Stars of David (35 page)

Richard Meier

RICHARD MEIER PHOTOGRAPHED BY LUCA VIGNELLI

“AS FAR AS I KNOW, I was the first Jewish architect in five thousand years to build for the Catholic Church.”

It's a stunning fact, which was emphasized repeatedly to Pritzker Prize–winning architect Richard Meier in the fall of 2003, after he designed Rome's Jubilee Church (Dio Padre Misericordioso), commissioned in honor of the Catholic Church's two thousandth year. A tall man with a lumbering gait, Meier has led me through his white reception area, with its white models of his famed designs, to his office, where he sits in front of white cabinets behind a white expanse of desk in a white shirt with a white mane of hair.

“This church design was a rather unusual circumstance because there was a competition in which fifty Italian architects were asked to submit designs,” Meier explains, his large hands folded in front of him, “and the Carriato [the Vatican] of Rome felt there wasn't one of those fifty designs that they felt was appropriate or good enough to carry on with. And so they decided to have an international competition when they invited six architects to compete for this particular project. Of the six, three were Jewish, as it turned out [Meier, Frank Gehry, and Peter Eisenmann]. I don't think that was intentional because they were all good architects. There was nothing in the Vatican's agenda that said that they required the church be done by someone of their faith. So when I won, I never thought it was particularly significant that I was Jewish. After I finished the church, then I realized.”

His realization was driven, in part, by reporters who zeroed in on the historical implications of a Jew creating a place of worship for a group that once persecuted Jews. “Every article mentioned that I was a Jewish architect,” Meier says. “I think partly because it coincided with the Pope's desire to open things up and recognize the Jews in a way that the Church hadn't done before.” I read him a paragraph from a 1996
New York Times
article in which architecture historian Bruno Zevi weighed in on Meier's Rome commission in L'Architettura, an Italian journal: “I do not think that anyone realizes the novelty of this,” Zevi wrote. “You must remember that for centuries and millenniums the Jews were defined, at best, as faithless. They were accused of murder, of procuring the death of the symbol of humanity, of the Son of the Father, of the Son of God.”

Meier concedes that the symbolism is “very important”: “It hopefully changes people's attitudes, breaks down barriers, and promotes understanding. I think all those things are very important. They were important to me. But when you're in the middle of
working
on the project, you don't think about those things.”

Now that the building is completed and populated, Meier says he can reflect on the more philosophical dimensions. “In a lot of interviews people said, ‘How can a Jew design a Catholic church?' And since it's now extremely popular not only with the parish but with tourists, and since everyone seems to respond to it, I answered: ‘Religion, and thinking about your religion and God, is not something that is reserved for one religion or another. It can be expressed in architecture in a way that affects all people regardless of your religion.' I think that's what happens in a church. And when you come in, the act of looking up and looking out and thinking about the world around you—not in a physical sense, but in the sense that your focus is, say, to the sky rather than to the earth—makes you think about things that are outside yourself.”

I ask if, in the course of this undertaking, he thought about his own spirituality. “I thought about what it is to make a religious place; whether it's Catholic or Jewish, it didn't matter: it's a religious space,” he says. “Now obviously if it were a synagogue, it wouldn't be the same because the criteria would be different, the organization would be different; you wouldn't have to have a baptistery or side chapel or confessionals or doors that don't open except on High Holidays.”

In fact, Meier is unenthusiastic about synagogue architecture in general. He says that temple design has been limited by the conflicting needs of the structure. “Basically these spaces, with dual functions which were contradictory, just didn't work,” he explains. “You can't make a space for worship and then also have it serve as space for bar mitzvah dinners for five hundred people.”

Meier schooled himself in synagogue architecture back in the early 1960s. “One of the first things I did when I went out on my own was to help install exhibits at the Jewish Museum for Alan Solomon, who was a teacher of mine and the curator of the Jewish Museum,” he says. “He made amazing exhibitions in the early sixties: the first Robert Rauschenberg show, the first Jasper Johns show, the first Ellsworth Kelly show. And the museum told him, ‘On the one hand, the attendance is going crazy and we're so pleased; on the other hand, what do these exhibits have to do with the role of the Jewish Museum?'

“So Alan Solomon and I were sitting on the beach one day on Fire Island and he said, ‘Everything's going great except the museum board is really pressing me to do a Jewish show.' So I said, ‘Why don't we do a show on synagogue architecture?' He asked me if I'd do it and I said yes. So in 1963, I did an exhibit on the architecture of synagogues in America. There was an historical section and then a section showing what was going on at the present moment—the Frank Lloyd Wright building in Philadelphia, Percival Goodman's work, Philip Johnson's building in Port Chester. We highlighted a building that was under design, Mikvah Israel, designed by Louis Kahn in Philadelphia. The point of the exhibit was to show what was happening and also to make a commentary on it.”

