Stars of David (49 page)

Al Franken

AL FRANKEN PHOTOGRAPHED BY OWEN FRANKEN

SITTING WITH AL FRANKEN at his dining room table with a bowl of cashews laid out by his buoyant wife, Franni, I ask him whether he was
Saturday Night Live
's go-to guy on whether a Jewish skit was in bad taste. “Remember
Lorne
's Jewish,” says Franken, speaking of SNL creator and executive producer Lorne Michaels, “so sometimes I'd have to get stuff past
him
.

“My comedy partner, Tom Davis, and I would do this thing called ‘The Franken and Davis Show,' where we'd walk out in costume to introduce the sketch we were about to do and then never actually do the sketch. And we did one once where Tom and I came out in Gestapo uniforms and my parents come out in overcoats with Stars of David on them—old European, tattered overcoats”—he's laughing already—“and my dad said to me, ‘Alan, we've decided not to do this sketch.' And I go, ‘What are you talking about?' And he says, ‘I don't know; I just feel I can't do it. It's not in good taste. I'm sorry that I've waited till now, but I can't do it.' And then I got angry at my parents for refusing to do the sketch, and that was the end of the sketch.

“I remember Bernie Brillstein, Lorne's manager, was there watching during dress rehearsal, and I guess Bernie objected to it and that resonated with Lorne and Lorne said, ‘Al, we can't do this. You just can't do it.' So we scrapped the sketch. Afterwards he said, ‘Don't ever make me cut your parents again.'” Franken laughs. “So Lorne was a little bit more sensitive on the Jewish issue than I am.”

There was also the time when Franken went on “Weekend Update” with anchor Dennis Miller to report on the most negative political ads of 1994. “In the skit, I introduced an ad that [Lieutenant Colonel] Ollie North ran against [former Virginia senator] Chuck Robb on Christian television and it said”—Franken assumes his ominous-attack-ad voice— “‘Chuck Robb is against school prayer. And no wonder:
He's a Jew
.'” Franken guffaws. “And Dennis goes, ‘Chuck Robb isn't Jewish!' and I said, ‘Dennis,
you
know that;
I
know that;
but it's a close race
.'” Another chortle. “And Lorne was like, ‘Oh, Al, I don't know about that.' So we cut that joke and my heart always aches that we cut it because I love that line.”

I ask Franken why he thinks so many top comedians happen to be Jewish. “There are funny gentiles too,” he says, adjusting his trademark glasses, “but there is a certain thing in Jewish culture that honors humor. Lenny Bruce said there's this tradition of the charming Jew—meaning the funny Jew. It started with the pyramids: There was one Jew who didn't want to carry the stones and so he would just be charming instead.” He laughs. “Am I proud that there are funny Jews? Yeah.”

But Franken says it's impossible to define humor—Jewish or otherwise. “It's never funny when you talk about it,” he says. “Obviously there's a lot of self-deprecation in it.”

That certainly applies to Franken's book
Why Not Me? The Inside Story
of the Making and Unmaking of the Franken Presidency
(2000), which chronicled his fictional effort to become the first Jewish president and his rapid implosion. In the book, candidate Franken hails from Christhaven, Minnesota, and proclaims, “I am not going to be president of the Jews. I am going to be president for all Americans, Jews and anti-Semites alike.”

“Part of the whole idea of the book,” Franken says with a chuckle, “was that my character was misguided in every possible way.” He picked an imaginary all-Jewish cabinet, for example, including Attorney General Joel Kleinbaum, Treasury Secretary Peter Steingarten, and Health and Human Services chief Harold Lipsky. “And I chose Joe Lieberman to be my vice president,” Franken continues, “which would be an incredibly stupid thing for a Jewish presidential candidate to do—to pick another Jew—but that's part of the comedy.” Franken writes that he selected Lieberman to “balance the ticket, since he's Orthodox and I'm Reform.”

I ask Franken what he thought of the real Joseph Lieberman's vice presidential candidacy in 2000: whether he agreed with those who felt the senator came off as holier-than-thou when explaining his faith. Franken is diplomatic: “He could have laid off it a
little
.”

But does Franken think the country is ready for a Jewish president? “I always tell this joke that I believe Colin Powell could have been president if he had run in '96, and that led me to conclude that the first Jew to be elected president will have to be a four-star general. So it gave me the idea that we should find a high-ranking Jew in the military and start grooming him for a run in the White House. I did a little research and, unfortunately, it turns out that currently the highest-ranking Jew in the military is the comptroller of the U.S. Coast Guard.” Another guffaw. “That's my ‘Is-it-possible-to-have-a-Jewish-president?' joke. But seriously: I do think if it's the right Jew at the right time . . .”

Unlike many Jews I spoke to after the 2004 election, Franken does not view America as a hyper-Christian nation that's less hospitable to Jews. “I think this strain of evangelical Christianity isn't anti-Semitic,” he says. “It's just very, very judgmental and intolerant and narrow-minded and in some cases, angry and cruel. But I don't think it's toward Jews as much as it is toward the rest of the world; toward Muslims, for example. It's a very scary mind-set to me, not as a Jew so much but as a person.”

Franken's daughter, Thomasin, has dropped in for a visit and is greeted warmly by her parents. “Hi honey!” Franken calls out. “Oh, my baby's here!” cries Franni. A graduate of Harvard—her dad's alma mater—Thomasin is currently a teacher in the Bronx. “Would you call yourself Jewish?” Franken ambushes her while she still has her coat on. “I would,” Thomasin replies, staying to chat amiably for a moment before joining her mother in the kitchen.

