Stars of David (28 page)

Ed Koch

FORMER THREE-TERM New York City mayor Ed Koch is calling out to his secretary, with yet another request: “JODI!!” he bellows in his pin-striped suit from his office in a Manhattan law firm. “GET THE CORRESPONDENCE WITH ABE FOXMAN!” Koch wants me to see every exchange of letters in which he's bombarded someone with outrage—no matter how long ago. There are the letters, for instance, about Peter Jennings's 1996 documentary on Israel: “I'm very direct and I told him what was wrong. I said, ‘You loaded the program with boorish Jews and cultured Arabs, so anyone coming away from it would say, ‘Oh, those boorish Jews!' Then I wrote a column—a really good column—you'll see; she'll find it.” Jodi does. “She's amazing!” Koch exclaims. “You see how good she is?”

A few minutes later, Koch recounts similar objections he made to a program on Channel 13, the New York public television station.
“I don't
send them a nickel anymore,”
he says bitterly. “They did a program with really nice Arabs speaking beautifully and saying all of the right things about wanting to live alongside Jews in Israel, and then they had some atrocious-speaking Jews—some with American Brooklyn accents. I'm going to give you my correspondence with Bill Baker [Channel 13's president]. “JODI!?! GET THE CORRESPONDENCE WITH BILL BAKER!”

Finally there's his tiff with writer Susan Sontag. “She is, in general, just one of those terrible people,” Koch says. [Sontag has since died.] “I had a correspondence with her and with Arthur Miller when I was mayor.” Naturally, I'm going to hear the story: “I'm a member of PEN [the writer's advocacy group, Poets, Essayists, and Novelists] because I wrote twelve books. And I once said that Israel shouldn't be bringing the press to the front lines to take photographs that are antithetical to Israel. What they end up showing is an Israeli man shooting an adolescent. But they don't show you the adolescent throwing the stone first! And I have been the subject of having the stone thrown at me during the intifada, and I have nine stitches in my head! And if the stone had hit me in the
eye
, it would have blinded me!”

Koch has a photograph on his wall of the time in 1990 when he was hit with a rock while walking with former Jerusalem mayor Teddy Kollek. “My feeling is, if you're a soldier, you don't have to take that stuff. You don't have to expose yourself to being blinded or killed or injured. You say to them, ‘Stop throwing stones,' and if they don't stop throwing stones, you shoot 'em! You have a right to self-defense.”

Back to why he hated Susan Sontag: “So I gave this advice to Israeli leaders: ‘You shouldn't have the press up close taking pictures, because the pictures will be used against you and they're not going to be fairly reflective of what's taking place.' And I get a letter from both Susan Sontag and Arthur Miller, saying, ‘If you don't retract this, we're going to seek your removal from PEN. How dare you suggest that the press not take pictures?' So I wrote back, ‘When did you become the Thought Police?' How dare they?”

Before we get too far from the rock story, I'm curious how he came to be pelted in Jerusalem. “That incident came about in the following way: I was in Israel, the guest of Teddy Kollek, and he said, ‘I'm going to show you the new museum.'” It was located under the Western Wall, and they walked there without any security. “Suddenly there are stones thrown and I'm hit on the head and I bleed like there's no tomorrow because there are a lot of veins up in your scalp. I was in Israel because they'd asked me to come to promote tourism, which was suffering because of the first intifada. And so I'm saying to myself, ‘I know that this story is going to go all over the world and make a bad impression—there are so many photographers here.' So I try to make light of it, saying to Teddy, ‘Teddy, this was meant for you, not for me; everybody loves
me
.' And Teddy jokes back, ‘No, Ed; this was meant for you, not me, and if you had my head of hair, you wouldn't have felt it.'”

Edward Irving Koch, now eighty-one, grew up in Newark, New Jersey, and attended the Hebrew Free School. “The teaching was terrible,” he says. His father, Louis, was a furrier, and his mother, Joyce Silpe, was a “terrible cook.” “She burned everything,” he says with a laugh. “And my father loved everything to be burned. I like rare food. I like it bloody.”

He says his mother was determined to assimilate. “She hired a tutor to teach her to lose her Yiddish Central European accent.”