Is there a synagogue today that Meier thinks is . . . “Good?” He finishes my question. “There's one in Amsterdam that was built in the 1700s, I think,” he replies. “And there's a tiny synagogue in Prague. It's beautiful. Tiny. It's amazing. Very moving.”

If Meier was today asked to design a synagogue? “I'd be delighted,” he says with a smile.

Does he think he could solve the problem he identified regarding the conflicting needs of the space? “Only by making the separation between the place of worship and the place of community,” he says. I submit that even the needs for worship can come into conflict—for instance, aiming for the intimacy of a Shabbat service versus accommodating the hordes on Yom Kippur. “Well, I think that's something that really has to be addressed,” Meier says. “I haven't thought about it in a long time, but I think there's ways of solving it.”

Meier says he used to go to temple on Friday nights as a child. When I inquire about any brushes with anti-Semitism, he recalls one. “When I was thirteen or fourteen I wanted to go out with a girl in my class,” he says, “and she said to me, ‘I won't go out with you.' And I said, ‘Why?' She answered, ‘Because you're a Jew.' That was a big surprise to me.”

Meier ended up marrying a Catholic, and his two children were raised as Jews with major Jewish holidays and Christmas thrown in; no Hebrew school. “I felt that they should know their history and be as aware as they can be without any formal education,” Meier says. “When they were maybe nine and ten, I once took them to enroll them in religious school at Temple Emanu-El. After the first day they said, ‘Dad we don't want to go there anymore.' I said, ‘Why not?' They said, ‘The kids just made us feel very uncomfortable.' They felt that somehow they weren't accepted in that situation. I figured it was probably because they'd had no religious education, so they felt out of place. So I said, ‘Fine, you don't have to go.' I didn't want to force it on them. And therefore I felt whatever I can do at home to reinforce it is good.”

Meier doesn't go to synagogue anymore. “If I observe the holidays now, I observe them at home,” he says. “It's something which I think is for me and my immediate family; I don't feel part of a quote, unquote, ‘Jewish community.'”

I ask Meier if he can describe the moment in his life when he felt the most Jewish. “Probably my wedding,” he says. “Because I thought it was important—I don't know why I felt it was important—to have a rabbi there, and therefore my wife felt it was important to have a priest too—her family was fairly religious. I think it was significant because here we were, both coming together to say, ‘We're going to be together, but we have a history and identity that we feel it's important to maintain.'”

I tell him that the majority of those I've interviewed are, like him, not observant, which for some begs the question of what makes someone a Jew. “If you believe you are a Jew,” Meier says firmly, “then you are one.”

When Meier walks me out, we stop to look at the glass-encased model of the Jubilee Church. I have to ask him whether he thinks anything can be made of the fact that so many giants in his field are Jewish, including himself, Frank Gehry, Robert A. M. Stern, Denise Scott Brown, Peter Eisenman, James Ingo Freed, Stanley Tigerman, and Eric Owen Moss. “No,” he says with a shake of his head. “I mean, if you take all the good architects in the world today—and there are many—maybe five percent are Jewish. It's not like it's a profession of Jewish architects.”

“Well, you have to concede that many of the stars happen to be Jewish,” I tell him.

Meier smiles. “There are a few.”

Ruth Reichl

DESPITE RUTH REICHL'S varied culinary exploits as restaurant critic for the
New York Times
(1993–1999) and as editor in chief of
Gourmet
magazine since then, she has never had a great Jewish meal. “It's the only food I don't much like: that sort of heavy, brown Eastern European food,” she explains, leaning on her blond wood desk in the Conde Nast Building. “I don't think of it particularly as Jewish food—it's Eastern European: heavy, meaty, cooked a lot. As opposed to light, green, barely cooked.”

Reichl, fifty-six, doesn't have fond memories of authentic Jewish cooking in her Greenwich Village home: Her mother, chronicled comically in Reichl's memoir,
Comfort Me with Apples
, was inept in the kitchen and couldn't have molded a matzo ball without involving mold. (Reichl has described her mother's cooking as life-threatening.) But the Reichl family wasn't inclined to whip up big holiday dinners anyway: This was a family that couldn't find their menorah each year. “We were Christmas-tree Jews,” Reichl says. “Every year we hung up stockings and ate matzo brei.”

Matzo brei on Christmas? “Yes. That's probably the only Jewish food we really ate.”

