Between 1940 and 1941, working out of a hotel room and later a small office in the French port city of Marseille, Varian Fry rescued hundreds of artists, writers, musicians, composers, scientists, philosophers, intellectuals, and their families from the Nazis, taking enormous personal risks to bring them to the United States. Fry was one of the only American “righteous Gentiles,” a man who voluntarily risked everything to save others, with no personal connection to those he saved. At the age of 32, Fry had volunteered to go to France on behalf of the Emergency Rescue Committee, an ad hoc group of American intellectuals formed in 1940 for the purpose of distributing emergency American visas to endangered European artists and thinkers. The U.S. Department of State, which initially supported the committee’s mission, slowly turned against it in favor of its supposed allies in the “unoccupied” pro-Nazi French government—to the point of arranging for Fry’s arrest and expulsion from France in 1941. During Fry’s 13 months in Marseille, he managed to rescue 2,000 people, including a hand-picked list of the brightest stars of European culture—Hannah Arendt, Marcel Duchamp, Marc Chagall, Max Ernst, Claude Lévi-Strauss, and André Breton, to name a few. Until recently, I had never heard of Fry, even though it is arguably because of him—and because of his equally brave colleagues, including several other non-Jewish Americans—that these artists and intellectuals not only survived but reshaped the culture of America. But now I was driving through Los Angeles to see the former homes of some of these rescued luminaries—and to meet a filmmaker who is one of the few living Americans who has heard of Varian Fry.

“We pay tribute to the righteous in order to ignore them. There have been no high-caliber books written about the righteous, no rigorous, critical studies of what made these people do what they did.” This is what I was told by Pierre Sauvage, a filmmaker who has spent much of the past 14 years working on a documentary about Varian Fry. Bearded and bespectacled in a red polo shirt and looking less like a French cineaste than an American dad who had just dropped his daughter off at college, Sauvage is convinced that the stories of Holocaust rescuers like Fry should be not merely inspirational, but instructional—that by studying these exceptional people, we can learn to be more like them. It’s a surprisingly lonely point of view. In 1984, Sauvage helped organize an international conference on the righteous, chaired by Elie Wiesel. “We brought all these righteous Gentiles to Washington,” Sauvage recalled. “In the breaks between sessions, the righteous Gentiles were standing around being ignored by the scholars. No one spoke to them, no one engaged them. How can scholars not be fascinated by these people?”

Sauvage is the director (and proprietor) of the Varian Fry Institute, a nonprofit archive of “Fryana,” as he calls it. On a warm winter morning in Los Angeles, he welcomed me to the “institute,” which turned out to be a small office with floor-to-ceiling shelves of binders that revealed an obsession bordering on mania. Sauvage’s collection of Fryana included everything from copies of Fry’s letters to textbooks Fry wrote for a public-affairs think tank to a poem he composed in French not long before his death. But most of the Fryana was stored on computers containing video files of what was easily several months of Sauvage’s filmed interviews with nearly every person who ever worked with, talked to, knew of, or breathed near Varian Fry.

Sauvage’s fascination with rescuers comes in part because he owes his life to them. He was born in 1944 in Le Chambon, France, a Huguenot village in the south central part of the country in which the entire town, following the leadership of its Protestant clergy, formed a silent “conspiracy of goodness,” as Sauvage has called it, to shelter Jews from the Nazis. Sauvage’s parents were among the thousands of Jews hidden by the righteous of Le Chambon. His 1989 film Weapons of the Spirit is a documentary about the village; it has become an educational staple that I watched in my high-school French class. Sauvage’s parents went to Le Chambon, he later discovered, after being rejected for rescue by Varian Fry.

Fry was honored by Yad Vashem in 1997, 30 years after his death, as one of the Righteous Among the Nations; there is also a street named after him in his hometown of Ridgewood, N.J., not far from where I live. But to Sauvage, this kind of recognition is meaningless when we make no attempt to learn what motivated people like Fry. “Many years ago in New York, I read about a guy who had fallen onto the subway tracks, and another man had jumped down to rescue him,” Sauvage told me. “When he was asked why he did it, he said, ‘What else could I do? There was a train coming.’ For most people, that would be the reason not to do it. But this man’s response was automatic. Fiction and drama have given us a distorted sense of how rescuers think. Writers need a narrative arc, so they show these people wrestling with themselves, agonizing over what to do. But rescuers actually don’t hesitate or agonize. They immediately recognize what the situation calls for. When they say that what they did was no big deal, we think they are being modest. They aren’t. They genuinely experienced it as no big deal.”

From his research in Le Chambon, Sauvage developed his own theory about the righteous: that they are happy, secure people with a profound awareness of who they are. “I’ve never met an unhappy rescuer,” he claimed. “These are people who are rooted in a clear sense of identity—who they are, what they love, what they hate, what they value—that gives them a footing to assess a situation.” He described the inspiration the people of Le Chambon drew from their Protestant history and faith. Then he began showing me his interviews with Fry’s colleagues, introducing me posthumously to several exceedingly intelligent, colorful, and sincere Americans. All of them did indeed seem like happy people, with a deep sense of who they were.

The only person missing from his footage is Varian Fry.

I’ve long been uncomfortable with stories of Holocaust rescue, not least because of the painful fact that they are statistically insignificant—as are, for that matter, stories of Holocaust survival. But for me, the unease of these stories runs deeper. When I was 23 and just beginning my doctoral work in Yiddish, I barely understood the world I was entering. It is a very distant world from what we are taught to assume in American culture, where happy endings are so expected that even our stories of the Holocaust somehow have to be redemptive. In Holocaust literature written in Yiddish, the language of the culture that was successfully destroyed, one doesn’t find many musings on the kindness of strangers, because there actually wasn’t much of that. Instead one finds cries of anguish, rage, and, yes, vengeance. Stories about Christian rescuers are far more palatable to American audiences, because while they have the imprimatur of true stories, they also conveniently follow the familiar arc of fiction. The overwhelming reality of the unavenged murder of innocents—the reality one finds recorded in the culture that was actually destroyed—doesn’t play as well in Hollywood.

But unlike the humble peasants of Le Chambon, Varian Fry felt oddly familiar to me. Not just because he was young and American, but because he was very much the kind of young American I know best. Like me, he grew up in a commuter suburb in northern New Jersey; he graduated from Harvard in 1931, 68 years before I did. In photographs, he looks a lot like the guys I went to college with: thin, awkward, but handsome in a dorky way, his then-stylish glasses and carefully knotted ties a failed but endearing attempt at coolness. His personal letters, which I read in Columbia University’s Rare Book Room, are well-written and irreverent in a tone I recognize from my college friends—full of witty references to nerdy things ranging from the Aeneid (“I was surprised to find so many more/ had joined us, ready for exile …”) to Gilbert and Sullivan (“I am never disappointed in them [the rescued artists]—what never? Well, hardly ever!”). If he hadn’t been dead for more than 40 years, I might have dated him.

What felt creepily familiar about him, too, were his motivations.

To read Dara Horn’s full story in Tablet Magazine’s first-ever Kindle Single, see here. And remember: You don’t need a Kindle to read—Kindle Singles can be read with a free Kindle app for your iPhone, Android, or BlackBerry smartphone or tablet, or on your computer. The complete, 16,000-word version of The Rescuer costs $1.99.

Born in Brooklyn and raised in rural Connecticut until the age of 10, when his family moved to Los Angeles, Shulman maintained his connection to nature while simultaneously documenting a new urban paradigm that was taking shape on the West Coast. Shulman sought spiritual sanctity in the beauty of the physical world—both built and natural—but never in a synagogue. He had no interest in ethno-centrism or Jewish exceptionalism. Yet he maintained close relationships with architects in the progressive modern movement, many of whom were Jewish émigrés from Europe who often found philosophical and professional support from Jewish Americans.

Architects of American synagogues embraced the seismic shift of modernism, and so too did practitioners and patrons of residential and commercial modern design. This generally meant rejecting historical precedent in favor of a forward-thinking visual and spatial vocabulary that valued clean lines and new technologies over fussy ornamentation. When it came time to design a home and studio for himself on a bucolic Hollywood hillside, where Shulman bought a plot in 1947, he hired his friend Raphael Soriano, a Sephardic Jew who immigrated from Rhodes, Greece, to Los Angeles. The project was completed in 1950, and Shulman lived and worked at the property until his death at home on July 15, 2009, at the age of 98.

Although Shulman traveled with his camera and took photographs abroad, two recent books about him reveal new insights into his relationship with his adopted hometown. This spring’s Julius Shulman Los Angeles: The Birth of a Modern Metropolis—which features text by architectural writer Sam Lubell and a forward by Shulman’s daughter Judy McKee—shows how Shulman recorded all corners of L.A. as it went through various boom cycles and forged a new path for cities in the West. Julius Shulman’s Los Angeles draws from a 2007-2008 exhibition of Shulman’s work at Los Angeles Central Library that featured a range of buildings and environments. And Shulman’s legacy is again manifest in several exhibitions associated with the Getty-coordinated citywide series of exhibitions, Pacific Standard Time: Art in L.A. 1945-1980, which continues through April 2012.

For the accompanying slideshow, author Lubell selected images representative of Shulman’s life and work. His commentary is provided in the captions.

New York: The uber-hip Mondrian Soho hotel has unveiled neighborhood artist Sol Lewitt’s 1979 photographic work, On the Walls of the Lower East Side, quite literally on its Lafayette St. facade. Jenni Wolfson performs her searing one-woman show, Rash, which details her experience working for the United Nations in Rwanda, Sunday evening as part of the All for One solo theater festival (Nov. 20, 7 p.m., $20). On Monday, actress Anne Hathaway hosts the Public Theater forum titled “Does Culture Make Us Who We Are?” with New York Times columnist David Brooks as one of the panelists (Nov. 21, 8 p.m., $25). On Tuesday, McNally Jackson Books hosts writers André Aciman and Sven Sirkerts (Nov. 21, 7 p.m., free). Uptown, the 92Y holds a discussion about Jewish soldiers who fought in the Soviet Red Army in World War II, to accompany an in-house exhibit on the same topic (Nov. 22, 8:15 p.m., $29; exhibit runs through Dec. 29).

Memoirist and reporter Lucette Lagnado talks about her new book, The Arrogant Years, with writer Malachy McCourt at the Museum of Jewish Heritage in downtown Manhattan (Nov. 30, 7 p.m., $10). Next Tuesday, New York’s Asia Society puts on what is bound to be a knock-out event as part of its Great Debates series: Jewish Talmudic Debate (Nov. 29, 6 p.m., $15).

Elsewhere: In Chapel Hill, N.C., this weekend marks the final performances of the mostly omnivourous theater group The Performance Collective’s jarringly physical take on Jonathan Safran Foer’s dietary tome, Eating Animals (Nov. 18, 19, 8 p.m., $10). Los Angeles’ Skirball Cultural Center exhibits “Women Hold Up Half the Sky,” which addresses gender equality and women’s issues and was inspired by Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn’s book, Half the Sky (through March 11, 2012, $10). Stop by Sunday to hear from Edna Adan Ismail, a Somalian activist featured in the exhibit (Nov. 19, 12:30 p.m.).

Abroad: On Sunday, the Koffler Chamber Orchestra plays the work of some of artist Marc Chagall’s favorite composers, including Mozart and Tchaikovsky, in conjunction with the very cool-looking exhibit “Chagall and the Russian Avant Garde” at the Art Gallery of Ontario (Nov. 20, 3 p.m., free with $25 museum admission; exhibit runs through Jan. 26, 2012). The UJA Federation of Greater Toronto is putting on a panel called “The Innovators: New Frontiers in the Fashion World,” featuring the co-founders of the voyeur website The Coveteur (Nov 22, 7 p.m., $30).