In his last year of college, he was drafted into the army, where he “had a fight because I was a Jew.” It all started because his platoon, according to Koch, was composed of twenty-five percent Jewish New Yorkers. “It was an unusual number,” he says, “and many of them simply couldn't do the obstacle course. I must say, I found it hard, but I practiced. I wanted to look good. What the Jewish kids
did
excel in was asking questions. So when they had seminars, the Jewish kids would put up their hands and ask questions. And one day, this one guy said, ‘Which is the next Yid that's going to ask a question?' I knew I couldn't take on a fight because I wasn't strong enough yet—this happened in the first few weeks of basic training. So I said, ‘I'm going to build myself up and ultimately I'm going to challenge him.'”

Koch trained hard over the next sixteen weeks. “It didn't help,” Koch admits with a smile, “he still beat me up. But I was proud of the mere fact that I challenged him. I went over to him and grabbed him by the throat and I said, ‘We're going to have it out.' And he said, ‘Why? What did I do?' And I couldn't say to him, ‘It's because of what you said.' He looked baffled, but all I could say to him was, ‘
You
know.
You
know.'”

I wonder if, once Koch got to be the blustery, bigheaded, likable mayor of New York, he became more Jewish on the job than he had been. He nods. “Sure. It made me speak out more. I am very proud of the fact that, as a result of being identified as proud of my faith, I got higher percentages of Catholic votes than I got from the Jews.” Like most dyed-in-the-wool candidates, Koch rattles off numbers: “Eighty-one percent of the Italians and the Irish supported me in my elections, whereas with Jews, it was only seventy-three percent, and the reason is very simple: I'm not liberal enough for the West Side Jew. And I'm proud of that! I am a
moderate
! Jews have a very large group that is too radical for me in a host of areas. But the Catholics
love
me. I'm proud of the fact that John Cardinal O'Connor asked me to do a book with him. It was called His Eminence and
Hizzoner
.”

Koch makes sure to attend synagogue on the High Holy Days every year, though he never had a seder at Gracie Mansion. “But I put up a mezuzah on the door there,” he points out. “Abe Beame had a mezuzah.” (He refers to a famous predecessor.) “But I had a better mezuzah. And when my father died, we sat shivah at Gracie Mansion. That was nice.”

When I ask him if he feels more Jewish or more American, he winces. “It's not a question that should be asked. Look, I am an American. I happen to be a white male, a senior citizen, and I'm Jewish. If I had to pick the two things I'm proud of, it's being an American and being a Jew. But my overall allegiance is American.”

Koch pulls out an anecdote to illustrate: “When I was a congressman, early on, I noted that they had prayer breakfasts in Washington every two weeks, where a group of legislators would meet for breakfast and discuss religious matters. One day, a congressman from Mississippi, Sonny Montgomery, meets me on the House floor and says, ‘Ed, next week we want to discuss Judaism. You are a Jew?' ‘Yes, I'm a Jew.' ‘Would you come and lecture on Judaism?' I said, ‘Sure.' At the time, I thought, ‘I'm not a scholar; how much do I know? I'll go to the library and figure out what will amuse them.' I took out a couple books, read them, and went to the breakfast. And I told them about Jewish exotica, which they enjoyed, and then they asked questions. At the end, I said, ‘What's interesting to me is you are all avoiding a question which I know is on your minds by looking in your eyes. And the question that you're not asking me is, “Do Jews have dual loyalty?” Isn't that what you're wondering?' They all nodded. ‘So I want to make you one pledge,' and I raised my right hand. ‘I swear to you, that if Israel ever invades the United States, I shall stand with the United States.' And they roared.”

But Koch does have a deep fealty to Israel that clearly makes him hyper-aware of when it's the target of condemnation. “It's clear to me that anti-Semitism has re-arisen to an extent even greater than before World War II, without the killings in concentration camps,” he says. “I don't want to overstate it, but I mean, it's amazing—the hate and the venom. It's directed at Israel because it wouldn't be acceptable in polite circles to direct it at Jews, but it's intended to be directed at all Jews.”

I ask how he would explain this Jewish hatred. “First: anti-Semitism is based, in large part, on actions of the church; and we're very lucky there have been two popes who have changed that to an enormous degree. But take Cardinal Glemp in Poland. I met him; he is a vile anti-Semite. And he's the
primate
—the number one cardinal! So in Europe in particular, you have still the residue of that.

