Stars of David (13 page)

Wilder met Gilda Radner doing
Hanky Panky
, directed by Sidney Poitier (1982). “I married a Catholic, then I married another Catholic, and then I married Gilda—she's as Jewish as they come,” he says with a mischievous smile. Did he feel more Jewish while he was married to her? “Yeah, because she was
so
Jewish.” He laughs. “She was pretty young, but she talked like an old Jew. And her jokes and her kvetching—it would have been easier to take, but it was so
Jewish
when it came out. I used to say, ‘Do I have to listen to you kvetch in Jewish?'”

Her illness made him seek healing from wherever it might possibly come. “I went to a Buddhist master,” Wilder recalls. “He said, ‘If Gilda gets in trouble with pain, call me, and just put the phone wherever it hurts.'” Wilder's tone suggests he believed in the touchy-feely ritual, but—“It's bullshit,” he states abruptly. “Still, I did it. His telephone number was 322-U-GOD—something like that. Meaning: ‘The god is within you' or ‘You are god.' And I said, ‘Well, I'm a Jewish-Buddhist-Atheist, I guess.'”

As someone who fears a cancer diagnosis is inevitable, I pay special attention to those who have managed to slog through it. So I can't help wondering aloud if Wilder ever asked the proverbial question: How could God let this happen? “That ignorant question—and I say ‘ignorant,' not ‘stupid'—never crosses my mind,” he says. “I would never have dreamed that God would favor you if you did this, and piss on you if you did that. If you pray for help, he or she or it will help you, and if you don't pray, ‘I'm not going to help you.' There couldn't be any God that cruel or dumb or uncompassionate. So I don't think, ‘How could that be?'

“In
Unforgiven
, when Clint Eastwood shoots Gene Hackman, Hackman says, ‘I'm building a house; this isn't fair.' Eastwood answers, ‘Fairness has nothing to do with it.'” (The film's dialogue actually has Hackman saying, “I don't deserve this. To die like this. I was building a house.” Eastwood replies, “Deserve's got nothing to do with it.”) Wilder continues: “
Fairness has nothing to do with it
,” he quotes. “
That's
the answer to your question. The world is not based on fairness. Human beings can
rise
to fairness, can administer something that
makes
it fair or just. But that's not God. When I was being radiated twice a day at Sloan-Kettering, they'd wheel me down there and I'd see these little kids—five, six years old—bald from the chemotherapy. I'm supposed to think that if their mothers had prayed to God, asking, ‘Please help my child,' then they wouldn't be here? Nonsense.” Wilder shakes his head.

“You asked me at the beginning, ‘Why do I feel Jewish?” he says, “and I said, ‘because of my parents' love and embracing, because they gave me confidence.' If my mother hadn't laughed at the funny things I did, I probably wouldn't be a comic actor. After she had her first heart attack, the doctor said, ‘Try to make her laugh.' And that was the first time I tried to make anyone laugh. [Wilder was just six at the time.] It seems to me you either have an optimistic outlook on life, or you have a Jewish pessimist's outlook.” All of a sudden Wilder's playing an Old Jew: “‘Oy—my luck, it would happen to me! Of course they'd be closed! Of course the car would break down!'” Back to himself: “I always hate it when I hear that. They don't know what trouble is till they've seen real suffering.”

Old Jew again: ‘They're out of cabbage; of course. No more orange juice in the whole shop. They haven't got
one
chicken left.'”

I can't help laughing and feeling relieved to see a flash of Wilder-the-performer again.

I ask him at what moment in his life has he felt the most Jewish? He pauses for a full thirty seconds before answering: “I think when I was with Zero Mostel and Mel Brooks,” he says finally. “Not while the camera was rolling, but while they were talking. I identified with
something
that was Jewish. They weren't talking about Jewish subjects. But I said to myself, ‘Yes, I'm part of that; I'm part of what they're doing, and how they sound, and how they're thinking.' That's
in
me.” I don't know where I got it from. My mother wasn't at all like that. She didn't have any Jewish expressions or typically Jewish intonations or even a Jewish outlook—she wouldn't have talked about God. The closest I ever heard my father talk about God was when it had been raining and I had an umbrella and I came in out of the rain and opened the umbrella in the living room. And he said, ‘Jerry, close the umbrella; you're opening an umbrella in the house.' I said, ‘Daddy, are you superstitious?' He said, ‘Not in the least, but why take a chance?' Now, that's Jewish.”

Dr. Laura Schlessinger

DR. LAURA SCHLESSINGER—with over twelve million listeners daily, the fourth most popular radio personality in America after Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, and Howard Stern—decided in 1998 to convert to Judaism. She was already half-Jewish, having been born to a Jewish father, but she decided to embrace the faith fully and formally as an adult. She says the last thing she expected, when she discussed her conversion on the radio and in speeches, was to be “reamed” by other Jews. “The primary anger I've experienced is from Jews,” says Schlessinger, sitting in her Los Angeles office in a powder blue warm-up suit, with coral nail polish and diamond earrings. “The Orthodox community has really embraced me. But the rest, like the Federation folks, have been horrible—really
brutal
.”