Vienna’s Jewish Film Festival is under way, featuring the movingly brilliant documentary ‘Til We Meet Again, one Jewish family’s modern-day journey through Austria to uncover the story of a grandmother’s 1939 flight from Vienna (Nov. 27, 12:30 p.m., $8). London’s Jewish Community Centre continues its attention-getting programming Thursday with the discussion “Would we be better off without religion?” featuring former Member of Parliament Evan Harris and playwright Diane Samuels (Nov. 24, 8 p.m. $13 in advance). On Wednesday, in Israel’s port city of Ashdod, the Jerusalem-based Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design debuts the fruits of a two-year partnership with the city in the form of a two-day exhibit, “Bezalel in Ashdod,” with live music and street entertainment (Nov. 23, 7 p.m., free).

Agenda will return Dec. 2.

East Coast: Irene Nemirovsky gets the star treatment with a discussion of her life and works at Barnard College Tuesday (Sept. 27, 7 p.m., free). Vanessa Davis and other female comics artists take center stage in the Yeshiva University Museum exhibition “Graphic Details: Confessional Comics by Jewish Women” (through April 15, free with museum admission). Park 51, the Islamic Community Center in downtown Manhattan, is showing photography of immigrant children living in New York City (free). Yoko Ono’s art, created pre-John Lennon and also in collaboration with the Beatle, is on display at Stony Brook University’s Staller Center gallery (through Oct. 15, free).

The New York Arab American comedy festival kicks off this weekend, with headliner shows Tuesday and Wednesday at the Gotham Comedy Club (Sept. 27 and 28, 8 p.m., $20). Off-Broadway Week runs Monday through Oct. 9.: Don’t miss Long Island native Adam Kantor in Avenue Q. Tovah Feldshuh takes Westchester with her new one-woman show, Aging Is Optional (Sept. 24, 3 p.m. and 8 p.m., $65). Not optional is keeping your regrets bottled up: 10Q hosts a confessional event Tuesday, at Manhattan’s Drom (Sept. 27, 8 p.m., from $7).

Saveur magazine’s Gabriella Gershenson wrangles Dine Out Irene, an eat-out event in and around New York City where a percentage of your check goes to New York farmers (Sept. 25, reservations recommended). Iraqi-Jewish artist Michael Rakowitz, best known for his cooking-slash-teaching-slash-art project Enemy Kitchen, will take up residence at the ever-morphing restaurant Park Avenue Autumn, where he will follow in Marina Abramovic’s creative footsteps and collaborate with chef Kevin Lasko on something that might taste good.

The Philadelphia Museum of Art hosts the excessively titled event, “Interfaith Forum: A Catholic, Jewish, Muslim and Protestant conversation about Rembrandt and the Face of Jesus at the Philadelphia Museum of Art,” presented with the nearby National Museum of American Jewish History and featuring JTS Chancellor Arnold Eisen (a Tablet contributor) as one of the speakers (Sept. 25, 2 p.m., $13.50). Philly also celebrates Oktoberfest (Sept. 24, 12 p.m., free). Shakespeare scholar Stephen Greenblatt hits up the Harvard bookstore in Cambridge, Mass., to discuss his new book The Swerve and the rise of humanism (Sept. 26, 7 p.m., free).

West Coast: Steven Spielberg’s epic boy-meets-alien film, E.T., screens at the trendy but controversial Hollywood Forever Cemetery on Saturday night, with a live DJ before and after to minimize the creep factor. Bring your own Skittles (Sept. 24, 8 p.m., $10). The Last Bookstore in L.A. is hosting a “literary vaudeville event” called “5 Jews You Might Not Want to Invite for Passover”—one of whom may or may not be Spielberg (Sept. 25, 2 p.m., free). Temple Emanuel of Beverly Hills reveals its new sanctuary and social hall Saturday with a dessert reception (Sept. 24, 7 p.m., free).

In Between: The Art Institute of Chicago exhibits “Bertrand Goldberg: Architecture of Invention,” featuring more than 100 drawings, models, and photographs from the famed architect of Chicago’s Marina City apartment towers (through Jan. 15, 2012, $18). Kansas City, Mo., just unveiled the Kauffman Center for the Performing Arts, a $413 million downtown anchor project that looks part Dyson vacuum cleaner and part spaceport. The 20th anniversary of 1991’s Slacker gave the Milwaukee Art Center an excuse to finally get around to a Richard Linklater film series, which runs through next month. The cult classic screens Saturday (Sept. 24, 7:30 p.m., $8). Polish band Dikanda plays the Lotus World Music and Arts Festival in Bloomington, Ind., this weekend (Sept. 24, 10:30 p.m., from $37).

Abroad: The Klezmatics continue their 25th-anniversary world tour with a stop in Prague Tuesday at the Plac Akropolis (Sept. 27, 7:30 p.m., $26). The Tel Aviv Museum of Art brings the work of well-known local graffiti artists to a more institutionalized setting for “Inside Job: Street Art in Tel Aviv” (free). The Jerusalem Post weighed in on burgers and determined that one of Tel Aviv’s five best are to be had at Wolfnights. Jerusalem’s Eden Hotel hosts a pre-Rosh Hashanah market, where vendors will be selling olive oil, organic fruits, and cakes, with live jazz (Sept. 26, 5-8 p.m., free).

Anywhere: Suburgatory, the latest TV show to depict the horrors of suburban life—vampire free, we can only hope—stars Jeremy Sisto, formerly that creep Elton of Clueless, as the father of a ripped-from-Manhattan teen, played by rising star Jane Levy (premieres Sept. 28, 8:30 p.m., ABC). It’s no longer your grandfather’s Jewish eyewear operation, now that the hip Moscot spectacles company releases new retro-inspired, cheekily-named frames the Bissle and the Mensch. The trailer for the film version of the graphic novel The Rabbi’s Cat looks more promising than the film version of Les Mis, even if Hugh Jackman stars.

Comic book writer Scott Snyder discussed the dark future of his popular creations, a student at the University of Pennsylvania honored Claudia Gould, who is set to take over at the Jewish Museum after 12 years at the school’s Institute of Contemporary Art, and Maurice Sendak talked Bumble-Ardy, his lastest book, on NPR’s Fresh Air. Don’t forget that tomorrow is National Punctuation Day, which is, apparently, a thing.

Tips: culture@tabletmag.com

Burial Plots

This wasn’t a revival theater or a movie night at the Hollywood Bowl. Rather, it was a typical Saturday night during the summer season at Hollywood Forever Cemetery, which in the last decade has become as well known for its menagerie of eclectic events as for the many early film stars buried there—including director Ernst Laemmle, composer Franz Waxman, Yiddish playwright Peretz Hirschbein, and mobster Bugsy Siegel. That Saturday, the gates opened a few minutes after 6 p.m., and the masses poured in, streaming across the cemetery’s broad lawns. Picnic bags were opened, wine bottles uncorked, tea candles lit. The skunky bouquet of marijuana materialized, overwhelming the grounds’ natural jasmine aroma. By 7:30, about a thousand people had assembled, and a young Steve Martin emerged, projected 30-feet tall on a mausoleum’s whitewashed wall.

While a hit with partygoers, Hollywood Forever’s insouciant attitude toward matters of life and death elides its complicated past. Journalists have also been guilty of submitting to the charms of the place and its management. Most stories about the cemetery have focused on the success of its current owner—Tyler Cassity, a handsome 40-year-old from a wealthy Missouri family of cemeterians—and ignored the cemetery’s vibrant Jewish history, including the tale of Jules Roth, an ex-con who for much of the 20th century owned and ran it as a private fiefdom, milking it for money and terrorizing his employees. In a 2000 HBO documentary, The Young and the Dead, Cassity adopted a tone of almost philosophical whimsy when speaking of Roth, a bust of whom sits in the young entrepreneur’s office. “We’re still affected by his actions,” Cassity said. Now that several of Cassity’s business associates and family members—including his brother, his early partner at Hollywood Forever—have been indicted in a wide-ranging $600 million federal fraud case in Missouri, his statement seems less a nostalgic bromide than a literal statement of fact—and a warning of trouble to come.

***

Over the summer, I took a daytime tour of Hollywood Forever with a group from a West Los Angeles synagogue. Our guide was Karie Bible, a pale, bird-boned woman in a long-sleeved black dress. In one hand she carried a black parasol, in the other a book of photographs of famous cemetery residents that she employed as a visual aid. A collector of vintage clothing, Bible is, in the Hollywood tradition, a woman of many hats: She co-wrote a book, Location Filming in Los Angeles; she edits filmradar.com, a site covering “revival, repertory, and special film events and the venues which house them”; and works for a box-office recording company. She has been Hollywood Forever’s de facto in-house tour guide for nine years; offerings include a Jewish Tour and a Hidden Hollywood Tour.

Bible led us to what she calls a cemetery within the cemetery, the Jewish section known as Beth Olam. (Half of Hollywood Forever’s customers are Jewish.) While in other parts of Hollywood Forever memorials come in peculiar forms, such as a cenotaph of Johnny Ramone performing a power slide or voice actor Mel Blanc’s tombstone, which reads “That’s All Folks,” here the headstones are austere, massed so closely together that they nearly appear to be stacked on top of one another. Under Roth, the grass in this area had been allowed to grow wild.

In a shaded corner near the outer wall of the Beth Olam Mausoleum, Cassity built a fountain serving as a Holocaust memorial. To the right is a small tribute to Anne Frank. Mounted above a carved wooden bench, a bronze plaque carries an inscription from her diary: “This is a photo of me as I wish I still was. If so, I would still have a chance to come to Hollywood.” It’s an unexpected touch of schmaltz but consistent with the cemetery’s Old Hollywood mythos.

***

Born on July 23, 1900, Jules A. Hine Frederick Roth was a natural swindler. In his early twenties, Jack, as he was known, fell in with C.C. Julian, a silver-tongued con artist taking advantage of the tremendous oil boom occurring in Southern California. (Julian’s story is well chronicled in Jules Tygiel’s book The Great Los Angeles Oil Swindle.) Julian managed to attract thousands of investors, allowing him to set up a profusion of oil derricks and gas stations across the region. Roth was the vice president of Julian Petroleum and his boss’s right-hand man, according to Tygiel. The two spent lavishly, drank heavily, dated actresses, and became prominent members of the city’s social circuit.

But soon the Julian Petroleum Company began to unravel. The ledgers were a mess, the stock watered down. Roth’s and Julian’s reputations became increasingly checkered; raucous incidents like a fistfight with Charlie Chaplin probably didn’t help. (Chaplin decked a belligerent Julian.) On the night of Jan. 3, 1924, as Roth visited Julian at his home, someone fired three shots through a window, nearly hitting Julian. In April 1925, under federal investigation, Julian sold his shares in his company to the businessman Sheridan C. Lewis, under whom the shady investment operation only grew, roping in a wide swath of the city’s Jewish financial elite.

When Julian Petroleum finally imploded in 1927, the $150-million scam was widely regarded as a sign of the perfidy and greed of the country’s big businessmen. (Historians like Tygiel now regard it as an important precursor to the creation of the Securities and Exchange Commission.) A number of men went to jail, but mostly for crimes unrelated to the investment scheme. Motley Flint, a five-time-indicted lawyer who had helped to bring in Louis B. Mayer as a Julian investor, was testifying in a separate trial when Frank Keaton, who lost $35,000 to the scheme, shot him.

Both Jack Roth and C.C. Julian ran from the authorities. Facing a mail-fraud charge, Julian made it to Shanghai, where, after burning through his remaining funds in a wild spending binge, he committed suicide in 1934. Roth, wanted on 39 counts, including grand theft and securities violations, fled to Canada in 1932, using the name J. Chase. He was arrested in Winnipeg, but after a court hearing, he snuck through a door reserved for jurors and disappeared. He was later found in New York, where he was arrested again and extradited to Los Angeles. After a one-month trial, he was convicted on 21 counts and sentenced to nine to 95 years at San Quentin.

Roth didn’t spend long in prison, winning parole in 1937. In 1939, he bought what was then called Hollywood Memorial Park Cemetery, where his parents had been buried in 1917 and 1923. Founded in 1899 on 100 acres, the cemetery had sold off large tracts to Paramount Studios, which still stands to the cemetery’s south, its iconic water tower looming in the night like some kind of alien landing craft. (Facing financial problems in the late 1960s, Paramount almost sold its lot back to the cemetery.)

