Stars of David (27 page)

He started taking art pictures of women's bodies—some very sensual. “I began to explore the idea of putting together this image with the female figure and it ended up being a book.”
Shekinah
was published in 2002. “I love the idea that there is a feminine spiritual presence,” says Nimoy. “Because to me, it's nurturing, it's compassionate, it's creative, it's aesthetic, it's warming, it's comforting. And in a strange kind of way, I guess—this is the first time I'm trying to articulate this—I feel less judgmental of that presence than I would of a male presence. To the male God, I say, ‘What are you doing, where are you, what are you thinking? Why are you letting these things happen, looking the other way, or saying,
Go ahead, work it out
for yourselves, guys
?' But this whole feminine thing, I don't have that kind of expectation, because to me it doesn't present itself as being the all-powerful figure; it's a maternal figure, it's a loving figure, it's even an erotic figure. But it's not a power figure in the sense that it has control of everything. So I'm comfortable with it, and I'm comforted by it. Does that make sense?”

Obviously any project Nimoy does these days generates attention simply because he is still Spock to the world—no matter how accomplished a photographer he is, or how many other movies he's acted in or directed. (He received an Emmy nomination for his portrayal of Golda Meir's husband, Morris Meyerson, in
A Woman Called Golda
(1982), he directed
Three Men and a Baby
(1987) and
The Good Mother
(1988), and in 1991, in
Never Forget
, he played an Auschwitz survivor, Mel Mermelstein, who went to court in 1980 to prove the Holocaust happened.)

Nimoy doesn't fight his
Star Trek
identity as he once did when he wrote his first of two memoirs,
I Am Not Spock
(1975), but he does try to make it count for something. “In the mid-nineties, I was invited to go to a
Star Trek
convention in Germany. I had been invited several times before, and had always said no. But some people whom I knew and trusted in L.A. and who had been to these German
Star Trek
conventions encouraged me to go, and said, ‘You'll find that it's an amazing audience, they are fervent, supportive, perceptive, and you'll have a great experience.' I went to our rabbi, and I said, ‘What do you think? I hated being there ten years ago.' And he said, ‘Do they know you're Jewish?' And I said, ‘I don't know, maybe some do, maybe they don't.' And he said, ‘I think you should go, and identify yourself as a Jew, and let all these people who admire you discover that you're Jewish. And let them examine their own feelings about liking somebody who's a Jew.' So right then and there I knew I had to go. I was committed.

“I went trepidatiously; I went with the intention of finding the appropriate moment to say to this audience ‘I'm a Jew; how do you feel about that?' I went somewhat confrontationally. I had two days of presentations to do to the same audience and I was looking for the appropriate way to time this thing so it would be a climactic moment. I thought, ‘I'll tell a lot of stories on Saturday, and on Sunday I'll get to it.' So, I get out there on Saturday and I'm only maybe ten minutes into it, when a hand goes up, and somebody says to me: ‘Mr. Nimoy, you did a television movie about a Holocaust survivor who went to court against some Holocaust deniers. Would you tell us how you got involved with that and what was your interest?' And I thought, ‘I have underestimated the awareness of this audience correctly.' I sensed that they knew more than I thought they knew, about me and who I was. So I talked about Mermelstein and immediately went into the whole story about the Vulcan thing and how the hand sign came from my Jewish background and so forth . . . When I finished, the place started applauding and they would not stop. When I tell you they wouldn't stop, I mean they
would not stop
. They went on and on and on. I started crying. They were on their feet, and they were cheering. It was incredible. And there was this message in it that I picked up, that has something to do with:
We are a new generation
.” Nimoy gets choked up. “We are a repairing generation. We are a reconstituting, healing generation . . . It was extraordinary.”

Tony Kushner

TONY KUSHNER PHOTOGRAPHED IN 2004 BY JILL KREMENTZ

“I THINK THAT BEING JEWISH was invaluable preparation for being gay.”

Tony Kushner is sitting in his cramped office near Union Square in Manhattan. I would have expected a Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright to work in a somewhat larger space—this is the size of many walk-in closets— but its atmosphere feels appropriately artistic. We are surrounded by books climbing the walls on blond wooden shelves (a ladder allows him to get to the high volumes), there are two lamps with fringed lampshades, photographs of his award-winning epic,
Angels in America
, an easy chair, and a desk jammed into the corner. Kushner is wearing gray wool pants, black sweater, black boots, and purple socks. He keeps patting his curly hair when he speaks and it springs back.

