Members of the Tribe (12 page)

After a tour of the Succah, Arnow led us back down to his office on the thirty-fourth floor. He poured coffee into styrofoam cups, leaned back in his chair, and explained his version of Jewish leadership.

“My family has been involved with Jewish things for years, and I share their commitment,” he said. “I’m totally dedicated to helping Israel. But the question is, what kind of Israel? And what
kind of help is appropriate? Things aren’t as simple as they seemed twenty or forty years ago.”

In those days the Weiler family gave huge sums of money and helped to raise even more. Israel is dotted with monuments to their philanthropy. I mentioned that there is a Ben Swig Memorial Park—donated by Jack Weiler in honor of his late partner—on the corner of my street in Jerusalem. “There’s a whole neighborhood, Kiriat Jack Weiler, named after my grandfather in Jerusalem,” Arnow said, putting the park into perspective.

David Arnow could have a park of his own, or even a neighborhood; it’s all a matter of money. But he wants influence, not honors. He has a vision of Israel, and he wants to use his organization to further it.

“I’m focused on Israel because the ultimate value of the Jewish people will be decided there,” he said. “We can’t create an oppressor state. I have a vision of us as a light unto the nations, a vision of pluralism where the lion lies down with the lamb sort of thing. We can live together—I believe that, I really do.

“Look, I have a Ph.D. in psychology. And it’s well known that usually people who go from the bottom to the top tend to do the same things to the people at the bottom that were done to them. It’s a problem of going from a position of relative weakness to relative strength.

“We want people to face reality—in Israel and here, too,” Arnow continued. “American Jews don’t know, and they don’t care to know, that Arabs live in Israel. The country could become like South Africa, and we just can’t let that happen.”

Arnow reached over to his desk and took out a sheet of paper that listed the goals of his organization. “ ‘We are primarily concerned with strengthening the democratic fabric of Israel and supporting efforts to create a society based on justice and tolerance,’ ” he read. “That’s the kind of country we should have.”

I winced at the “we,” and Jacoby quickly intervened. “I want to stress that the New Israel Fund is an international organization, not just an American one,” he said. “Israelis are involved in every aspect of our activity. They have input into the grant process and we have an Israeli vice president.” He sounded very much like the earnest white liberals who once dominated civil rights
organizations in America and were devastated when blacks, intent on running their own lives, kicked them out.

For more than an hour we sat discussing David Arnow’s agenda for Israel. From time to time I tried to nudge the conversation in the direction of American problems—intermarriage, shrinking numbers, the state of American Jewish education—but they didn’t elicit much interest. Arnow’s concept of what Israel should be may differ from his grandfather’s, but Israel is no less central in his view of the Jewish people.

“Don’t you think it would be more appropriate for you to move to Israel and work from the inside?” I asked as our conversation drew to a close. Arnow paused to consider, and Jacoby took over.

“I’ve just about given up on mass immigration to Israel from America,” he said. “It’s unrealistic. American Jews won’t go, they’ll give money—love money and guilt money. But they don’t want to know the truth about Israel, they don’t want to be confused by reality. Now personally, I’m torn. I have one foot in Israel and the other here. I’ll probably move there for good someday.”

David Arnow felt no such conflict. “We’re all one people, but we can’t all live in one place,” he said. “I don’t advocate moving to Israel, making
aliyah
. After all, how can I send people to a place that I’m not prepared to live in? That doesn’t seem fair.”

David Arnow and Jonathan Jacoby have a vision of Israel—they want the Jewish State to be a light unto the nations. But like other American Jewish leaders, they prefer to see that light from a distance, from the vantage point of the great American Succah in the Sky.

“You want to know how I got my organization? Simple—I stole it!” said Israel Singer when I stopped by to see him at the headquarters of the World Jewish Congress on Madison Avenue in New York. The Congress is located in a suite of offices considerably less grand than Arnow’s, but that is more a matter of style than of necessity. The organization belongs to Singer and his senior partner, Edgar Bronfman; and when you’re in business with Bronfman, what do you have to prove?

Singer’s monthly trips to Israel are guided by this same tasteful understatement. Although he flies first class, he prefers to stay in modest five-star hotels. “Bronfman can afford the King David,” he said with a mischievous grin. “That’s where all the big American
makhers
stay. But I don’t stay there on principle. I don’t need to.”