Despite the cemetery’s desirable location and the large roster of prominent early movie stars interred there—among them Janet Gaynor, Rudolph Valentino, Peter Lorre, Cecil B. DeMille, Fay Wray—Roth paid only intermittent attention to its upkeep. Instead, he siphoned money from its operations to pay for luxuries. He closed its grounds to most racial minorities. (Roth forbade Gone With The Wind star Hattie McDaniel from being buried there; a memorial was later added for her under Tyler Cassity’s ownership.) In the 1950s, echoing the anti-communist fervor of the times, Roth ordered an employee—he named the informant “Operative 16”—to submit daily secret reports on the cemetery’s other employees. He installed a wet bar in his office. He collected pornographic postcards from around the world. He bought a yacht that he argued was for scattering clients’ ashes and claimed it as a tax deduction. Instead, he mostly used the boat to entertain himself and various women.

The cemetery fell into disrepair, headstones and crypts crumbling, the grounds untended as questions grew about where the cemetery’s endowment funds went. In one year, Hollywood Memorial made more money disinterring bodies than interring them—relatives wanted their loved ones moved to better-kept environs. Finally, one of Roth’s employees reported his yacht scam to the IRS. To settle the resultant tax bills, Roth was forced to sell off some of the cemetery’s buildings along Santa Monica Boulevard; the imposing stone edifices became home to an auto-parts store and a laundromat.

By 1997, Roth, as old as the century and nearly as the old as the cemetery itself, was bankrupt. He died on Jan. 4, 1998. No obituary appeared in the Los Angeles Times. His body was dumped in an unmarked grave on a rainy night, later to be moved to a (marked) crypt near his parents. After his death, employees found stacks of urns in a closet in his office—ashes that were supposed to have been dumped into the Pacific from his yacht.

Tyler and Brent Cassity bought the cemetery that year, renamed it Hollywood Forever, and invested millions in revitalizing the grounds, offering events and tours to draw visitors and creating innovative products like LifeStories, documentary-style videos memorializing the departed. The cemetery’s turnaround has been tremendous; it’s become a must-see for the hip and the weird, the death-obsessed and students of L.A.’s history. Los Angeles magazine named it one of the city’s 101 sexiest places, and in The Young and the Dead, a cemetery employee practically brags about the carnal possibilities of the place’s many hidden nooks.

***

Under the shadow of Jules Roth, the Cassity family may be writing its own chapter in the cemetery’s criminal history. In November 2010, the U.S. Attorney’s Office in St. Louis named Tyler Cassity’s brother Brent, their father, Doug, and several business partners from their company National Prearranged Services in a 50-count indictment that alleged widespread fraud amounting to $600 million in disappeared funds. Until its collapse in 2008, NPS had been a big player in the pre-need funeral business, in which companies sell funeral plots to the living, often years before they might need them. Customers are promised lower rates, while funeral homes can invest the money, boosting their profits. But the industry is largely unregulated and filled with unscrupulous operators, Joshua Slocum, the executive director of the Funeral Consumers Alliance, told me. “NPS always had a reputation for being very aggressive,” Slocum said, adding that their sales tactics were “particularly disgusting.”

The funeral business has long been notoriously corrupt, so perhaps it’s not a surprise that the Cassitys’ alleged behavior echoes that of Jules Roth. The government charges that Doug Cassity illegally removed money from pre-need funeral trusts and used it to purchase real estate and a 36-foot boat, among other luxuries.

Tyler Cassity hasn’t been charged in the case, but his original partner in Hollywood Forever, his brother Brent, has. It’s difficult to untangle Brent Cassity’s actual relationship with Hollywood Forever. In 2000, he sold his interest in Forever Enterprises, which he cofounded with Tyler, for $12 million to a company whose majority shareholder was a family-owned trust. A 2004 Fortune article named Brent as CEO of Forever Enterprises and Tyler as the company’s president. Forever Enterprises, which owns Hollywood Forever, belongs to the Cassity family’s RBT trust.

Theodore Hovey, a family counselor at Hollywood Forever, told me that when he started at the cemetery nine years ago, Brent no longer worked there and he doesn’t work there now. But as late as 2006, an article in St. Louis magazine described him as a co-owner of the cemetery, as well as being involved in the operations of Tyler Cassity’s Fernwood cemetery in northern California’s Marin County. His LinkedIn account lists him as president of ForeverNetwork, the web of cemeteries that includes Hollywood Forever.

Hovey said that Tyler Cassity owns Hollywood Forever but sometime in the last decade other owners joined the business. When I asked who else could be counted as an owner, he said, “Gosh, I wonder if I’m supposed to tell.” He then backpedaled, saying, “I’m not privy to that information really.”

On Saturday, E.T. will be shown at the cemetery. It’s the last show of the season. By the time screenings resume in May, the most consequential act of theater in the life of Hollywood Forever may be under way in a St. Louis courtroom, where the trial of Doug and Brent Cassity is likely to begin next year.

“I view the world of rabbis and the world of filmmaking as very similar—you have to tell a story,” said Rabbi Jonathan Hanish, a Board of Rabbis executive committee member who came up with the idea for the workshop. “And if you can tell a story, you can reach people.”

-“Hollywood Writers Help Rabbis Punch Up Their Sermons”

Turns out that in places the 405 serves as the boundary of an eruv—the enclosure within which (and only within which) observant Jews may perform certain tasks during Shabbat. In fact, the eruv formed in part by the 405, with a 40-mile circumference that stretches from Los Angeles proper into the San Fernando Valley, is one of the largest in the country.

And, inevitably, the story of the 405 renovation—they are widening it to ten lanes (finally, amirite?)—has become a warmhearted tale of interfaith tolerance. “The level of help we’ve had,” reports one volunteer eruv administrator, “from the Roman Catholic permit people at Caltrans … to the Muslim line inspector along the freeways who gave us engineering help.…The level of deference and courtesy and kindness—it makes you feel good that you live in America.” Sure, but does it make you feel good that you live in L.A.?

Massive 405 Freeway Project Respects the Boundaries of a Jewish Tradition [LAT]

This was a new one for Seidler-Feller, who has built a thriving practice as the go-to sex therapist for L.A.’s sizable Orthodox population. “It was stark, and it was revelatory, and it was disturbing,” she said.

A silver-haired Modern Orthodox Jew who does not wear a sheitl, or a wig, as many of her patients do, Seidler-Feller, 62, says she aspires to make a “cultural dent” in the cloistered world of Judaism’s most pious adherents. “There’s a little bit of the messianist in me,” she said in an interview from her airy office in L.A.‘s Westwood neighborhood.

To help understand this particular patient’s fears, she turned to her rabbi—who also happens to be her husband of 35 years, Chaim Seidler-Feller, the longtime head of UCLA’s Hillel. He found the passage to which the patient was referring in the Kitzur Shulchan Aruch, the 19th-century abridged tome of Jewish law that is widely used as a guidepost for Orthodox Jews on matters of intimacy.

“Clearly the Shulchan Aruch preserves a point of view that is medieval about the fears that existed at that time—and up until Freud’s time—about the vagina and what its powers are,” said Seidler-Feller, the accent of her native South Africa still prominent. “But the point is that it was alive today, in this room.”

What also struck Seidler-Feller, whose work with Orthodox couples comprises about 40 percent of her clinical-psychology practice, was that the notion troubling that married patient derived from a minority rabbinic opinion. That the opinion has survived in the commentary alongside the far more permissive majority opinion written by the 3rd-century rabbi, Yochanan bar Nafcha, vexes her.

But Seidler-Feller’s clinical work can only reach so many, as she says, and several years ago, she and her husband decided to go on the road. At Jewish learning conferences such as Limmud, they unpack what Judaism has to say about sex, with Rabbi Seidler-Feller exploring the textual sources and Dr. Seidler-Feller providing the psychological context. “We want to show people that the majority opinions are permissive with respect to marital sexuality,” she said. “And not only permissive, but instructive.”

The child of a Czech Auschwitz survivor, Seidler-Feller was raised in a nonobservant home where the memories of the Holocaust were palpable; her mother had lost both of her parents, as well as her first husband, by the time she turned 18. Her mother’s tragic past, coupled with her parents’ early divorce, led Seidler-Feller to pursue a career in psychology. “When you have experiences that fracture you psychically, you can try to deal with them in many ways,” she said. “One is writing novels, and another is becoming a psychologist.” At the same time, she said, the traumatic events of her childhood led her to seek out traditional Judaism. By the time she met her husband in 1973 at Ohio State University, where she was pursuing a doctorate and he was the new Hillel rabbi, she had already traveled to Israel and immersed herself in Jewish study.

In her office, decorated with unassuming flower prints—she’d removed a Gauguin print that featured a nude figure after an ultra-Orthodox man complained—Seidler-Feller explained that about 15 years ago, she began to think of Orthodox Jews, particularly the ultra-Orthodox, as culturally underprivileged; she likened it to the digital divide.

“It makes my heart sad that, in the modern world, with all that we have available to us, the sort of information that could so enhance the quality of their lives is unavailable to them because nobody is doing the active translation that is required,” she said.

When she completed the UCLA human sexuality program in the late 1970s, the Orthodox population was far more skeptical of psychotherapy than it is today. Moreover, the field of psychotherapy was far less attuned to religious sensitivities. As a woman steeped in both traditional Judaism and modern psychotherapy, Seidler-Feller realized that she could provide the necessary cultural mediation.

Ultra-Orthodox communities—among them the Chabad-Lubavitch and Satmar Hasidic sects—provide virtually no sex education until couples are about to marry. Even that information, generally dispensed to women by a kallah teacher, who is charged with teaching brides about intimacy, can be minimal. With limited or no access to books and movies, let alone the Internet, community members have few places to turn for information on the most basic aspects of human sexuality. Real-world experience is also limited: The rules of conduct known as Shomer Negiah prohibit girls and boys from touching, while boys are taught at puberty that masturbation is a grave evil.

A 2004 survey of 380 married Orthodox women in New York and Israel conducted by a team of psychiatrists and sexual health experts found significantly higher levels of sexual dissatisfaction among that community than among the general American population. Nine percent of Orthodox women reported never experiencing an orgasm during sex, as compared with 1 percent in the general population, according to a 1999 study on sexual dysfunction in the United States. Tellingly, women who were raised observant were twice as likely to have difficulty climaxing than ba’alot teshuva, or women who were raised secular and chose Orthodoxy later in life.

One of the study’s co-authors, Dr. Michelle Friedman, a psychiatrist who directs the pastoral counseling program at New York’s Yeshivat Chovevei Torah, a Modern Orthodox rabbinical school, said that part of the problem is lack of education. “There tends to be a kind of wariness about sex education and sexual matters in general,” she said of the Orthodox world. “Coupled with the deep commitment to modesty, it becomes difficult to construct appropriate educational models.”

An Orthodox couple will more than likely wind up in Seidler-Feller’s office if they’re having trouble conceiving, unlike secular couples who often seek treatment because they’re not enjoying sex.

Seidler-Feller is herself still fairly conservative when it comes to sex, more Michele Bachmann than Dr. Ruth when discussing pop culture. “The more vulgar our culture becomes about sexuality, especially female sexuality, the more recessed that world becomes,” she says, speaking of the ultra-Orthodox community. “And that’s a dynamic I regret.” It also means that the need for her services isn’t going away anytime soon.

CORRECTION, June 22: Yeshivat Chovevei Torah did not grant quasi-rabbinic status to a woman. This error has been corrected.

