It may sound like the starkest of contradictions, but Abigail Pogrebin’s Stars of David: Prominent Jews Talk About Being Jewish (Broadway Books) is as depressing as it is addictive. Reading it can only confirm the most pessimistic analyses and prognostications on the state (and future) of the American Jewish community, but in a way that dry, impersonal studies and charts never could.
In fact, it’s hard to think of a recent book that comes close to this one in conveying the assimilation and alienation that define 21st century American Jewry – particularly the Jewish movers and shakers in the worlds of entertainment, business and media.
Pogrebin, who says the book was inspired in large part by her desire to better understand her own Jewish identity, interviewed 62 prominent American Jews and somehow got most of them – this is where the addictive part comes in – to say the most revealing things about themselves and their relationship with Judaism and Jewishness. It’s not a pretty picture, but it sure makes for a bracing and informative read.
Before we get to our question-and-answer session with Pogrebin, we’ll whet readers’ appetites with just a few of the hundreds of fascinating tidbits to be found in her book.
Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg insists that her Jewishness is of great importance to her, but nevertheless says she was turned off to religious Judaism because, in her view, women were excluded from meaningful participation. Ginsburg never made a big deal about her children’s Jewish education (her son chose not to have a bar mitzvah), nor did she care whether they married Jews (her daughter is married to a non-Jew). Asked by Pogrebin whether she misses Judaism she responds, “I wish that I could have the feeling for it that I once did. I don’t think I ever will.”
Filmmaker Steven Spielberg tells Pogrebin that before he married Kate Capshaw, a Protestant who converted to Judaism, he “only felt [his] Judaism” when he was at his mother’s kosher eatery in Los Angeles. Here’s how he describes his family’s current regimen of religious observance: “We light the candles on most Friday nights….We observe Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur; nobody’s compelled to fast, but I fast and Kate fasts; the kids had to fast on their bar mitzvah year – their rabbi insisted. We do Hanukkah and we do Christmas….We do Christmas because it was a tradition in Kate’s family and because it’s the one holiday I wished I could have partaken in every year I was growing up.”
Don Hewitt, the creator and former executive producer of “60 Minutes,” comes off as aggressively hostile to Judaism. Asked if his children consider themselves Jewish he says, “I don’t think they call themselves anything.I don’t call myself anything.” Intermarriage in Hewitt’s view is not a bad thing: “I think it’s a better world if everybody’s integrated.” And talk of Jewish suffering apparently makes him extremely uncomfortable: “We cannot go on believing that nobody else had tsuris but us. There are a lot of people. There are a lot of blacks who say, ‘Holocaust, shmolocaust; we got lynched!’ And they’re right!”
Edgar Bronfman, the billionaire president of the World Jewish Congress, admits that “Synagogue bores me to tears. I don’t get any spirituality out of going.” Was the Torah given to the Jews by God? “Please. Don’t try to give me any of that stuff.” The traditional view of God as an all-powerful deity? Not for Bronfman: “The problem is that in synagogue, we talk about this Avinu Malkeinu business [“Our Father, Our King”] all the time. I don’t do that. I mean, I can sing it, but while I’m singing it, I’m saying, ‘It’s not my father, it’s not my king.'”