“Second is: We're supposed to be
dead
!
‘Why are you still standing?!'
There's a certain resentment: ‘How could it be? We've kicked the shit out of them; why are they
still
standing?'”

Barry Levinson

BARRY LEVINSON PHOTOGRAPHED BY YVONNE FERRIS

BARRY LEVINSON, the director of
Diner, Rainman, Good Morning, Vietnam
, and
Wag the Dog
, is unshaven in sweatpants, sitting in his gracefully designed home office on his Connecticut estate, talking about his 1999 film,
Liberty Heights
. “Jews, gentiles, and Colored People,” Levinson pronounces. “That's what I wanted to call
Liberty Heights
. The studio had a fit: ‘No! My God, are you kidding?' I said, ‘Why not? That's who it's about.' In the end, it was decided it was too inflammatory. I had thought, ‘At least the title will jump out at you.'”

The semiautobiographical 1999 film chronicled a middle-class Jewish family, the Kurtzmans, in suburban Baltimore. Joe Mantegna is the family man who each year on Yom Kippur skips out of services to go to the Cadillac showroom and view the new model; Adrien Brody plays his older son, who becomes obsessed with the typical shiksa goddess—played by model Carolyn Murphy; and Ben Foster is the younger brother, Ben, who falls for a smart, attractive black classmate.

Early on in the film, there is this exchange between Ben and his buddy, Sheldon, as they discuss the sign at the local pool that says “NO JEWS, DOGS, OR COLOREDS ALLOWED”:

BEN: How do you think they decided the order?

SHELDON: What?

BEN: That Jews should be first.

SHELDON: Yeah. I would have thought it would have been “Dogs, Coloreds, Jews.”

BEN: That must have been some meeting to come up with that. Someone had to say, “No, I have to tell you, the Jews bother me more than the dogs.”

Levinson, sixty-three, believes to this day that the explicit Jewishness of his script gave Jewish studio executives the jitters. “The reality is that anytime you do a movie where there are Jewish people in it, there is always going to be this situation where they'll think, ‘Well, it's too Jewish; no one's going to understand it, no one's going to like it.
I
can love it—I'm Jewish—but no one else will'—that kind of sensibility. Which may be part of the inferiority complex of a Jew who thinks no one can understand them except
them
.

“Studio people are petrified. When I did
Avalon
[his 1990 film about a Jewish family striving to assimilate], they thought, ‘Only a Jewish person could enjoy this movie.' The reality is that, over the years, I get letters from Japanese, blacks, Norwegians who say, ‘That was just like my family.' That's the amazing thing about film or literature—people can make connections. But when you do these projects, not only do you gamble, but you sort of take your artistic life in your own hands. Because it's a very difficult road to go down. Very.

“Studios are afraid to distribute it; they don't advertise it the same way. It's fraught with a lot of danger zones. Film at the end of the day is a commercial business; they look for the most commercial work to do. Therefore, when you get into certain kinds of movies, they're very nervous about it. It's one thing when you have a certain violence to it; then you can increase your commercial viability.”

In other words, if he had scripted some Jews getting killed? “Yes!” Levinson smiles. “If you don't do that, then it's just ‘
Jews
.' It's interesting that ultimately the most successful movies about Jews are really about dead Jews and not Jews that live and laugh and everything else; because then they're ‘just
Jewish
.' But dead Jews:
Then
it's significant. Anytime you do the rest, it's ‘Well, they're too Jewish.' Have you ever heard the comment ‘They're too Italian'? Do you ever hear ‘It was good, but I thought they were too Catholic'? You can only be ‘too Jewish.'”

I wonder if he's ever worried that he'll be pegged as a Jewish director. “I don't think you can worry,” he replies. “You are what you are. But it's true that, in the world we live in, to be considered a Jewish director is not a great thing to be. That doesn't have great cachet to it.”

Why does he say that? “Because I think the way the business views things, that is not important enough.”

Levinson obviously decided to proceed on
Liberty Heights
regardless of the skepticism. “There are some ideas that just propel you,” he explains. “So you're going to fight studios and fight distribution and ultimately you may end up with a film that may not have the same commercial viability. But you do it because you believe in the work.”