The Iranian Jews spent two decades as the Cubans of Los Angeles: a tight-knit community living in exile, in many cases fabulously wealthy or entrepreneurial or both, plopped down not in some far, unseen corner of the city but right at its commercial and cultural heart, resisting any move toward assimilation while they waited for the tide to turn back home. Jimmy Delshad, the former mayor of Beverly Hills and an unofficial spokesman of the Persian Jewish community, refers to it as “the suitcase mentality”—as in, ready to go at any time. But that fantasy of return is long gone. Now, within a few miles of Nessah, there is a Chabad Persian Youth center, an Orthodox synagogue and school called Ohr HaEmet, and the Iranian Jewish Senior Center, all featuring prominent multi-lingual signage. “Their kids have grown up here,” Delshad says. “They know the kids would never go back to Iran.”

Nessah today occupies a 60,000-square-foot neoclassical temple a few blocks east of Rodeo Drive, where Yedidia Shofet’s son and successor, David Shofet, conducts services in Hebrew and Farsi, from a bimah in the middle of a high-ceilinged thousand-seat main sanctuary. Aging men in charcoal gray suits with white shirts fill the east side of the room, while their wives sit to the west. That is the part of Nessah that its members describe as “traditional Persian.”

No one knows what to call the services in the event hall on the other end of the block-long campus, where on Saturdays a charismatic young Lubavitch rabbi from Miami Beach named Menachem Weiss leads prayers in English from a standard Modern Orthodox text. Here, the worshippers are Jews who identify as Persian but are also unequivocally American. His congregants are the children and grandchildren of Shofet’s original flock, people who grew up in the United States, who live their daily lives in English, and who don’t want to or simply can’t follow services in Farsi. Even in the ladies’ room, where mothers whisper to their toddlers, the lingua franca is English.

Now adults, they are the first generation of Persian Jews to come of age outside their country since the time of the Babylonian exile. More Persian Jews live in Los Angeles than anywhere else in the world—an estimated 45,000, roughly twice the number remaining in Iran. They have homes in Beverly Hills, Bel Air, Brentwood, and Encino; they have Ivy League degrees and work as doctors, lawyers, producers, and bankers. The names of the community’s most successful members, the brothers Parviz and Younes Nazarian, adorn the city’s major synagogues and centers at USC and UCLA; Younes’ youngest son, Sam, is a nightlife impresario who has been profiled in The New Yorker and who made the Los Angeles Times power list in 2006 at 31. There is even a Persian “Bernie Madoff”: Ezri Namvar, a real-estate investor who owned everything from a Marriott downtown to a resort in Lake Tahoe and was indicted last fall on charges he stole $23 million from investors in his collapsed fund.

Marked by their complicated surnames and close family ties, the Persian Jews are—willingly or not—responsible for determining how much of the old language and customs will survive after their transplantation to Southern California. Many of Nessah’s members, including its board officers, have what they jokingly refer to as “dual citizenship”: membership at Nessah as well as at one of the large, mainstream synagogues nearby, like the Conservative Sinai Temple or Reform Stephen S. Wise Temple, where their children attend day or Hebrew school and have their bar or bat mitzvahs.

The community’s arrival exerts a profound influence on the Jewish culture and politics of Los Angeles, even as the Persian Jews themselves reshape their traditions to fit the American mold. “Persian, Jewish, American,” says Zvi Dershowitz, a rabbi who was instrumental in welcoming Persian Jews to his synagogue, Sinai Temple, one of the largest Conservative congregations in West Los Angeles, in the aftermath of the revolution. “It’s the three-legged stool.”

***

It’s hard, these days, to remember that there was a time when Iran was cool, a place where Elizabeth Taylor went to recover from her split from Richard Burton and before embarking on her political life with Virginia Sen. John Warner. In an American context, the Persians remained foreign and exotic even after they began arriving in large numbers. Their American pop-culture debut was in the 1995 movie Clueless, the writer and director of which, Amy Heckerling, spent months sitting in on classes at Beverly Hills High School. “That’s the Persian mafia,” went one line in Heckerling’s screenplay. “You can’t hang with them unless you own a BMW.” To people in Beverly Hills, the joke was funny because it was true, and because it lampooned both Persians’ extravagant materialism and their American counterparts’ disdainful fascination. The joke still plays: A lavish feature in W magazine accompanied by a Larry Sultan photo essay depicted a bejeweled L.A. Persian old guard in faux-Versailles mansions—the Shah Reza Pahlavi crowd—giving way to a generation of rich, nubile proto-Kardashians posing in their clothes in the rooftop hotel pool.

When the Persians began immigrating from Iran in the late 1970s, they encountered an established American Jewish community that was prepared to assist penniless Soviet defectors but utterly confused by the sudden arrival of self-sufficient and self-directed Jews who were relatively wealthy—wealthy enough to inspire genuine jealousy, the kind of jealousy that led parents to say nasty things in front of their kids and their kids to distill that into playground rejection. In Tehran, the wealthiest Jews had lived in the same neighborhood as the Pahlavis, down the road from the Shah’s new international ski resort; arriving in Beverly Hills at the height of the hostage crisis, they were treated like they had cooties. Sam Nazarian has recounted being called a “camel jockey”; his older sister, Sharon Baradaran, says one of her earliest memories in California is of being rejected in her seventh-grade folk-dancing class because she was from Iran. “Kids would say they wouldn’t hold hands with me,” said Baradaran, who now oversees strategic investments as president of the $30 million family foundation created by her parents, from an office in Century City where the parking lot is filled with Rolls-Royces and Maybachs. “Kids can be really mean at that age.”

It was a time of anti-Iranian violence and boycotts directed at Iranian businesses, and Jews—many of whom had been as unobservant and monarchist as their Muslim neighbors—found that being seen publicly in established synagogues helped them establish anti-Islamist bona fides, like wearing oversized chai necklaces or Americanizing their first names. “We were treated like terrorists,” says Ron Mehrdad, a 1980 graduate of Iowa State’s engineering program, who stopped using his Farsi name, Mehran, after sending out more than a thousand job applications and not getting a single positive response. Going to American synagogues was a way to signal they were Jews first and unwilling to be associated with the Islamic Republic.

Continue reading: strangers fitting in, fundraising, and “No, we are not Jewish.” Or view as a single page.

This Sunday, you will watch Super Bowl XLV. You will watch because the Super Bowl is among the American religion’s biggest holidays. You will watch because professional football is the national pastime (last Halloween, more viewers watched a regular-season National Football League game than a simultaneous Game 4 of the World Series). You will watch because at some point during the game, Aaron Rodgers of the Green Bay Packers or Ben Roethlisberger of the Pittsburgh Steelers will take the snap, drop back to give his receivers precious seconds to zoom down the field, maintain focus even as the pocket collapses, pat the ball once and chuck it 40 yards as one of the fastest men alive runs to meet it. For a little under three seconds, the ball will travel through the air, hovering onscreen against the backdrop of the blurred masses, and more than 100 million Americans will hold their breath, waiting to see what happens.

None of this would exist—pro football’s astounding popularity and financial success, the Super Bowl, the Hollywood-like narratives and Hollywood-like stars, and even the glorious deep bomb—if it were not for the American Football League, or AFL, which disappeared more than 40 years ago, only 10 years after its birth. The AFL’s story is a quintessentially American tale of a group of outmanned, outcast insurgents working on the margins, forced to break with the old way of doing things and in the process creating a brasher, more exciting version of the mainstream—a mainstream that then remade itself in the insurgents’ image.

And Sid Gillman, Sonny Werblin, and Al Davis—three Jewish men—were among the AFL’s boldest and most creative innovators, and through the AFL had among the greatest impacts on the shape, success, and direction of the game you will watch on Sunday night.

The AFL began because 27-year-old Lamar Hunt, the son of independent oil baron H.L. Hunt, wanted to own a football team and the 12-team NFL refused to expand. So Hunt found seven like-minded entrepreneurs and started his own league, which played its first games in the fall of 1960. (Jeff Miller’s oral history, Going Long, the NFL Films documentary Full Color Football, and especially Michael MacCambridge’s superb history of pro football, America’s Game all tell the story well.) Over the next decade, the AFL slowly gained enough respectability—and presented enough of a threat—that the NFL agreed to absorb it. In January 1970, Hunt’s team, the Kansas City Chiefs, won the AFL and then defeated the NFL champion Minnesota Vikings in Super Bowl IV—and then the AFL ceased to be. Its teams were absorbed into the American Football Conference of the NFL.

Then the NFL, having conquered the AFL, was in turn conquered by it. The story of how the AFL—and particularly Gillman, Werblin, and Davis—remade football will resonate with those who know how Gershwin remade American popular music, or how Bellow remade the American novel.

The Genius

At the end of a disappointing 1959 season, the NFL’s Los Angeles Rams—general-managed by a young comer named Pete Rozelle—fired Coach Sid Gillman, making him the logical choice, in 1960, to lead L.A.’s brand-new AFL franchise. Gillman was the Chargers’ coach (they soon moved to San Diego) for the entirety of the AFL’s 10-year existence and was, as at least three different people I talked to called him, “the father of the offensive passing game.”

1960 Fleer pro football trading card.
RemembertheAFL.com

In the 1950s, football offenses overwhelmingly handed the ball off. Gillman was typical in this regard: “He ran the ball an extraordinary amount even among NFL coaches,” the football historian Michael MacCambridge says. However, arriving in the AFL, Gillman noticed a few things. First—at least at its outset—AFL defenses were not quite up to the NFL standard and frequently played man-to-man coverage. Second, the actual ball was a Spalding J5-V, which was a quarter of an inch longer and slimmer than the Wilson model in the NFL, which made it slightly easier to throw. Finally, Gillman found an excellent set of toys to play with: quarterback Jack Kemp, an NFL cast-off who, like so many others, found the second act of his career in the nascent league (he would find his third act in politics, serving in Congress and eventually becoming Bob Dole’s running mate in the 1996 elections); running back Keith Lincoln; offensive tackle Ron Mix, a future Hall of Famer known as “The Intellectual Assassin”; and, most important, Lance “Bambi” Alworth, a wide receiver out of Arkansas with exceptionally soft hands. Most of all, Gillman saw a new league, where innovation would be more welcome.

So Gillman decided to switch things up offensively. “The field is 100 yards long and 53 yards and two-thirds inches wide,” Gillman is shown saying in Full Color Football, “and we decided we were going to use every inch of it.” Alworth could run deep and catch what was thrown at him, creating a potential for big plays and, just as important, a defense that would be stretched too thin guarding against the long pass to successfully defend the run and shorter passes—many of which, in another Gillman innovation, were caught by running backs.

“If you look at today’s game, Sid Gillman still has a tremendous impact,” says Ron Jaworski, the ESPN analyst who as a quarterback—and with Sid Gillman as his quarterbacks coach—led the Philadelphia Eagles to the 1981 Super Bowl. “Gillman was a vertical stretch guy who believed in attacking down the field, as well as the horizontal stretch, sideline-to-sideline.” The sport played today is dominated by the pass and by quarterbacks who routinely throw 4,000 yards in one season (including Roethlisberger and Rodgers, Super Bowl XLV’s featured QBs). While prime credit for this arguably goes to Bill Walsh, the legendary San Francisco 49ers coach who created the West Coast Offense, which spread offensive players across the field, Gillman’s innovations and emphasis on passing came first. “This notion that you hear associated with Walsh, that you use the pass to set up the run, the seeds of that were in the Chargers’ system,” MacCambridge argues. It is no coincidence that the first quarterback to throw for 4,000 yards did so in the AFL and that the quarterback to throw three of the next four 4,000-yard seasons did it for the Chargers.

That accomplishment belongs to Hall of Famer Dan Fouts, who played under coach Don Coryell; his brilliant offense, “Air Coryell,” extended Gillman’s ideas about deep routes and pass-catching running backs. “They shared ideas and concepts, and I think what they shared more than anything was a fearlessness about the passing game,” Fouts, now a CBS commentator, tells me. “When you think of the American Football League, you think of men like Sid Gillman, and the wide-open style that the league played, and how entertaining it was.”