I found Singer’s cheerful cynicism a refreshing change from the patrician earnestness of the New Israel Fund. Unlike David Arnow, Singer is a self-made man, the son of Chasidic Jews from Brooklyn. He attended a yeshiva as a boy—his family was so Old World that he spoke nothing but Yiddish until he was twelve. But once he began to talk English, thirty-five years ago, it has been hard to shut him up. Singer is an amusing monologuist with a conversational style that is part Talmudic erudition, part Brooklyn street jive. He sees himself as a kind of organizational Robin Hood, a man who steals from the rich to give to the Bronfmans.

Until Israel Singer came along, the World Jewish Congress (WJC) was a moribund outfit that labored for years under the brilliant but eccentric leadership of Nahum Goldmann. Then Singer teamed up with Edgar Bronfman, who was looking to get into the Jewish leadership game. Israel Singer, who knew a great deal about Jewish life, convinced Edgar Bronfman, who knew almost nothing, that the WJC would make a perfect vehicle. “I studied the techniques of Garibaldi,” he told me enthusiastically. “I studied the techniques of Juan Perón. And here we are.” He waved his hand grandly at his cramped office, a man with an empire.

Under Singer’s guidance, Edgar Bronfman has emerged as a major American Jewish figure, and the Congress has become an important, if somewhat maverick player in the Jewish community. Its greatest coup was its role in uncovering Kurt Waldheim’s Nazi past, an achievement that Singer dismissed with uncharacteristic modesty. “Waldheim was important,” he told me, “but believe me, I’ve got bigger things on my agenda.”

Singer’s master plan involves another theft. “I want to steal one hundred twenty million dollars from the Jewish Agency,” he said with an expansive grin. “I want to take it out of their budget for education and aliyah and use it to set up Jewish schools.”

Singer is an Orthodox Jew of some flexibility, who believes that Orthodoxy is the wave of the American Jewish future. “There are 120,000 kids in Jewish day schools in this country today, and ninety percent of them are Orthodox,” he said. By the year 2000, according to his projections, the American Jewish community will have shrunk from its present 5.5 million to about 1.5 million unless there is a drastic change in the education of American Jews. “That’s my priority—not catching Nazi war criminals,” he said.

What does Bronfman think of all this? I wondered. Edgar Bronfman, whose family made a huge amount of money in the liquor business, is not exactly renowned for his piety. Singer gave me a cheerful smile and fingered the fringes of his prayer shawl. “Bronfman and I are partners. My
tzitzes
make up for his
shikseh
wife.”

Despite Singer’s blithe attitude, this is a sore point. Bronfman is far from the only Jewish leader in America with a Christian wife; and a very large number of these leaders have children who are not Jewish or are married to non-Jews. This may account for the thunderous silence of many Jewish organizations on the subject of intermarriage.

Singer was interrupted by a transatlantic telephone call. “It’s Hungary on the line,” he said grandly, covering the mouthpiece with his hand in a conspiratorial gesture, obviously delighted to be at the fulcrum of international diplomacy. “We’re going there next month for a meeting.”

Jewish leadership in America offers rewards not normally available to the owners of distilleries, or even run-of-the-mill billionaires. There are consultations at the White House, international conferences, meetings with heads of state, a chance to play on the world stage. Israel Singer hijacked an organization for himself and Edgar Bronfman and, like the legendary chariot of Sir Moses Montefiore, they use it to ride to the rescue of Jews in distress—accompanied, as Sir Moses was not, by minicams and wire service reporters.

The Bronfman-Singer collaboration, and particularly their independent leadership style, have not endeared them to their fellow Jewish leaders. Singer is well aware of his reputation as a prima donna, but he dismisses his critics with a contemptuous wave of
his hand. “I’m prepared to include others in our initiatives, like the meeting in Hungary,” he said, “providing they’re willing to pay the price.”

“What price?”

“Loyalty,” said Singer in a level tone.

“Loyalty to what?” I asked, and he paused for a dramatic beat.

“Loyalty to my program; that’s the price,” said the Jewish Perónista from Brooklyn with a smile.