She's referring to the Jewish Federation, namely the Dallas women's chapter, which invited her to be the keynote speaker at a fund-raiser in March 1997 and then apparently regretted it. “When I did my presentation, it was a
horror
story,” Schlessinger says. “I was talking about my spiritual journey, and the room got more and more hostile. You see, nobody had told me.”

She was unprepared for what she describes as the tacit understanding among Jews that a Jewish speaker shouldn't extol Orthodoxy when talking to non-observant Jews. She tells a joke to illustrate. “The rabbi asks a Jewish person to come and speak to his congregation, and the Jewish person says, ‘What should I talk about?'

“‘You know,' the rabbi answers, ‘Judaism.'

“‘Okay, I'll talk about the beauty of shabbos, and observing.'

“‘No, no, no: You can't talk about shabbos!' says the rabbi. ‘That's unacceptable.'

“‘Okay, well then I'll talk about being kosher and the beauties of holiness.'

“‘Oh no, you can't talk about being kosher!' the rabbi says.

“‘Well what should I talk about?'

“‘You know: being
Jewish
.'”

Schlessinger throws up her hands. “I didn't know that when you go into your basic non-Orthodox Jewish audience that there's going to be defensiveness and rage when you say that these rituals—shabbos and kashrut—are part of Judaism; they're prescribed to us as holiness, they're commandments. When you're a convert, you're in the middle of all this enthusiasm, you're embracing it all, and I was trying to put that context in my speech.

“I also commented on a videotape that the Federation showed before I spoke—because they were raising money, and the tape talked about how good you feel when you give money. And I said, ‘It's not about how good you feel; it's how good you make
other
people feel.' In Jewish law, it doesn't matter what you're going through; you're supposed to give anyway.”

The reaction in the banquet hall was unreceptive, to say the least. “I was stunned,” says Schlessinger. “I thought if there was a group in the world—” She pauses. “I'm going to try to tell you this without crying because this is one of the more painful things I've experienced in my entire life. I thought that I had joined a family. I come from a really bad family; for me, this was joining a family. And I expected, when I walked in that room, that I was going to have that dream met. Instead, it turned into my original dysfunctional family.” She laughs at the irony. “During the Q & A, it was so nasty and so noisy in the room. And at one point, you know what I did? I picked myself up and I said, ‘Thank you very much,' and I walked out. They had raised more money than they'd ever raised. But I left and I cried.

“The next day, I go on air; I decide I'm not going to say a word about it because I don't want to embarrass anybody, right? But then somebody faxes me an e-mail that went racing around to rabbis all over the country: It said how horrible I was at the Federation dinner, how disgusting I was up there. Now mind you, I've been talking for twenty years: I had never gotten a report card like that, reaming me that I should never be asked to talk to a Jewish group again. I had just seen this fax that was circulating and I made the mistake of going on air. And I said, ‘When I first started talking on my show about being Jewish, I was warned that anti-Semitism would come out of the Christian community. From day one that has never happened; I've gotten calls from ministers, pastors, priests, and nuns unbelievably supportive that I was standing up for communal values, right? And here I am, blindsided
by my own people
.' And I was choked up on the air. This turned into something that was in
Newsweek, Time, USA Today
, CNN, every news station. The
Forward
did a cover story on me.”

I venture that maybe the Federation audience was reacting to her politics, which have been such a lightning rod. “It wasn't my politics because those weren't an issue yet,” Schlessinger says, shaking her head. “It was just that I was upholding traditional Jewish rituals and values. That's all it was about. And this is an audience—at the Federation event—which perceives that, if it does charity work, that is sufficient. I didn't know that there were these political subdivisions within Judaism. Nobody had clued me in. And I got mowed over.”

Did that event change her behavior at all? “I only spoke to Orthodox groups after that. Because the Federation folks went after my reputation, which is against Jewish law . . . That's considered
lashon harah
(the evil tongue); you're not allowed to do that.”

Her son is the reason she converted—or embraced her patrilineal heritage. “Derrick was about five or six years old,” she recalls. “It was a rainy Saturday, we were watching television, I was clicking through the channels, and up comes PBS and Nazi footage of the naked Jewish mothers holding their infants and being machine-gunned into graves. And my finger froze on the channel turner, because I had never seen that myself. I'm frozen and my son gets hysterical: ‘What is that?'

“‘That was a long time ago,' I told him, ‘and those are German Nazi soldiers.'

“‘Well, what are they doing?'

“‘They're murdering those women with their babies.'

“‘Well who are the women with their babies?'