Sid Gillman of the San Diego Chargers with quarterback John Hadl in 1971.
Al Messerschmidt/Getty Images

In the AFL, necessity was the mother not only of invention but of tolerance. Most famously, when it became clear that New Orleans was neither big nor easy on the prospect of black players competing in the 1964 AFL All-Star Game, the squads refused to play, and, a day later, the League moved the game to Houston. But this proud moment was possible only because from the outset several teams—and most notably the Chargers—were unafraid of putting 10 or 15 black players on their squads at a time when American sports had only recently integrated; Gillman and his chief scout, a young Al Davis, placed particular emphasis on recruiting at historically black colleges, which the NFL ignored. Additionally, in training camp, Gillman assigned rooms by position, meaning the extraordinarily rare phenomenon of whites and blacks sharing bedrooms. “Sid told me at the time that’s why he was doing it,” says Ron Mix, Gillman’s offensive lineman.

Continue reading: Pope Pete, the showman, and “the only thing that sells tickets.” Or view as a single page.

• How the Flotilla Fiasco proved dialectically useful, opening up an opportunity for the diplomacy that culminated in today’s announcement of direct talks. [Ben Smith]

• As part of his rehabilitation tour, former Sen. George Allen (R-Virginia)—who was felled by the infamous “macaca” remark—described his exploration into his North African Jewish roots. [JTA]

• Israel formally complained to the U.N. about a Lebanon-sponsored ship set to sail for Gaza Sunday with activists onboard. [Haaretz]

• Some radical Muslims despise the Park51 project. In fact, to them it is such an evil thing that, yup, guess whose fault it really is. [Pajamas Media]

• Your weekend reading assignment is this really long and provocative blogpost that has been making the rounds, on why some segments of European society have such a problem with Israel. [Jerusalem Letters]

A kosher taco truck featuring brisket and latke? Los Angeles, you win this round.

• Michael Hayden, final CIA director under George W. Bush, said he has personally come around to the view that a U.S. bombing of Iran “may not be the worst of all possible outcomes.” [WSJ]

• Prime Minister Netanyahu confirmed that the 10-month settlement freeze really will come to a close in September. [JPost]

• Iran’s chief nuclear negotiator has agreed to meet with the European Union’s foreign policy chief. [NYT]

• Egyptian President Mubarak canceled a planned appearance at an African Union meeting Uganda. No reason was given, which means everyone assumes he’s dying (and, let’s face it, everyone probably has a point). [JPost]

• In a rare display of civic consciousness in Los Angeles, residents of Silver Lake gathered to remember the famed neighborhood “Walking Man,” Marc Abrams. [NYT]

“Roger Greenberg’s only rival at saying gauche or obnoxious things to anyone in almost any situation is the character played by Larry David in the HBO series Curb Your Enthusiasm,” Dickstein, the great literary critic, writes of Ben Stiller’s title character. “But while Curb Your Enthusiasm’s once refreshing dose of bile and misanthropy has now degenerated into predictable formula, Greenberg, on the other hand, is guaranteed to set one’s teeth on edge.” It’s important to understand the evolution that resulted in Roger Greenberg.

Dickstein goes on to place the film within the genres of screwball comedy (for the antagonistic romance at its center) and Woody Allen’s brand of “neurotic Jewish comedy.” Those elements are clearly there, but the comparison with Curb Your Enthusiasm is sharpest, and points to a key difference between Woody Allen’s and Larry David’s often-elided comic personas.

The easiest way to explain it is to look at the two comics’ relationships with Los Angeles (where Greenberg takes place as well). When Alvy Singer, Allen’s Annie Hall alter ego, derides L.A. (“the only cultural advantage is being able to make a right turn on a red light”), it’s because he genuinely doesn’t fit in there: Alvy is a nervous arriviste from old Brooklyn whose contempt for Hollywood glamour is rooted in the real fear that he’s about to get chucked out of the party. But David’s character—significantly, a generation younger—lives in L.A. Yes, part of the shtick is that he’s too much of a New Yorker to be able to stand the constant sunshine, but he also cocoons himself in the pampered Hollywood bubble that Allen can’t even handle. David would be roughly as successful at riding the subway as Alvy is at driving a car.

Roger Greenberg, yet another generation younger, is yet another step removed from Alvy’s cultural and class-based anxieties. Greenberg is a born Hollywood insider who’s become an outsider only because he’s a jerk (a troubled one whom we feel sorry for, but basically, a jerk). By the time you get to Greenberg, the thread of distinctively Jewish paranoia that keeps David’s character from being just a rich asshole is lost.

The Inner Nerd [Arguing The World]
Related: Look Out!

“Iran analysts said Tehran government may be pointing the finger at Tondar because it is politically expedient,” the article concludes.

One interesting tidbit: Among other incidents, Iran blamed Tondar for the murder of an Iranian physicist in January. This puts it at odds with Haaretz’s Yossi Melman, who believes the physicist was killed by some group whose prime aim is to slow Iran’s nuclear program; with the U.S. think-tank Stratfor, which blamed Mossad; and, of course, with President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad himself, who, after a rigorous examination of the assassination, detected that the physicist was undoubtedly killed in the “Zionist style.” Which presumably involves—literally dozens—of bagels.

U.S.-Iran Feud Hits L.A. [WSJ]

Nearly 30 years ago, Cohen left France to enroll in L.A.’s American Film Institute. Born in Tunisia, he had lived in Paris from the age of 6, and he’d grown up working for his father’s kosher restaurant Les Ailes—everything from serving as a busboy and waiter to later bartending and managing. Now run by Cohen’s brother (their father died in 2000), Les Ailes is famous for its grilled meats, couscous, and a convivial atmosphere that attracts North African Jewish emigres. (Its location next door to the famed Folies Bergère never hurt, either.)

While Hollywood ostensibly fueled Cohen’s departure, the opportunity to place serious distance between himself and the family business was no small fringe benefit.

“I left France, I left the Jews,” the 54-year-old Cohen now says. “I left cooking Tunisian cuisine, I left everything I knew.” But the pull of his culinary roots proved surprisingly resilient. Nearly two summers ago, he opened up a café, Got Kosher? Provisions, featuring, he is the first to admit, food very much like his father served. At a time when delis are reinventing themselves and winning the spotlight for their efforts, Cohen and Got Kosher? remind us that there are other, equally delectable, Jewish gustatory traditions.

But let’s back up. When Cohen first moved to California, he found that breaking into the movie industry was harder than he had hoped. His one film was a documentary for French television called The Jews of Djerba, about a tiny island off the coast of Tunisia where Cohen’s maternal family has roots. After several years in Hollywood without steady work, and finding himself in a relationship that would ultimately produce a daughter, now 19, Cohen decided it was “time to get serious. I needed to make a living,” he says. “I thought, ‘What do I know how to do?’ Thank God, I knew food, I knew managing restaurants, I knew how to cook.”

Through the years, Cohen has held a smattering of culinary jobs—most of which were far from the kosher realm—from helping to train Disney employees in French language and cuisine in preparation for EuroDisney’s launch to managing Nancy Silverton’s popular, upscale La Brea Bakery. Gradually he found himself returning to the observances he grew up with and eventually took on work within the kosher food industry too. “Little by little,” Cohen says, “kosher was calling me back.”

About five years ago, he established the antecedant to his café—a wholesale business selling prepacked kosher sandwiches. In July, 2008, he opened the cafe. Got Kosher?, with its sign reading, “haute glatt to go,” sits on a busy stretch of Pico Boulevard in the heart of L.A.’s traditional Jewish neighborhood, a tiny take-out shop with just one table inside and a couple more on the sidewalk. But with an expansive menu including Tunisian dishes from his childhood, Got Kosher? has quickly gained attention.

The Los Angeles Times, not in the habit of featuring tiny glatt cafes, included Got Kosher? in a 2009 roundup of the city’s standout international sandwiches, calling Cohen’s merguez “splendid” and reporting that his smoked andouille “travels deep into uncharted flavor territory.”

His food lives up to its reputation. The warm merguez sandwich has a terrific kick to it, with peppery sausage redolent of fennel and accompanied by onions, parsley, and homemade harissa, resting in a challah roll. The traditional Tunisian sandwich is a revelation, somewhat like a nicoise salad but its own salty-sweet creation, a hodgepodge of tuna, egg, potato, olives, capers, and peppers. Cohen, who tends toward modesty, can’t resist waxing poetic when he talks about it. ”It’s a gestalt of tastes,” he says, his face breaking into a big smile, adding that the potato is “an island of rest in an ocean of spiciness.”

Kosher food doesn’t exactly have the best reputation, I say to Cohen, fantasizing about a world in which his Tunisian sandwich replaces the chicken and fish options on the bar and bat mitzvah circuit. Cohen sighs. He speaks of the relative scarcity of food that Jews found in Eastern Europe versus the bounty available in places like Spain and Northern Africa. “Ashkenazic cuisine reflects that,” Cohen says. “I’m not putting it down; there are some gems, and when it’s well done, it’s incredible, but they don’t have the same palate, the same range of spices as are available in Sephardic cuisine.”

It was a realization of a gap in kosher offerings that kick-started Cohen’s business. About 10 years ago, his partner in life and business, Evelyn Baran, realized that sausages were all the gustatory rage.“Why don’t you make kosher sausages?’” she asked him. He got to work and began tinkering in his garage, seeking counsel from his family butcher back in France, wrestling with the issue of casing—a Gordian knot of sorts, since non-kosher sausage uses a pork casing. In France, kosher and halal sausage is made from lamb intestines, but Cohen couldn’t find anyone in the States to supply these to him. When Cohen tried to import them from France, it took a month just to receive a sample, and then it was held up at customs; never mind the issue of rabbinical certification. “It was a problem,” he says. He ultimately turned to beef collagen for the casing. You can buy the result of his effort, Neshama Sausages, at Whole Foods and Fairway today.

But for all of Cohen’s focus on meat (Sundays he offers barbecue), it’s a Jewish staple, baked with a twist, that draws many customers. Inspired by the pretzel roll at La Brea Bakery, Cohen introduced a pretzel challah last year and saw sales skyrocket. He had to add a nightshift of bakers to meet the demand. Bathed in a baking soda solution, the dough is lighter than more traditional challahs and turns a beautiful dark color with a light pretzel flavor after being baked. Cohen now offers several varieties of challah, including one with chocolate chunks and another with green olives.

Yet as proud as he is of his other creations, Cohen constantly returns to Tunisian cuisine. “I left everything I knew, and now where am I?” he says. “I am here, cooking kosher Tunisian food, selling sandwiches, just like my father.” And then, as if he still can’t quite believe it himself, he adds, “I’m the perfect personification of the grass is always greener. I wanted something else, and then I realized, here I am standing, with grass, here under my feet.”

• The legendary Leonard Nimoy, 79, announced his retirement from show business. [Before It's News]

• The Christian Broadcasting Network features an interview with photojournalist David Rubinger, who has documented much of Israel’s history and describes the face of the first Prime Minister David Ben Gurion as “Like granite.” [CBN]

• Israel’s national museum unveiled a restored Renaissance-era Hebrew manuscript documenting Jewish law and adorned with gold and gems. [AP]

• Los Angeles’s South Robertson Neighborhood Council has elected Orthodox 15-year-old Rachel Lester, the youngest elected public representative in the city. [JTA]

• Virginia has recalled a license plate reading “14CV88,” allegedly a coded reference to Hitler. That may sound paranoid, but check out the photo of the truck that boasted it. [AP via VIN]

• Also in confusing news from L.A., the Jewish Journal interviews mega-pastor Joel Osteen (who doesn’t eat pork!). [JJ]

• The Jaffa Gate to Jerusalem’s Old City has been reopened after two months of renovation as part of a $4 billion project, which, shockingly, has caused tension between Israel and the Palestinians. [AP]

• Elswehere in that city, despite a Jewish tradition that it’s good luck to give money to the needy at the Western Wall, security forces have resorted to posting pictures of known panhandlers for exclusion from the area, where they have been gathering in increasing numbers. “[W]e already know them by heart. Some people even dream about them from time to time,” said one guard. [Ynet]

• Gay Israelis struggle with ways to start a family, with increasing numbers turning to U.S. women as surrogate mothers. [MinnPost]

• Regardless, the New York Times reports that as Israel marks the holiday, “there is something about the mood this year that feels darker than usual.” [NYT]

• And meanwhile, Egypt is beseeching the UN to pressure Israel to join in “an internationally and effectively verifiable treaty for the establishment of a nuclear-weapon-free zone in the Middle East.” [Reuters]

• A Neo-Nazi rally in Los Angeles, counterprotestors threw “rocks, bottles, eggs and other items,” injuring two white supremacists; five assailants (of various races) were arrested. [L.A. Independent]

Tablet Magazine investigated. A meticulous and hungry bunch, we ordered hamantashen from bakeries in six cities across five states, driven by recommendations of what different people claimed were the best hamantasheries in the country. The array of flavors and sizes that arrived boggled the mind: poppy, prune, apricot, cherry, and chocolate; crispy and chewy; compact and supersized. Dedicated to the cause, we tasted them all.

