate the danger of blogging for journalists? Brad may need to interview Foer one day (or those who are fans of Foer). Where does going out on a limb get him? I understand Brad’s reaction, it just seems reckless to publish it.
I’m gonna start today. Promise! (Except I have to watch the most recent episode of South Park first. Then I’m going to play around with Google Streetview Australia for a couple of hours. Then I’m going to watch Survivor. [I’ve saved but haven’t watch any episodes yet from this season [not to mention last season]. Then I’m going to watch Big Brother Australia — all of last year’s series, which I haven’t even started yet but it’s on my hard drive and I really want to watch it since I enjoyed seasons 1 through 7 very much). Then I’m going to watch Hockey Night in Canada.)
So, yeah, I’m gonna start blogging again — reeeeaaaaal soooooon! It’s on my To Do List. I just need to get motivated and focused.
Oh, and I have 44 hours of the Dennis Prager Show to listen to. And a whole bunch of Michael Medved (not to mention Howard Stern [including the TV show — I just downloaded the Eric the Midget episode and I really want to watch that]).
And I’ve decided to learn Italian. I don’t know why I just want to learn Italian. So I have two books from the library on learning how to speak and read Italian.
And I have to go to hockeyfights.com to check out last night’s action. I need to exercise, too. I’m getting really fat. I now weigh 220lbs. I’m a big fat cow! And I need to do some vacuuming. And a bunch of other stuff, including fixing the fan for my video card, because it’s making a heck of a lot of noise .. and it’s really pissing me off!
I arrange for her to meet me at shul Friday night.
"Can I wear pants?" she asks.
Yeah.
"Can I drive?"
Yeah.
"Do I have to cover my arms?"
No.
"Do I have to sit in the girls secttion?"
Yeah.
She’s only been in an Orthodox shul once before. That was with me many years ago. We were just kids.
She calls me at 4:25 p.m. She’s a mile away from the shul. She’s driving.
"I’ll see you there!" I say.
I walk 30 minutes to shul. She’s nowhere in sight.
I find out after Shabbos that she looked in and saw only men. She figured the women’s section was on the other side of the mehitza but she didn’t want to walk past all the men. She looked in the window but couldn’t see me. She didn’t know that the door to the women’s section was around the back.
Three times, she walked past the shul.
Then her anxiety got the best of her and she drove home.
This has happened to me several times before with shiksas. They get all freaked out about stepping into a shul.
They also get all freaked out when I ask them to sleep in this coffin I keep in the back of the hovel.
8:50 a.m. The speaker says the minyan never forces anyone to do anything. I breathe a big sigh of relief. This is my home!
Joey Kurtzman does not come to shul unprepared. He had his wallet, his cell phone, a $300 designer towel to wipe off the sweat (it pours off him whenever he gets close to Judaism) and a small Artscroll siddur.
He keeps popping out to smoke cigarettes and I have to fight to save his seat.
"Take off your yarmulke," he was told outside the Persian Chabad shul on Pico Blvd while he was sucking on his cancer stick.
"It’s a matter of etiquette?" asks Joey.
The couple smiles.
"Is there anything wrong with carrying a towel around?" asks Joey.
"Well, there’s an eruv," says the man.
"People won’t look askance?" asks Joey.
"It’s not the done thing to carry a towel around any day of the week," says the man.
After lunch, we’re looking all around the shul for Joey’s towel. We finally find it.
He bought it with his winnings from counting cards in Vegas.
We walk off. Joey says he’s left his siddur behind. "Ahh, it’s a donation," he says.
"No, we’ll find it."
We look all around the shul and can’t find it.
Under his breath, Joey accuses the minyan of theft. Then I see that the siddur is in his pocket.
Shaygetz!
This time he doesn’t come in jeans. He wears decent daks and a decent shirt. But he crosses his legs when he davens and that looks so goyisha.
We’re walking home around 2 p.m. He pops into the gas station to buy a pack of smokes.
"Should I not smoke around you?" he asks.
"No, go ahead and smoke. It makes me look tolerant. But don’t smoke here. Not in front of the shul we just davened at."
"This guy knows all the gossip, the ins and outs, the lashon hara of the Orthodox world. He’s an [expert] in... all the inner workings of the Orthodox world." (Rabbi Aaron Rakeffet-Rothkoff)