“When I came out, my father and I started having these terrible fights because it wasn't easy for him at all,” says Kushner. “He would say, ‘Okay, it's too bad that you are homosexual, but why do you have to tell anybody about it?' He said, ‘I knew homosexuals when I was a kid and they stayed to themselves.' When I'd argue with him, I used Jewishness as a metaphor. I'd ask him, ‘Why don't you have your nose cut off and change your name to Brown or White and become a goy?' Hannah Arendt's right: If you're a pariah, your only protection is to embrace the fact. Not to try to pretend that you're accepted, because you can't be. Pretending carries you out of your history—you'll turn against yourself, and when you're found out, you're contemptible not just because society holds you in contempt as a Jew, a black person, or a gay person, but also because you recognize you're a traitor to your own kind and your own self and you're weakened because of it.”

I wonder if this argument worked on Kushner's father. “I think to an extent it worked; it may have been useful to him, I'm not entirely sure. It was a long process. I think it helped him.” It certainly helped Kushner— the notion that he could take a page from Jewish experience when it came to his sexuality. “I already knew what it was to be a proud member of a minority in a secular, pluralist democracy,” he says, sipping coffee. “I had a long history to fall back on. What gay people have had to do in the last thirty or forty years is invent that identity for themselves. And I don't think it's any coincidence that so many of the people who have been immensely important in shaping that identity have been Jewish lesbians and gay men. We sort of arrive knowing how to be unpopular and how to turn that into a source of power for ourselves and not to feel condemned because society condemns us. And we also have a belief that justice triumphs. Pharaoh doesn't win. In the long run, the righteous are triumphant, even if the wicked seem to be winning at the moment.”

Kushner's faith that fairness prevails was instilled by liberal parents (homophobia aside) in a small, very old Jewish community in Lake Charles, Louisiana. His parents drummed into him and his siblings that “you didn't have to take shit from people,” such as teachers who made them kneel at his Episcopal day school (“We didn't want to kneel,” Kushner says) or teachers who said things like, “‘The Jews killed Jesus.' We had a good liberal frame of reference,” Kushner says with a smile, “we knew our rights.” He also knew his ethnic pedigree: his parents regularly held up the usual triumvirate of Jewish achievement—Einstein, Marx, and Freud—and rejoiced when Israelis triumphed in the Six Day War. “A lot of people my age remember our parents saving the newspapers for every day of the war,” says Kushner, who was ten at the time. “There was a
Life
magazine picture of an Israeli army jet, with a Mogen David [Jewish star] on each wing; I think the headline was something like ‘The Miracle of the Desert.' I remember hearing this idea that the Jewish suffering was at an end because Moshe Dayan and Golda Meir were here—the new Maccabees. There was tremendous pride.”

He has discovered over the years that non-Jews who don't share these childhood landmarks will never fathom his fidelity to Israel and will feel free to criticize it. “It's why I think the left is frequently accused of anti-Semitism without actually being anti-Semitic: There is a way in which non-Jewish people who are incredibly well-meaning and not anti-Semitic
just
don't get it
. I went to the Occupied Territories this summer with six other people, none of them were Jewish, and they're all very left, very progressive, and very smart, but I found myself feeling very isolated in a lot of moments. Because what they don't get is that no matter how beastly I think Ariel Sharon is, or how appalling I think the behavior of the IDF [Israeli Defense Forces] is, you don't understand what they're doing there unless it's a part of your lived history. I didn't grow up with pogroms, but I grew up with the kind of normal anti-Semitism that you would run into, and that history is with me; people who died in the Holocaust—they're with me.”

When I ask if that's made him gravitate toward Jewish friendships, Kushner seems to bristle. “I've never really done the demographics of my friends,” he says. “I find that, in general, I get along best with Jews, Irish people, Italians, and black people. There are strong similarities in eloquence and aggressive intelligence. My partner, Mark, had a Polish Catholic mother and a Jewish father.”

Kushner, forty-nine, and Mark Harris, forty-two, had a commitment ceremony in April 2003, which was announced in the
New York Times'
“Vows” column and which included guests such as Mike Nichols, who directed Kushner's
Angels in America
for HBO, and his wife, ABC anchor Diane Sawyer. Kushner and Harris stood under a canopy before a rabbi in a favorite Manhattan restaurant, Gabriel's. Kushner told the
Times
that Mark was someone “who needs more hysteria in his life.” Harris said, “Now I have plenty.”

Kushner says Mark's family has some wonderful, quirky Jewish stories. “The first year that Mark's parents were married, his Catholic mother, Harriet, wanted to impress his Jewish dad's mother, Minnie Moskowitz. So Harriet made this huge seder meal, and at the conclusion of the meal, Minnie made a toast, saying, ‘I'm deeply moved that my new daughter-in-law, the enemy of my people, has made such a beautiful seder meal.'”