Our tasters graded each cookie on a scale of 1 to 5, higher being better, in five categories: appearance, filling-to-dough ratio, overall taste, texture and consistency, and how badly we wanted another. The judges’ scores were compiled, the individual scores were averaged, and we found a winner.

The results:

1. Russ & Daughters, New York. Family-owned and almost a century old, this Lower East Side institution is best known for its smoked fish. But it also sells all sorts of traditional Jewish sweets—rugelach and babka and macaroons and, of course hamantashen. We picked up a sampling—conveniently, it’s located right down the block from our office—and were thrilled with these small, soft wonders. A “sublime dream cookie,” one of our judges said.
Score: 3.9

2. Silver Moon Bakery, New York. Celebrating its 10th year on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, this shrine to butter specializes in assorted continental baked goods. When they go traditional, however—as they do for nearly every major holiday of the year—Silver Moon is tough to beat. Their large and crispy cookies were elegantly shaped, with the dot of filling visible from the outside making promises the generously stuffed interior more than fulfilled. Our judges found themselves yearning for a cup of tea in which to dunk these “fantastic” cookies.
Score: 3.8

3. Ricki’s Cookie Corner, Memphis. Ricki Krupp, owner of this two-decade-old bakery, believes the secret to perfect hamantashen lies in the dough. Her hamantashen are tiny works of art, each hand-pinched in a way that perfectly resembles the three-cornered hat it is meant to evoke. The dough is also mixed with vanilla and laced with cinnamon, which makes for a sweet and enticing bite. While our judges were impressed by the “nicely pinched” shape, they were less enthusiastic about the filling, which they said recalled the horrors of Hostess’s baked goods. But, still, Ricki produces a delicious cookie.
Score: 3.2

4. Pratzel’s Bakery, St. Louis. This European-style bakery opened its doors in 1913, and it keeps its baked goods pretty traditional. These hamantashen most resembled the home-baked kind, which charmed some of our judges and repulsed others, and the apple-pie filling flavor was a nice, creative touch. Still, all those around the tasting table agreed that “the strange smell” and the “undercooked texture” made Pratzel’s cookie less than perfect. “If these are Haman’s ears,” quipped one judge, “I’d like to see his nose.”
Score: 2.3

5. Eilat Café and Bakery, Los Angeles. A favorite late-night dessert spot in North Hollywood, Eilat, which opened in 1983, is known for its challah and other staples of Jewish baking. Our judges, however, found the hamantashen to represent all that’s lamentable about traditional pastry. “This cookie,” said one judge, “reminded me of something I may find at my shul’s Kiddush.” Another compared them to the handiwork of a talentless relative. The judges disliked nearly everything about this minuscule, hard, and largely flavorless cookie. “This,” one judge harshly mused, “is the bakery I would skip.”
Score: 2.2

6. Kupel’s Bakery, Brookline, Massachusetts. Since it opened in 1978, Kupel’s has been known for hand-rolling the best bagels in Boston. Our judges, however, liked little about Kupel’s hamantashen, wondering whether anyone at Kupel’s has “even been to a Jewish home.” The “cherry cough drop” filling and “formless and flavorless” dough suggested not.
Score: 1.7

When I first took up yoga, this question never occurred to me. I was dealing with a difficult time, but I had also abandoned my religious upbringing. I was at peace with a secular life that included some high-holiday observance and crippling guilt when I didn’t observe Passover. Now, married to a man who converted so that we could be together, I find myself running an Orthodox home. (You know the old joke: don’t date a non-Jew unless you want to end up really religious.) I’m surprisingly happy in my lifestyle, but I’m also realizing that a true immersion in yogic practice may very well be a violation of my Jewish one.

There is a statue of Ganesh, the Hindu diety, in the yoga studio I attend. At the end of the class, my instructor says, “Namaste,” and bows toward the class. In turn, we bow back. I am bowing toward the teacher, but also toward the statue. Namaste means, “The Divine in me salutes the Divine in you.” During many of the meditation sessions, we are asked to put our hands in “prayer position,” which is what it sounds like: hands joined together at the heart. The more I thought about it, the more I worried that yoga might be its own religion, and that I might be committing a sin—worshipping an idol, even—by practicing it.

This might seem like a niggling question of minutia, but Judaism, especially Orthodox Judaism, is a religion filled with niggling questions of minutiae—how an animal is slaughtered, at what angle, exactly, a mezuzah should be affixed to a door post. There are serious implications to committing idolatry, whether you do so accidentally or not. In the Talmud (Sanhedrin 74), it states that there are only three sins in which a person is commanded to die rather than commit the sin: the second and third are incest and murder. The first is idolatry.

That was the Lubavitch rebbe’s rationale when, in 1977, he forbade his followers from practicing yoga, transcendental meditation, and the like. “In as much as these movements involve certain rites and rituals, they have been rightly regarded by Rabbinic authorities as cults bordering on, and in some respects actual, avodah zarah,” he wrote, using the Hebrew term for idolatry. “Accordingly Rabbinic authorities everywhere…ruled that these cults come under all the strictures associated with avodah zarah, so that also their appurtenances come under strict prohibition.”

But, of course, I’m not a Lubavitcher. So I asked my yoga teacher at City Yoga in West Hollywood, Linda Eifer, a Conservative Jew, what she thought. “Yoga is not a religion,” she said, emphatically. “It’s a spiritual practice that combines the body, the mind, and the spirit. It’s based on an ancient Indian tradition that includes inspiration from statues, which are a mythology that combine human and divine characteristics.” But, aside from the statues, that’s pretty much what my religion is to me.

David Adelson, a Reform rabbi in New York who is enrolled at the Institute for Jewish Spirituality, a two-year program that includes yoga retreats and text study, offered a distinction. “If I’m in a church around Christmastime, I sing and even say ‘Jesus’ in the hymns. I know that I am just singing because I like singing, and in no way praying, so it doesn’t worry me,” he said. “Yoga feels just a bit dicier because I am a full participant in the experience, not an observer. But I believe in general that to constitute avodah zarah, you probably need some kavana,” or intention.

Kavana is an interesting thing. Intuitively, it would seem that a religion demanding absolute morality would be concerned with intention. But, actually, that’s not really the case. If you eat bread on Passover, even accidentally, you have sinned. If you give charity but grudgingly, the charity still counts for the good. On Yom Kippur, we repent for sins we didn’t even know we did. And then there are Hannah’s sons—seven Jews who chose to die rather than bow to Antiochus, the Greek ruler who tried to forcibly convert Jews in 167 BCE. Bowing but not meaning it wasn’t an option. Judaism is concerned not just with your actions but also very much with how your actions appear to others. Bowing is the physical manifestation of idolatry, whatever your intention. “Do not make idols or set up an image or a sacred stone for yourselves,” says Leviticus 26:1, “and do not place a carved stone in your land to bow down before it.”

But let’s ignore that for a second, and accept Adelson’s argument that intention does matter. Even so, don’t I intentionally practice yoga? And while Eifer, my yoga teacher, had said she doesn’t find yoga incompatible with Judaism because her status as a Jew isn’t compromised by her practice of yoga, I have a more literal view of Judaism and what it expects from me. I believe that I’m supposed to practice only Judaism. I don’t believe the practice of another religion makes me an adherent of that religion, but I do believe that I choose to only practice Judaism. The rituals and chanting that was expected of me in yoga seem like another religion to me—and practicing another religion is practicing another religion.

But Srinivasan, the senior teacher at the worldwide Shivananda Yoga Vedanta Centers, says I have it backwards. “Yoga is not a religion, but a science of religion,” he explained. “It applies to all religions. It’s not that yoga comes from Hinduism. Hinduism originates in yoga. Buddhism comes from yoga, too.” Srinivasan doesn’t see how spiritual yoga practice and Judaism are incompatible. “Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach used to come to our Ashrams,” he said. “He understood we were talking about the same thing. Hasidic mysticism and Kabbalah are very much in line with yogic thought.”

I explain to Srinivasan that the approach may be similar—even some of the text and ideas may be similar—but that only proves my point that yoga is a religion. “There is yoga in every religion,” he responded. “Yoga means ‘union’ or ‘absolute consciousness’ with God. Don’t look at the differences; look at the similarities. Yoga is beyond words or institution. When you use the word ‘religion,’ people want to know what books you read, what language you speak.” He also says that though some sects of yoga won’t even use the word God, the tradition is similar to monotheism. “We’re all talking about the same God,” he said. To him, the statue of Ganesh at the front of many yoga studios is the same God to whom Jews pray. “Don’t confuse the map for the actual place,” he said. “God is everywhere. There is no conflict here. There is respect for that diversity. To explain God is to limit God.”

So could I just be bowing in front of this statue without bowing to the statue? I asked Pinchas Giller, an Orthodox rabbi who practices yoga at the same studio I do. “Many Hindus argue these days that their deities are just archetypal principles,” says Giller. “But any third-grader in Hebrew school will tell you that those are idols. Veneration and offerings are unacceptable. I avoid classes where the teacher is too into the mythos. It’s hard to escape the impression that if you take some of the practices too seriously then it could be avodah zarah.” Giller practices yoga for the exercise and only for the exercise, he’s careful to say.

Chanah Forster, a Hasid and yoga teacher in Brooklyn, may have found a solution. “Yoga absolutely is a religion,” she says. Before she became religious, Forster lived on an ashram, where she became certified to teach yoga. She still teaches it, but with an approach tailored to her current audience. There is no chanting in her class—not even Om, the vibrational sound recited at the start of most yoga classes. She describes poses, but won’t use their traditional Sanskrit names. She also won’t say their English translations, like Downward-Facing Dog. “Instead, I’ll say to raise your hips to the ceiling,” she explained to me. “The Sanskrit names have a spiritual meaning. If you don’t call these poses by their Sanskrit names, it’s just exercise.” Forster believes that when you do any of these things—chant, say Om, speak in Sanskrit—you are opening yourself up spiritually to outside influences. “These aren’t just words,” she said. “They have meanings and repercussions to your neshama”—your soul—“and they are at odds with Jewish spirituality.”

But despite all these things at odds with Judaism, yoga seems to have a strong pull on Jews. In the past few years, several yoga minyans, prayer services in which yoga stretches accompany liturgy, have gotten underway. At least half of the people who frequent my yoga studio, as well as many of its teachers, are Jewish. India is a hotbed of Israeli tourism and the great Hindu leader Ram Dass was born Richard Alpert, a nice Jewish boy. (The author Rodger Kamenetz wrote a whole book, The Jew in the Lotus, about Jews struggling to understand and relate to Eastern spirituality.) But though unresolved, it’s a debate that’s new to me and that has new urgency for me as I’ve returned to religious observance.) The Kabbalistic viewpoint asserts that we are born with a pintele yid, a Jewish spark always searching for spirituality. If you live in America in 2010, your pintele yid may be a little malnourished, and whether because of assimilation or a lack of Jewish practice, some Jews seek to feed this hunger outside of the synagogue.