The idea for
Liberty Heights
was sparked when Levinson read a critic's review of his 1998 science fiction movie,
Sphere
. Lisa Schwarzbaum of
Entertainment Weekly
called Dustin Hoffman's character a “Jewish psychologist” when his ethnicity was nowhere in the script. Schwarzbaum wrote,
“Okay, so he's not officially Jewish; he's only Ho fman, who arrives at the floating
habitat and immediately announces, noodgey and menschlike, ‘I'd like to call my
family.' You do the math.”

“It jarred me for a number of reasons,” Levinson says, putting a leg up on a coffee table piled with scripts. “I don't know her at all; I assume she's Jewish with that name. But the reference that she made, implying that we were either hiding the fact that he was Jewish or that he wants to call home like a nice Jewish boy, I just thought was kind of weird. And some people might say that's an overreaction, but I was thinking about it: I mean, no one would mention that someone is a Protestant in a review. It stayed in my head. And I began to think, ‘What is this whole thing about Jews? Why do we somehow have to define who's who and what's the point of it?' I suddenly started to write and there it was. At the end of it, I wanted to be able to show the absurdity, the nonsense of prejudice. And also to show that it wasn't really based on hatred.”

The film was not a great success. “To me it was very disappointing,” Levinson says, “because we got great reviews, but the studio was petrified of a movie that was going to deal with those issues.” He seems bitter that Warner Bros. didn't promote the film. “They didn't bother,” he says.

Like so many others in this book, Levinson remembers despising Hebrew school—“I might as well have been on Mars for two hours.” His Jewishness is found in the milieu of his movies more than in any spiritual identification. “It is what I am, you know? It's a sense of a big extended family—the traditions when so many of us gathered. And it is made up of the stories of being in Russia or Poland or Latvia—that journey to America. That's where my connection is. How important is it? I don't know. But it affects everything that I do in some way, unconsciously or consciously. Mostly unconsciously.”

In
Liberty Heights
, for example, it can be found in the character of the father, Nate Kurtzman, who, like Levinson's own father, Irv, checks out the new Cadillac every Yom Kippur; or the character of sixteen-year-old Ben, who, inspired by Levinson's real cousin Eddie, dresses up as Hitler one Halloween and is forbidden to leave the house. Or the character of Grandma Rose, who always stays on the telephone after she's answered it, even when it's not for her. “Hang up!” her grandson yells.

Levinson idealizes the gentile girl in the film just the way he and his friends did as kids: “In the script, I alluded to Lewis and Clark: ‘We found the Northwest Passage and there were all these blond-haired girls and they were all great-looking and they had names that sounded terrific and we thought we'd found the Promised Land.'”

He says when he dated non-Jewish girls as a teenager, they shared one trait in common: They were prompt. “We would go to pick up gentile girls at their houses and we always remarked, ‘They're so punctual! You ring their bell, they're ready to go!' But it never occurred to us what that was really about: They wanted to get out of the house before we had a chance to come in and meet the mother and father and say, ‘Hi, I'm Barry
Levinson
.' We were thinking the girls were so punctual, when really it was about the fact that they'd otherwise have to introduce this Jewish boy to their Protestant or Catholic family.” Levinson says his parents didn't weigh in on whom he should date or marry. “Didn't come up,” he says. “My grandmother on the Levinson side was much more religious—she kept kosher—but she said something to me before she died which was extraordinary: ‘A Jewish girl, it doesn't matter. You should find someone to make you happy.'”

He did. Diana Rhodes, Levinson's second wife, is a painter and a non-observant Catholic. Their two sons, Sam and Jack, have taken opposite religious paths. “Jack studied and is going to be bar mitzvah and Sam, on the other hand, had no interest in it,” Levinson says. His stepdaughter, Michelle, who came into his life when she was seven, decided as an adult to convert to Judaism. “So we've got a family that's all mixed up,” he says with a chuckle.

Levinson wrote a line for
Liberty Heights
that captures how he has tried to revisit—or revivify—the atmosphere of his Jewish childhood. The character Ben Foster says at the end of the film,
“Life is made up of a few big moments and a lot of little ones . . . but a lot of images fade, and no matter how hard
I try, I can't get them back . . . If I knew things would no longer be, I would've
tried to remember better.”