The center of American Jewish communal life is, and always has been, New York City. A few dozen blocks in midtown contain the headquarters of big league Judaism—the Jewish Agency, the United Jewish Appeal, and the offices of various national organizations. In recent years, as American Jews have become more political, Washington, D.C., has become a second power center. AIPAC is located in the capital, and the important national Jewish organizations have branch offices there. Still, New York remains the hub.

In the past few years, however, the primacy of New York and the eastern seaboard has been challenged by Rabbi Marvin Hier—founder and director of the Menachem Begin Yeshiva High School, the West Coast branch of Yeshiva University, and most importantly the Simon Wiesenthal Holocaust Center. Over the past decade, Hier has employed aggressive marketing, astute media management, and emotional appeals to West Coast patriotism in order to create one of the country’s most successful Jewish organizations.

The Wiesenthal Center and its sister institutions are located in a single squat brick complex on Pico Boulevard in Los Angeles. The building, with its dark, lugubrious interior, seems strangely out of place in California, a reminder that Judaism has traditionally been an indoor activity.

The building also reflects the personality of its founder. Marvin Hier, an Orthodox rabbi who looks like a middle-aged Duddy Kravitz, is a small, intense man with piercing black eyes, a prominent hook nose, and a little potbelly that strains at the buttons of his monogrammed shirts. He was born and raised on New
York’s Lower East Side, and he remains a traditionalist. On Saturday afternoons, for example, in the bean sprout capital of America, Marvin Hier eats cholent—the heavy meat-and-potato stew that his mother used to make back in New York. But the rabbi is also an iconoclast and a visionary—traits that have enabled him to become one of Jewish America’s most successful entrepreneurs.

Marvin Heir began his career as a congregational rabbi, and eventually he wound up in an Orthodox synagogue in Vancouver, Canada. In those days he used to visit Los Angeles frequently, and during his trips to Babylon he made two interesting discoveries. First, that L.A. was a Jewish boomtown, with hundreds of thousands of people and more pouring in every day; and second, that there was no important national Jewish organization headquartered on the West Coast.

The young rabbi was immediately impressed by the potential this situation offered. Thirty years earlier a fellow New Yorker, Walter O’Malley, had exploited a similar vacuum by moving his baseball team, the Brooklyn Dodgers, across the continent to Chavez Ravine. Hier has emulated him by establishing the first big league Jewish franchise on the West Coast.

“I saw that California, especially Los Angeles, was very underdeveloped from a Jewish point of view,” he said. “The American Jewish investment out here was spread very thin. Until we came along, the entire American Jewish world was tilted toward about thirty square miles on the East Coast. Take them away and there goes your
Yiddishkeit
.”

Unlike O’Malley, Hier had no organization of his own. But he did have a backer, Sam Belzberg, a multimillionaire congregant in Vancouver. Belzberg, already one of the most prominent Jewish philanthropists in North America, agreed to bankroll the L.A. franchise, provided that it was run on a businesslike basis. Hier accepted the condition, and by the late 1970s the two men were busy setting up shop in Los Angeles.

The move was far from popular. “The local Jews out here didn’t want us and neither did the national organizations,” said Hier. “But the truth is, Jewish growth is in California, not back East. There are already close to one million Jews on the West Coast, and that number is going to grow.”

Hier began by creating a West Coast affiliate of New York’s
Orthodox Yeshiva University. Unlike the main school, the West Coast branch, which has an enrollment of about forty, offers only Judaica. The Menachem Begin Yeshiva High School is more ambitious. Established in 1980, it has around three hundred students and a basketball team, the Yeshiva Panthers, that is the class of its division.

“We’ve won the championship three out of the last four years,” Rabbi Abraham Cooper, the school’s headmaster, told me proudly. “And out here, it’s not like in Brooklyn. I mean, it’s not like we’re competing against Flatbush Yeshiva.” In addition to basketball, the school offers secular and Jewish studies—Talmud, Bible, Jewish history—“the whole shmeer,” in Cooper’s words.

The high school and college are important elements in Marvin Hier’s operation, but its centerpiece is the Simon Wiesenthal Holocaust Center, named in honor of the renowned Nazi hunter. Hier wanted an organization that would appeal not only to Orthodox Jews but to the mainstream; and only Israel and the Holocaust have that kind of broad appeal.