And the question of yoga’s compatibility with Judaism might just be an unanswerable one. In Adelson’s Reform world, it’s the Jew’s intention that matters. But in the Judaism I know, the one I have chosen to participate in, intentions, or even wishes, are not the only things to consider. My Judaism is a Judaism that is preoccupied with my physical life as much as my spiritual one. It has laws for when I eat, what wear, how I wash my hands. The problem isn’t what yoga might ask me to think or believe; it’s what it asks me to do. And despite my physical flexibility—you should see my frog pose—I don’t have the same spiritual agility.

Further practice of Judaism has not, historically, helped me become more open-minded. But perhaps that is where yoga can be an asset, not a detriment, to my religious practice. Yes, yoga walks a fine line (verboten to some; certainly not to all). But maybe my uptight approach to religion requires yoga and its nuances of illicit practice to help me remain flexible in my spirit, as well as my body. Maybe having something that isn’t so easy to reconcile, a gray area, is good for me.

• Yesterday saw the first spate of arrests of settlers protesting the construction freeze, even as the Palestinians still refuse to negotiate. “So far,” the paper says, the freeze “has succeeded only in pitting the settlers against the state.” [NYT]

• Israel revoked 4500 Palestinians’ Jerusalem residencies last year—an all-time high—according to its own newly released figures. [Washington Post]

• Though the police do not believe an October shooting at a North Hollywood, Calif. synagogue was a hate crime, they are now investigating possible ties to Israeli organized crime. [L.A. Times]

• Following his country’s ban on minaret construction, the leader of a mainstream Swiss political party called for an end to separate Jewish and Muslim cemeteries. [JTA]

Bacon-Wrapped Matzvah [Sic] Balls With Top Chef Ilan Hall [LAJJ]

Synagogue Shooting Unnerves Los Angeles [LAT]

We’ll update as more information is available.

UPDATE, 1:55 p.m.: The Los Angeles Times has more detail, including word that the man arrested near the synagogue is not believed to be the gunman.

The two victims, both in their 40s, were arriving for morning minyan when they were shot in Adat Yeshurun Valley Sephardic’s underground parking lot. The gunman fled; other worshippers inside the synagogue called 911. The LAPD tells the Times that both victims are in good condition at local hospitals.

The police are investigating the shooting as a hate crime, but Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa called it “a senseless act of violence.”

Police Search for Gunman in North Hollywood Synagogue Shooting [LAT]
2 Shot in Legs as Gunman Attacks L.A. Synagogue [AP/NYT]

Since the attacks of September 11, 2001, de Winter has been vocal in his defense of Dutch traditions of freedom and tolerance against encroachments by political Islam, his denunciations of the Iranian regime, and his support for America’s invasion of Iraq. If he were an American, in other words, he would be a neoconservative. And his newest novel, The Right of Return—published last year in Dutch and not yet translated into English—seems like a kind of neoconservative dystopia or fever dream. Set in the year 2024, it imagines a future in which Israel’s territory has been whittled down to almost nothing, most Israelis have emigrated to America or Europe, and Jewish children are recruited as suicide bombers by Muslim terrorist groups. (De Winter discussed the book, and its deliberately provocative premise, in this interview with Der Spiegel.

God’s Gym, which appeared in the Netherlands in 2002, also belongs to the post-9/11 moment, and grows out of the same clash of fundamentalism with Western ideals and Jewish anxieties. The unwilling hero of the novel is Joop Koopman, a Dutchman who lives in the Venice neighborhood of Los Angeles and makes a tenuous living as a screenwriter. (De Winter himself has directed films and television programs as well as writing fiction.) Joop’s mother, we soon learn, was Jewish, and the only member of her family to survive the Holocaust. She made sure that Joop went to synagogue and had a bar mitzvah, if only for the sake of preserving tradition: “It’s about people who are no longer here, something like that,” she explains to her “strict atheist” husband. There is a rough parallel here with de Winter’s own biography—the author, like his hero, was born in the early 1950s in the town of Den Bosch. He evokes the strange mood of such post-Holocaust Jewish communities, which could hardly summon a minyan and “urgently needed to be enlarged by a boy who could assure the continuity of the services.”

Joop knows little about Judaism and certainly doesn’t believe in it—he “could read the Hebrew texts, but he didn’t understand a word, just as he could read mathematical equations without any understanding.” But Jewishness retains a strong hold on his imagination and conscience. As a young man, he faked illness to avoid conscription into the Dutch Army; but when the Yom Kippur War broke out later that year, he rushed to the Israeli embassy to enlist, and spent several months working behind the lines.

One of his fellow volunteers—“all young Jewish Dutchmen, all descendants of survivors”—had been a star student named Philip van Gelder. Now, as the novel opens, in December 2000, van Gelder suddenly reappears in Joop’s life, setting the thriller’s plot in motion. He is now an Israeli, who has taken the name Uri, and works in some shadowy capacity for the Ministry of Defense. He surprises Joop with his forthrightly Jewish-nationalist views: when Joop complains about the Bush-Gore election of 2000, Gelder replies, “Makes no difference, Bush will be as good for us as Gore.”

“Us?”
“Us—you and I—the Jews.”
“I belong to nothing.”
“Makes no difference to me. For Jews and for anti-Semites you remain a Jew.”

Philip’s tribal toughness inspires in Joop a familiar mixture of envy, guilt, and disdain. The whole encounter plays out the double stereotype of violent Sabra versus wilting Diaspora Jew; “If we wanted to, we’d break the Palestinians as though they were matchsticks,” Philip rants. What ensues can be read as a classic compensation fantasy. For it turns out that Philip wants to recruit Joop into a Mossad operation to trap a Dutch Muslim terrorist, Omar van Lieshout, who has just turned up in Los Angeles. Here is a chance for the pacific, assimilated, intellectual Jew to turn secret agent and help save the Jewish people. “You need me for the future of Israel?” Joop says incredulously, and indeed, in the contrived logic typical of the genre, it turns out that he is the one man who can capture the deadly Omar.

But on the very day Joop meets Philip, a wholly different kind of violence erupts into his life: his only daughter, Miriam, is killed in a motorcycle accident. The domestic tragedy immediately displaces international intrigue in Joop’s mind, and also in the novel’s attention. This creates a problem of pacing and balance for God’s Gym: we start out reading a Jewish spy novel, then for chapter after chapter we are reading a harrowing story of a parent’s mourning for his child. We see Joop agree, in a daze, to donate his daughter’s heart for a transplant—a decision that will come to haunt him. In the long flashbacks and reveries that follow, we learn about Joop’s quasi-incestuous admiration for the seventeen-year-old Miriam (he is divorced from her mother), and there is a deliberately uncomfortable scene where he catches a glimpse of her in the shower: “What he saw of her was mainly her shape. But a number of details did not escape him.”

The story takes another unexpected turn when Joop enters into a bizarre relationship with Erroll Washington, the man who was giving Miriam a ride on his motorcycle when she was killed. A black American martial-arts champion nicknamed Godzilla—usually shortened to God—he owns the titular God’s Gym, which is not a metaphor for the Middle East, as the reader might at first suspect, but a health club in Venice where Miriam used to work out. To make amends for his role in the accident, God, as Joop learns to call him, volunteers to become his servant—living with Joop, running his household, taking care of Miriam’s funeral. The racial aspects of this relationship are distinctly queasy, as Joop recognizes, and an American writer surely would have avoided them. Eventually, “God’s” search for meaning in the accident leads him to Chabad, and he begins studying to convert to Judaism.

The imperative of faith, the need to make order out of the casualties of life, is the real theme of God’s Gym. Philip van Gelder has faith in the Jewish people, Erroll in messianic Judaism, Omar in Islam. Even Linda, Joop’s old lover, who mysteriously reappears in his life after decades, seems to have an answer: she has become a Buddhist, and travels around the world with a Tibetan monk. When this monk claims to have secret knowledge, from a past life, about the fate of Joop’s family in the Holocaust, he is embroiled in yet another layer of improbable mystery. The only skeptic in a novel of true believers, Joop comes to seem at once admirable and pitiable. No wonder he grows obsessed with discovering the fate of his daughter’s heart—as though meeting the transplant recipient would somehow make sense of her death.

To say that the way de Winter ties together all these strands of plot is improbable is no real criticism of God’s Gym. Thrillers are supposed to be contrived and improbable, just as sonnets are supposed to rhyme. In a sense, however, God’s Gym is injured by its own ambition, its desire to shoehorn serious thoughts about faith and suffering into a genre novel. The resolution of the mysteries of Omar and Linda, when they come, seem trivial next to the greater mysteries—of Jewish identity, family and sexual love, faith and reason—that de Winter also broaches. But even so, God’s Gym is an entertaining and unusual book, which ought to introduce Leon de Winter to the wider American readership he deserves.

Adam Kirsch is a contributing editor to Tablet Magazine and the author of Benjamin Disraeli, a biography in the Nextbook Press Jewish Encounters book series.

Which is nice for him, but maybe not enough for the victims. One refused to be interviewed by the paper, and the father of Josh Stepakoff, then a 6-year-old camper who was shot in the thigh and back, said he didn’t think the apology was sincere. “This doesn’t change what he did,” Alan Stepakoff said. Relatives of the postal worker, Joseph Ileto, agreed, but were more magnanimous. “It still hurts that our brother and son was taken from us, and a letter won’t make up for that,” Ismael Ileto told the paper. But, he added, “It gives us some type of hope that people are able to rehabilitate themselves.”

JCC Shooter Furrow Renounces Past Beliefs [LADN]

Abergil Brothers’ Extradition Approved [Jerusalem Post]
Previously: Holy Land Gangland

Like the protagonist of her first novel, Early Bright, Ami Silber is a Los Angeleno, and her investment in that city and its history is palpable on every page of her insightful, absorbing—and often sexy—book. The 1940s L.A. of Early Bright comes to life in these pages: sultry and seedy, glaring and haunting, a land of all-American possibility and all-American despair. The book’s narrator, Louis Greenberg, is a Bronx-born jazz pianist who’s finagled his way out of fighting in World War II and come instead to Los Angeles, where he plays bebop by night and runs con schemes by day. He also falls deeply in love with a black woman, Beatrice, with whom, in the segregated 1940s, he can never have a future.

Silber has a master’s degree in literature from U.C. San Diego, and earned her MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in 2000.

Your protagonist, Louis Greenberg, is phenomenally complex. Where did your idea for this character come from?

Louis’ identity evolved, rather than emerged fully formed from my head. He underwent many transformations as Early Bright took shape, until he ultimately became a fully realized person. His voice drives the novel—the mixture of con slang, jazz patois, Jewish New York and his own particular way of seeing the world. We’re not much alike, but I knew the only way to really tell his story was through first-person narration, so I essentially had to inhabit his consciousness whenever I sat down to type. Writing is a lot like Jungian dream analysis—every character is, in some way, a permutation of the author’s own identity, so that somewhere inside me is a tough-talking, sentimental, and manipulative con artist.

How were you able to make yourself think in his voice?

Obviously, music was key. I always wrote to jazz from that time period: Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Oscar Peterson. The very first draft of the novel had Louis speaking almost entirely in slang, but that got impenetrable—just ask my early readers. And Louis, while from the Bronx, isn’t a Bowery Boy. He comes from a comfortable, lower-middle-class world. When he does use slang, it’s very conscious. He’s creating a role for himself and trying to inhabit it, just as I inhabited him.

Where did this story come from?

Initially, the novel was going to be told in two parts: the present day, featuring a young woman learning of a disgraced, never-talked-about relative; and the past, detailing the story of that relative from his point of view. The more I researched and thought about the book, the less interested I became in the present-day story. The stakes seemed so much higher with the disgraced relative. So I refocused the novel on Louis.