Reichl does recall one “major experience” with Jewish restaurant food: “When my first husband, Doug, and I were living on Rivington Street, whoever was the restaurant critic at the
New York Times
reviewed Sammy's Romanian Restaurant, which my mother was thrilled to see; it was right around the corner from our apartment. So she said, ‘Let's go to this place.' And we went there and ate this seriously Jewish food, and it was
awful
.” Is she referring, for instance, to the chicken fat that sits bottled like ketchup on each table? “Yeah, and unborn chicken eggs and what Doug called ‘steak by the yard.'”

Since Reichl is considered one of the reigning arbiters of gastronomy, I ask for her take on why Jews and food are a cliché—that notion of “food is love”? “You see it in any culture,” she says. “But what my parents always said was, ‘The Jews eat themselves to death and the goyim drink themselves to death.' The role that alcohol plays in many cultures, food plays in the Jewish culture. Of course, for my parents' generation, that wasn't true: A lot of my parents' friends were big drinkers.”

For all the Jewish emphasis on food (I'm recalling my own Aunt Helen's entreaties to “Eat! Eat!”), I'm curious why Reichl thinks none of the top-tier chefs in New York are Jewish. She immediately rattles off accomplished Jewish chefs in England—Heston Blumenthal—and in California— Joyce Goldstein and Nancy Silverton (“She virtually
invented
pastry,” Reichl says). “Oh, and there's Jonathan Waxman in New York.”

So she doesn't think there's a cultural indicator that steers Jews away from the kitchen? “Well, it's true that Jonathan Waxman has an M.A. in political science or something. So I think it's fair to say cooking is not where the culture sends you. I mean, my parents were horrified that I was even
writing
about food: ‘For this we sent you to college?'”

The Reichls valued religion even less than great cuisine. “My parents didn't belong to a temple,” she says. “But when I was in eighth grade, my mother announced that she thought I should get some Jewish background. So she went and joined Temple Emanu-El. And she came home and announced that I was going to go to Sunday school and be confirmed. And my father said, ‘How did you join the temple?' And my mother said she put down their names on the membership, ‘Mr. and Mrs. Ernst Reichl.' And my father said, ‘You will go and take my name off; I will not belong to a temple.' It's the only time in my life I ever saw him really put his foot down.”

Her father, who was raised in an assimilated, wealthy German family and came to America in 1926, “hated religion of every kind. He thought religion had been the source of every evil in the world and he was very anti-Zionist: He believed that Israel was going to be the source of the next world war and just another reason for people to hate the Jews. So he was just adamant: ‘I will not belong to a temple.' So my mother went and took his name off of the temple membership. I went to Sunday school. The next year, they sent me to a French Catholic boarding school in Canada, so I finished my confirmation by mail: I wrote my confirmation thesis on why I didn't believe in God.”

It had to have been odd, being a young Jewish girl from Greenwich Village in a French Catholic boarding school. “I don't think most of those kids had ever
seen
a Jew before,” Reichl says with a laugh. “But it was a much bigger issue for my schoolmates that I didn't believe in God than that I was Jewish. I remember one of my roommates saying to me, ‘Oh, please believe in God.'”

Was she required to recite all the Catholic prayers? “The priest came in twice a week for catechism and I was excused. Everyone thought I was really lucky because the priest really smelled. He'd wear these long black wool cassocks and he had this incredible B.O. So everyone was really jealous of me not having to be in the classroom with him.

“I didn't speak any French when I got there and the one lightbulb moment for me was: We got up every morning and sang the Canadian national anthem first and then we recited this other thing in French. And after about six months there, I realized I was saying the Hail Mary every morning! I'd never bothered to translate it! All of a sudden one morning, I'm saying, ‘Je vous salue, Marie, pleine de grâce—Oh my God.'”

Did she keep saying it after that? “No.”

Reichl fininshed high school in Norwalk, Connecticut, where she was again in the minority. “It was very Italian, Polish, and it was very funny to all my friends that I was Jewish. I remember they made up this little thing: ‘Boo-boo-pee-doo! Ruthie's a Jew!'”

Reichl says her mother was pleased that Ruth's first husband, Doug, wasn't Jewish. (Her second husband, Michael Singer, is). “Michael would tell you that my parents were self-loathing Jews,” Reichl says. “I don't think that's true. But my mother would probably have been happier if she herself wasn't Jewish. When I told her that I was marrying Doug, she asked, ‘Don't his parents mind?”

Though she'd had a limited religious upbringing, Reichl did want to be married by a rabbi. I ask her why. “I'm Jewish,” she says simply. “I didn't want to be married by a minister.” Her mother had a hard time finding someone who would conduct an intermarriage, so they enlisted a Unitarian minister.