Though Kushner wanted a Jewish marriage ceremony, he's not opposed to interfaith unions. “Walt Whitman in his poem
A Passage to India
says God's purpose from the start is for races to intermarry and continents to merge, and I really believe that.” That said, Kushner has been surprised by his feelings of clannish pride when it comes to his godson. “I have a godchild who was born on my birthday in the same hospital I was born in: Mount Sinai. He's the son of Brian Kulick [who directed Kushner's play
A
Dybbuk
] and Naomi Goldberg, and they're both Jews, so Noah's one hundred percent ethnically Jewish. I feel sort of like I shouldn't admit this— you should never feel this way—but
that means something to me
; I feel a certain sort of kvelling,
schep naches
[taking and pride and pleasure]. There is some sense of continuity about that, and I find myself thinking something that I feel very uncomfortable with: that ‘this kid is like me.' And I like that because I love Jews and I want to see us continue as a presence in the world.

“But I also believe that there is nobody smarter or more gorgeous in the world than my two nieces, whom I love immensely and who have an Irish mother.” He sighs. “I think there's no point in denying the fact that it's human and important to want to see the religion and the culture continue. And yet also nothing should continue preserved in amber.”

Kushner says Judaism has in fact proved flexible—enough to accommodate both his sexuality and his taste for old-fashioned worship: “A house so big has a room for you in it somewhere, if you want it,” Kushner asserts. “And I've found a couple rooms that I feel comfortable in.” Thanks, in part—surprisingly enough—to klezmer music. “Discovering the Klezmatics changed everything for me,” Kushner says of the New York–based sextet. “It really did. Because I just fell madly in love with the music. My parents are both musicians—my father was a clarinetist, my mother was a really great bassoonist; she recorded with Stravinsky. Listening to David Krakauer [clarinetist] play had a tremendously powerful effect,” he says. “It helped me discover Yiddish again, which was hugely important. And half the Klezmatics are gay. There's this whole gay Jewish movement that has grown up around klezmer, klezmer revival, ‘klez camp.' That was incredibly important.”

Kushner found another “room” in Daniel Boyarin, head of Talmudic studies at U.C. Berkeley. “I read his book Carnal Israel [subtitle: Reading Sex
in Talmudic Culture
] and got to know him. He deals with sexuality and Judaism in a way that makes you aware of things that you always suspected. You go to an Orthodox shul and you see these guys dancing with each other and the sensuality of davening and the weird kind of privacy of the whole thing—its onanistic quality—and you think, ‘This is not a religion of people with no bodies or no sense of the sensual.' And of course, it's true.”

Kushner is drawn not only to Judaism's sensuality, but also to its argumentativeness: the constant questioning and disputation. He was a star debater in school, and he says conflict is elemental to his heritage and his DNA. “Struggle and battling is so much a part of what being Jewish is,” he says, “even on a family level. You learn that if it's a good fight, that fighting can be constructive and that it's necessary—it's part of life. I look at people like my friend Larry Kramer [the playwright and gay activist who founded Act-Up], and I sort of marvel at his unquenchable appetite for brawling; but then I look at my Aunt Martha and I understand Larry. These are not people who have any expectation that life is ever going to be peaceful. And what is peaceful? Peaceful is boring and dead.”

His seders, not surprisingly, are never serene. Kushner took up his father's mantle and sits at the head of his family's table each year. He encourages wide participation, which, when it comes to the subject of Israel, inevitably leads to warfare. “I have a cousin who is a poverty medicine doctor in Santa Fe,” he says, “and since the second intifada, both of us have become rabid—just apoplectic. It just turns into a horrendous free-for-all—people yelling and screaming—just terrible.”

Clashes aside, he's developed a new appreciation for a quirky family tradition: “I used to think how corny it was that at the end of the seder every year we sang ‘America the Beautiful.' But I actually think now, ‘What a great thing'—that it's exactly the point. It isn't about Israel; it's about American constitutional democracy.
That's
the promised land. This is what has worked. America is where we—where Jews—have lived better lives.'”

Passover is one of the few holidays Kushner still observes. And for very personal reasons, he has always—and will always—fast on Yom Kippur. “When I was twelve, my mother got breast cancer and they fucked up the operation really terribly and she almost died from being over-radiated. That was the deal I made: I would fast if she could live. The operation was right before Rosh Hashanah and she was out of the hospital in time for that holiday and then, the day before Yom Kippur, she got terribly sick again and she had to be flown to New York for six months. It was horrible. They overdid the radiation so much that they'd actually given her a bone infection. But she survived—for twenty more years. So that's when I started fasting, and I've done it every year since.”

He seems suddenly bashful, aware it might sound like utilitarian Judaism: “I don't want to disappoint you.” I assure him he needn't apologize— that in fact, most of the people I've interviewed are similarly randomly observant and find piety complicated. “Judaism is really hard and it's intentionally hard. I think the reason we're so smart as a people is that the religion over the centuries is such an imponderably difficult task. It's not masterable. The Talmudic tradition is literally sort of an embrace of the condition of being at sea.”