“‘They're Jews.'

“‘What's a Jew?'”

She sighs. “I said, “They're our people.' He said, ‘But what is a Jew?' I said, ‘I don't know, but I'm going to find out.'

“So I started reading and I read the part in Torah where it says
you are
a nation of priests and you are a light unto the nations
. Suddenly a lightbulb went on. I suddenly felt, ‘That's what I'm supposed to be doing.' It all clicked together with what I was doing on radio: trying to help people do the right thing.” As she became more absorbed in Jewish study, she changed her radio show's tagline: “It evolved from ‘Now go take on the day,' which was what I said at the end of each hour, to, ‘Now go do the right thing.' My mission solidified. I had to help people
do
better; not
feel
better;
be
better.”

She was brought up with no religion, despite having a Jewish father and an Italian-Catholic mother. “My father's family was cruel to my mother because she wasn't Jewish; evidently my father's mother would call the house when my father was out and wish my mother dead on the phone. So you wouldn't think that would make me feel warm about Judaism, would you? And my father was hostile toward Judaism—I remember him saying,” she bellows, dramatizing his voice, “‘Passover: what a disgusting holiday! Imagine celebrating the
death
of newborn children!'” Schlessinger is referring to the point in the Passover story when God sends the worst of ten plagues to the Egyptian people: the death of their firstborn. “And I said to myself, when I was a little kid hearing that, ‘Oh my God, you mean to tell me that this religion celebrates dead kids?'”

She was stunned to learn as an adult that her father had missed the sadness and regret of the Jewish people over this horrific punishment. “We went to a seder at our neighborhood temple, and it got to the point in the service where you take the wine and drip ten times for the plagues. I heard the rabbi explain that they were the tears. And I started sobbing in the middle of this room and had to run out of the building. My father had
lied
to me
. We're not celebrating these children's death at Passover, we're
crying
for them.” She gets teary. “I was so angry and so struck.”

It's strange to be sitting in a quiet room with this startlingly petite, soft-spoken, fifty-six-year-old woman with platinum hair, and to think how many people revile her. “The Jewish Anti-Defamation League went after me on the issues of homosexuality,” she recounts. “And Orthodox rabbis wrote to them saying, ‘How could you condemn her for the same things we say in the pulpit every Saturday?' They had no answer. So I've been targeted by that political position or mentality; it's been unbelievably ugly.”

I ask her what made her publicly apologize—or “atone,” as she put it— to the gay community three years ago on Yom Kippur. She bought a full-page ad in a special “Gay Hollywood” edition of the trade paper
Daily
Variety
to say:

While I express my opinions from the perspective of an Orthodox Jew and a staunch defender of the traditional family, in talking about gays and lesbians some of my words were poorly chosen. Many people perceive them as hate speech. This fact has been personally and professionally devastating to me as well as to many others . . . On the Day of Atonement, Jews are commanded to seek forgiveness from people we have hurt . . . I deeply regret the hurt this situation has caused the gay and lesbian community.

But Schlessinger still stresses the Torah forbids homosexuality. “The Jewish line is that homosexuality is an unacceptable behavior; not that a homosexual is an unacceptable person. In Leviticus, there's a long list of things you're not supposed to do. Basically it asks you to be the master over your impulses. And God said certain behaviors are unacceptable. Period. That's the position. It's as simple as that. So I did not apologize for the content because that's like saying, ‘God's wrong'; I can't do that. But what I did say was distorted for political reasons, and the distortion hurt many people—devastated many people. That has been probably the biggest pain: That the homosexual activist groups were willing to lie about what I said . . . But if people are hurt by what comes of what I do, I am sorry.”

After a deep breath, she adds one personal note: “You need to know that my closest male friend is homosexual—but he doesn't have homosexual relationships. Four out of my five dearest girlfriends are all lesbians.”

So how does she advise a caller who has a gay son or daughter? “You tell them that the behaviors are unacceptable but you love them to pieces and they should come to dinner Sunday and don't bring their laundry. I've never said other than that.”

I mention the fact that her critics have often suggested she's trying to couch far-right ideas in the cloak of a religious Jewish persona. “It's Jewish
law
,” she exclaims. “I have not—and I want this quoted—I have not said anything that the pope hasn't said. But I haven't seen a
stopthepope.com! Christianity, Judaism, Islam—all have the same rules about certain behaviors. And they're supposed to be God-given. They're not mine—I didn't make them up; I would
not
have left out bacon.” She laughs. “If you left it to me, we'd be eating cheeseburgers.”

She's kept kosher since her conversion, though occasionally she asks to smell a friend's food. “I went out to dinner last night, everybody else is Christian, we're at a nice pizza place, and I had to make my own stuff. And somebody ordered prosciutto on her pizza and I said, ‘Can I smell it?'” She inhales deeply, demonstrating.