Her second wedding, to Singer, was more kosher. “Michael's mother would not have come if we had not been married by a rabbi,” she says.

But her faint feelings for Judaism did not intensify being married to a Jewish man, and their son, Nicholas, was not raised with any tradition. “We asked him if he wanted to be bar mitzvahed because everyone in his class at Fieldston was being bar mitzvahed, and he said no,” Reichl says. “I think Michael was disappointed, although Michael hated every second of Hebrew school. So he wasn't going to force Nick into it. Nick didn't even go to all the ostentatious bar mitzvahs he was invited to. He said they were just stupid, big, fancy parties.”

I ask if it would give her pause were Nicholas to end up with a non-Jewish spouse. Reichl shakes her head: “No. I expect he will. What would give me pause—what would make me unhappy—is if he were ever not to identify himself as a Jew. But that's not going to happen.”

And if he decided to raise his children as Christians? Reichl responds by relating a personal story that clearly shook her up: Her father's only sister, Lili, had “experienced part of the Holocaust,” but escaped to America and decided to convert to Protestantism. Lili's son, Robert—Reichl's first cousin—married a Protestant. Robert's son, Mark, married a Catholic. Mark was speaking to Reichl about some land that they're now entitled to—land that had been confiscated during the Nazi regime that they won back through reparations after the Berlin Wall fell. “He called me and said, ‘You know, one of us should go over there and look at this land.' And I said, ‘I don't have time to go to Germany right now.' He said, ‘Well, my in-laws happen to be going over there, but my father doesn't really want them to know about this land.' And I said, ‘Why?' He said, ‘Well, he doesn't really want them to know how he came to get possession of this land.' And I said, ‘Wait a minute: Are you telling me that your father doesn't want your in-laws to know that he's Jewish?' And he said, ‘My father's not Jewish.'”

Reichl gets wide-eyed with anger—“I mean, I was
stunned:
I said, ‘I beg your pardon, but he was
one hundred percent
Jewish; he was
certainly
Jewish enough for Hitler; as would
you
have been.' And I hung up the phone and I haven't spoken to him since. I was stunned at how furious I became when he said to me, ‘My father's not Jewish.' It just came over me: ‘How dare you!? I mean, this is my only living relative of my father and you're telling me he's not a Jew? How
dare
you?'”

I'm curious why she thinks it disturbed her so much. “I think it speaks to everything that is important to me: not denying this kernel of who you are. I loved my Aunt Lili very much; she was this lovely Jewish woman, whether she changed her religion or not.”

Reichl describes her Jewish fealty as rooted mostly in family. “What's been most Jewish about my life is that my half-brother, Bob, moved to Israel in 1968. [We have the same mother, different fathers. He's fourteen years older than I.] So my only living immediate family are Israeli. They are all very strongly identified as Jews, but none of them has ever set foot in a temple. My brother and I really love each other and are very close, but we didn't see much of each other until my son, Nick, was born. Family is a huge thing for Israelis; and Bob knew that if anything happened to me and Michael, he was Nick's guardian. So the whole family really came back into our lives at that point. Suddenly this family connection became very strong. Bob comes to visit every few months—he's made the trip regularly from the day that Nick arrived. So this Israeli family is very present in our lives, and the Jewish identification there is very strong.”

I ask if the political situation in Israel impinges on their relationship. “Yes,” Reichl says with a nod. “It's major—as you might imagine.”

Are the political debates theoretical or a real emotional strain? “They're a real strain,” she says. “It's really hard. One year, we sponsored this Palestinian girl, brought her over here, and they really had a problem with it. They used to be very left, but as the situation gets worse there, they get more and more right wing.”

Her outlook on Israel's future is grim. “My father was so strongly anti-Zionist, and I just feel like he was right. I understand wanting a refuge, but why did they have to take the one corner of the earth—? There were all these other places that would have been much more welcoming, but no, it had to be there. And now the country is going to destroy itself with the right-wing Jews. You know, for my brother to have moved there was such a blow to my father. I don't see anything good happening there.”

When she visits Israel, does she feel a visceral reaction that “these are my people”? “No. About six or seven years ago, our whole family went on this four-day trip up to the Golan, white-water rafting; it was great. And at one point, we were walking through some area, and my niece's then-boyfriend was telling my son, Nick, about the history of the battles that have taken place, and I said, ‘This just makes me feel like we have to take Nick to visit Civil War sites so he can see this kind of history in his own country.' And my niece's boyfriend looked at me and said, ‘This
is
your country.' And I said, ‘This is not my country.' That's where we part company, because I just don't feel that at all. I mean, I'm American. My identification as an American is much stronger than my identification as a Jew.”