“I don't think I ever told my kids, ‘
You're Jewish!
'” Franken explains. “They just think they're Jewish.” Franni, he explains, is a “lapsed Catholic.” “When the kids would ask me growing up, ‘Am I Jewish?' I'd say, ‘Well, you're half-Jewish, so you're kind of Jewish and you live in New York on the Upper West Side, so you're Jewish!' When my daughter was five or six, my brother asked her, ‘What's the advantage of being half-Jewish and half Christian?'—thinking she'd say, ‘You get to celebrate both Hanukkah and Christmas.' And instead, she said, ‘If someone asks you if you're Jewish, you can say no.' My brother was both amused and a little shocked by that.”

He says Franni was observant until they got married. “She comes from a very Irish Catholic family,” he says. “We met freshman year in college. She would stay over in my room and then go to Mass on Sunday morning, which I thought was odd. But she, more than I, made the conscious decision: ‘The kids aren't going to be Catholic.' And I said, ‘Okay.'” He laughs.

Franken grew up in Minnesota's St. Louis Park—dubbed “St. Jewish Park,” Franken says, because of its heavy concentration of Jews. He was confirmed in a Reform synagogue. “I remember being in a carpool to go to temple and not particularly liking confirmation class. I would have preferred to have slept.” He laughs. “My father was slightly more observant than my mother in the sense that he liked to be an usher at temple. I liked some of the music: ‘Ein Kelohenu.' And I also liked Rabbi Shapiro. Everyone who was confirmed got to have a meeting with Rabbi Shapiro, and when it was my turn, I asked him, ‘Why exactly should I believe in God?' and he said, ‘It's easier.' And I said, ‘Boy, that doesn't convince me at all.'” He laughs.

His parents held a seder every year and celebrated a low-key Hanukkah. “We'd get a quarter every night,” he recalls. “Or socks.”

In tenth grade, Franken went to a private academy, the Blake School, in Hopkins, Minnesota, which required a coat and tie and attendance at morning chapel. “In later years, when I used to visit Minnesota and talk about Blake, I'd say that it was founded around the turn of the century as a school for Protestant boys, which it was, and that they started letting Jews in during the fifties to keep the SAT scores up. I'd say that and I'd get a laugh. About three years ago, they had their centennial, and as part of it, a history teacher researched a history of the school. She calls me up and says, ‘You know that joke you tell when you come to town about the Jews and the SAT scores? It's truer than you can possibly imagine.'”

Franken recalls two scrapes with anti-Semitism at Blake. “During morning chapel, you'd sit in these pews and sing two Protestant hymns. ‘Onward Christian Soldier'—Jesus stuff. I didn't mind it at all except that I didn't sing the hymns when I first got there because I'm Jewish. So one day, I'm about to leave math class, and Mr. Lundholm—Harold Lundholm—says to me, ‘Mr. Franken, could you stay after class?' and I said, ‘Sure.' And everyone leaves, and he says to me, ‘I notice you don't sing the hymns in chapel.' I couldn't believe he said this. I said, ‘Well, yeah.' He said, ‘I'd sing the hymns if I were you.' And I said, ‘Okay, well, the thing is, I'm Jewish and the hymns are Christian and I wouldn't want to undermine the sanctity of the songs by singing something that I don't believe in.' And he said, ‘You want to go to a good college, right?' and I said, ‘Yeah.' And he said, ‘And your math grade is going to be very important?' And I said, ‘Yeah.' And he said, ‘I'd sing the hymns.' So from then on, I sang the hymns.”

The second episode occurred in “The Senior Room,” which Franken describes as a recreation/study room for seniors only. “One morning we walked in and scrawled all over the walls were things like ‘Hitler was right,' and some swastikas.
That
, I thought, was very serious, and I went to the headmaster and he didn't take it seriously enough. He basically said, ‘Well, boys will be boys.' So I made a big stink out of it. At the time some friends and I were writing an underground newspaper—
The Blakely Barb
—so we did a really scathing piece.”

I ask Franken if, now that's he's out front politically and often a target of derision from those who disagree with him, he ever feels that a personal attack is also a shot at his ethnicity. “Only when it literally is,” he says. “You get mail or e-mail that literally says ‘Die, Jew.' That's pretty unambiguous.”

Franni comes in to offer me another Diet Coke and points out the gift Franken received as a child from his temple. “This was my confirmation Bible!” he says. “Open up and see all the rabbis' signatures,” Franni urges. Franken starts flipping through the rest of it. “Oy! I didn't know they had this section: ‘
Deaths
.'” He shows me the page and laughs.

Coincidentally, only two weeks before my visit, Franken had returned to his childhood temple in Minnesota to give a speech. “Rabbi Shapiro came,” he says proudly. “He's like eighty-eight now. I was very surprised and glad to see him; I really felt an emotional tie to my rabbi. I spoke for maybe an hour, then had a question-and-answer session, and then the synagogue's new rabbi said, ‘Rabbi Shapiro will ask the last question.' He was seated in the audience of the sanctuary and they gave him the hand mike and he just said to me, ‘I'm proud to be your rabbi.' And I just cried. I went down and hugged him.”

So if someone were to ask Franken how important is being Jewish to him, how he'd rank it among the components of his identity—husband, father, American, and so forth? “Well, it's important to me,” he replies. “Is it more important that I'm a Jew or an American? American. Is it more important that I'm a Jew or a husband? I'd say husband. Jew or father? I'd say father. Jew or New Yorker? Jew. Jew or Minnesotan? Minnesotan.”