My dad has long been fascinated with the 1930s and 1940s, so I grew up surrounded by fountain pens, vintage rotary phones, and collectibles from the 1939 New York World’s Fair. We listened to old radio broadcasts and went to revival houses showing Marx brothers movies. I was cognizant of that era from an early age. Also, I happen to be fascinated by con men. It really intrigued me how, especially back in the height of the old-time grifters, they played upon basic human desires, especially greed. Con men exploit our own need to have it better than someone else. I also grew up in Los Angeles, a place that figured largely in the world of noir, and that underwent huge expansion in the postwar period. There was such contradiction: sunshine, prosperity, and optimism combined with anxiety, shadows, and falsehood. All of this blended to make a world that I found incredibly rich and deeply involving.

I knew very little about jazz, less about World War II, and hardly anything about con artists from that time period. I did a ton of research for Early Bright—I think it’s the grad school geek in me that loves scouring library shelves and source materials.

Were Jews involved in the worlds you depict: the L.A. jazz scene, the con game?

Jews have long been involved in the music scene, especially during the 1920s and the era of Tin Pan Alley. It’s not a coincidence that The Jazz Singer was about a Jewish man trying to enter the world of popular jazz music. That was the era in which Louis grew up, the era which influenced him, the era of the Berlins, the Gershwins. But there’s long been an uneasy affinity between African Americans and Jewish Americans, so Louis’ heroes and contemporaries would also have been, to use the parlance of the day, Negro.

As for Jewish con artists, I didn’t find a lot of documentation about that. Most of the great con artists came from the Midwest, which didn’t have as large a Jewish community as other parts of the country. However, jazz and cons are part of liminal society, the edges of respectability, and I think that Jews often are perceived as and feel themselves to be outsiders. It isn’t such a stretch for Louis to ally and identify with these forms of our culture.

And into that uneasy affinity step Louis and Beatrice. Bea is the person with whom Louis can be most honest; the only thing she doesn’t know is that he cons for a living. He thinks it’s money that will ultimately trump race in their relationship, that money will be the great leveler.

For Louis, Beatrice is as close to the “right woman” as someone like him can get. She has a self-sufficiency and realism that he finds missing in most other women. Louis is honest with her—to a point. He can reveal his truest self to her, but not entirely, since she doesn’t know about his work as a con artist. In almost everything else in his life, Louis shields himself with cynicism, yet also clings to the notion that, if he became famous through his music, all his dissonant threads will come together, all problems will be solved. He and Beatrice can have a public life together, his father will forgive him. What the reader sees, but Louis cannot, is that he’s really conning himself. And that’s where the danger truly begins, with self-deception.

Self-deception, then, is both Louis’ means of survival and his undoing?

As his mentor, Memphis Arnie, states, one of Louis’ gifts is his complete and utter selfishness, his drive for self-preservation. The only way he can reconcile himself to all the terrible things he’s done is to deliberately block them from his mind or invent a means of justification. He also believes that he is better, different from everyone else, and thus provides a rationale for his conning. But again, the irony is that, to a con artist, the perfect mark is the one who wants it better than everybody else. The ideal con victim, too, is a person who believes they are better or more deserving than other people, and so Louis, by imbuing himself with a sense of primacy, becomes the ideal mark. Which is a precarious position for anyone, but especially him as he attempts to work many angles at once.

There’s a particularly affecting scene in which Louis hears from a friend about a war souvenir the guy is desperately jealous of: a “Jap ear” necklace. In the exposition that follows, Louis is revealed to the reader in a new way. “I dragged on my cigarette to keep my gorge down and my cool up…. [I]t got me then that there were depths folks would sink to even I couldn’t guess. The newsreels, for instance, of GIs liberating the camps. Hadn’t counted on that, not at all.”

Certain truths about violence and bloodthirstiness in other people still shock Louis. The kind of violence he inflicts on others is emotional and psychological. So his revulsion is about not only the making of a human-ear necklace, but the coveting of it. Similarly, he’s profoundly shaken when he first learns about the concentration camps, knowing that he didn’t fight. He’s confronted with evidence of the deep and systematic hatred and extermination of Jews, and that he did nothing to stop it. Though it isn’t constantly present in his mind, it’s always there, buried deep within him, the legacy of his cowardice.

What role did Judaism play in your imagining of Louis’ life?

Louis strongly identifies culturally as Jewish, even as he acknowledges that he comes from a non-observant background. Many of his memories of his life in New York are grounded in things like the social life surrounding the synagogue, and most, if not all, of his friends and his parents’ friends are Jewish. The community and sense of belonging are strong. Everyone looks like him. They all share a common cultural currency. So, when Louis must leave New York, his sense of displacement is amplified—which is ironic, because by removing himself from the New York Jewish community, his identity as a Jew becomes that much more significant. I think that happens a lot with Jews, that their knowledge and feeling of being different from the general world grows stronger if they leave Jewish enclaves. I definitely felt that in Iowa!

Louis’ strongest sense of displacement and loss comes when he goes to the Fairfax district here in L.A., where there is a very active community of Orthodox Jews. There, he feels the ties to his past, his family, everything he has lost or given up. His sense of being an outsider is underscored. Because he doesn’t wear payes or tzitzit, he isn’t immediately recognizable as a Jew, so that his sense of difference is carried on the inside where it is, in many ways, even more powerful.

I am reminded almost daily of the time God wanted destroy Sodom, and I think maybe I’ve been a little too hard on the Guy. I imagine Abraham here in Los Angeles, and I imagine God saying, “I am going to destroy LA,” and Abraham says, as he did regarding Sodom, “But what if you find fifty righteous men there, will you still destroy it then?” and I imagine a well-timed beat before Abe and God start laughing.

“Just kidding,” says Abe. “Burn it.”

I am in Los Angeles. And I want to kill.
      
I work part-time for Satan at a New York advertising agency. The days I am required to go into the office are torture. I hate cities. I hate the people, I hate the stink, I hate the noise. I try to convince myself to make the best of it—I’ll visit a museum! I’ll catch a play downtown! I’ll think happy thoughts!—but the only thoughts I can manage are thoughts of nuclear holocaust. Say, those are happy thoughts!

Now Satan has sent me to Los Angeles, where I am supposed to be helping my Satanic co-minions make a television commercial. I also have a manuscript deadline for this memoir looming; two and a half years in the making, it’s now due in just two and a half weeks. I hoped that secretly working on something of meaning while I am here would result in some occasionally happy thoughts, but thoughts of nuclear holocaust have already begun to cloud my mind. Say, those are happy thoughts!

The hotel at which we are staying is typical of Los Angeles: the arrogant clientele with their ironic facial hair, the raucous lobby with its ironic furniture, the inadequate overcrowded lobby bar meticulously designed by homosexual males for heterosexual males to comfortably solicit transsexual prostitutes. None of this, mind you, bothers me nearly so much as the televisions. You cannot escape television here—they’re in the bar, in the lobby, in the bathrooms. The treadmill in the fitness room has a TV in the display, as does the stationary bicycle, and neither of them operate properly unless the TV is on. The production trailer on the set of the TV commercial has a giant flat screen in the main sitting area, another in the dressing area, and one in each of the restrooms. Worst of all, though, is the one in my hotel room, which is hidden inside an armoire, but which housekeeping insists on turning on for me every afternoon, so that when I return from a long day of staggering vapidity and irretrievably wasted human energy, the 27-inch bottomless well of suicide incentives is shrieking at me before I’ve even entered the room. I need to have a sign made for the front door: We don’t swim in your toilet, please don’t turn on our television. I know this may seem odd coming from someone who freelances in advertising, but how many porn stars watch porn? We don’t watch television at home—even the set that we are forced to keep in our playroom if we have any hope of finding a nanny who will stay past “Prime Time” irritates me to the point of wanting to smash its fragile face in—and having not watched it in a very long time, every channel seems like the Nature Channel, a frightening documentary glimpse into a time I am reluctant to call my own.

I returned to my hotel room the first evening to discover a program on MTV where people insult one another’s mothers; afterwards, the crowd cheers, and a prize is awarded to the contestant deemed most vitriolic. I have a mother myself, so I can certainly understand the impulse, but the contestants on this program are insulting the other’s mothers—seeming, as unlikely as may it seem, to be defending their own. I know that this program is supposed to be rebellious and ironic and In My Face (a claim I might be persuaded to believe if the object was to insult your own mother), but as it stands, I can’t imagine anything more desperate and needy; to craft a convenient analogy, the television is the hotel bar, MTV is the transsexual prostitute, the “outrageous” contestant the john on his knees doing his best to service her. In your face, indeed. At least in the actual hotel bar there’s no cheering crowd.

After wasting ten minutes trying unsuccessfully to turn the thing off (it’s not as simple as hitting the power switch—there are three of them, and they need to be powered down in a precise sequence; the power cord is buried behind the armoire, and even if I could manage to move the damn thing and unplug the beast, I worry the door would be kicked in and I would be arrested for Anti-Television Bias, or Conduct Unbecoming an American), I went downstairs to the lobby, hoping I could get some work done. After a few moments, I looked up from my laptop to find a woman sitting on the ironic white-leather couch beside me.

“I have a great idea for a reality TV show,” she said.

“Excuse me?”

“What are you working on?”

“Nothing. A book.”

“For a movie?”

“That’s called a script.”

“I have a great idea for a reality show.”

“Isn’t that a bit of a contradiction?”

“I don’t follow.”

“Well, it’s reality. It doesn’t need an idea. It’s already being, you know, produced.”

“What’s your script about?”

“It’s not a script. It’s a book.”

“Well,” she said, “you can sit in your little shack in the woods and be an ‘artiste’ and all that, but people watch these shows, okay? People like them, okay? You can’t argue with that.”

“I can’t?”

“No.”

“I’m still not sure what this has to do with me,” I said.

“Okay,” she said, getting up at last and walking away, “but it’s your loss.”

It’s been three days now since I arrived in Los Angeles. I tend to write from anger, but I can’t write with anger, and so it’s been three days since I wrote anything. Instead of writing, I’ve been reading about writing, and it’s that time of the year when people begin looking back on the year in publishing, bemoaning the fate of the novel, the fall of the book, the death of fiction. The remedies usually fall into two predictable categories: the “don’t worry, everything’s fine” category, and the “books need to respond to the changing culture” category—a book of people insulting one another’s mothers, perhaps, or books “reflecting our new technological life”—books which read upside down and inside out, front to back and back to front, books with hypercontextual pretexts, contexts and subtexts which mirror the virtual, immersive and cyber realities of our boundless blah blah blah. Having been in Los Angeles for three days, I have my own solution: Let’s die. I say let’s go out with some dignity. In my travels with Satan, I have seen every sort of desperate company walk through the ad agency’s doors, desperate to stay alive, desperate to stay young. “Maybe something with Jimmy Kimmel,” they say hopefully. “Maybe Adam Sandler is available.” They want their breasts done, they want hair plugs, they want a corporate comb-over, and they get it. And, like women who get their breasts done, and men who get their plugs, guess what? They die. Maybe a week later, maybe a year later, but they die, the only difference being that now they die sadly. So let’s let books die as they are. No hyperlinks, no Sony Readers, no “approximating the nonlinear narrative of the information superhighway.” Let’s say “Fuck off.” Let’s say “The End.” Just a thought, from one miserable guest stuck for the next two weeks at a hotel in Downtown Sodom.

“How’s the script going?” asked my unreal reality TV friend.

I was back in the lobby, trying to give the writing one more shot, trying to get the blackness out of my mind and replace it, maybe, with some happy thoughts.

“Book,” I corrected her.

“I have a great idea for a reality TV show,” she said.

I passed by the front desk on the way back up to my room.
      
“Do you know,” I asked the man behind the counter, “where can I get some polonium 210 around here?”
      
“Some what?”
      
“Polonium,” I said. “210.”
      
“210?”
      
“Yes.”
      
“Pol…”

“Polonium. With an ‘n.’ 210.”
      
“210, okay. Is it a, uh, pill or something?”
      
“Or powder, either one. Pills will be good, too.”
      
“Okay,” he said cheerfully. “Sure. Let me make some calls.”
      
Maybe I’m just being harsh. Maybe I’m just away from my family, my routine, my sources of confidence and security, and I’m taking it out on an otherwise lovely city.

Beat.
      
Just kidding. Burn it.