Stars of David (40 page)

Stephen Breyer

COLLECTION OF ASSOCIATE JUSTICE STEPHEN G. BREYER

IT'S ONE OF THE MOST undeniably interesting components of Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer's Jewish identity: that his daughter, Chloe Breyer, thirty-five, is an Episcopal priest. But it's a subject he will address only cursorily. “That shouldn't be the emphasis of this,” he tells me. “Chloe is a wonderful person. And she's really decent and she wrote a book on her life in the seminary; so if you want to look at it . . .” He finds a copy of her memoir,
The Close
, for me on a shelf in his stately office. “It's funky and it's interesting.” He says, urging me to keep it.

I pursue the subject a little further, venturing that his daughter's religious path “is a pretty strong contrast” to his Jewish upbringing at Temple Emanu-El in San Francisco. “It is.” He nods. “She's quite ecumenical. I told her—which is how I do feel about it—that what I want for her is what satisfies her and what makes her life happy. And that's what she's found.”

Breyer's wife, Joanna Hare Breyer, a clinical psychologist, is Anglican (daughter of former Tory parliamentarian Lord John Blakenham), and the three Breyer children got a little of each parent's heritage. “The children went to Protestant church,” says Breyer. “Not a lot, but some. And also we'd celebrate Passover and sometimes the children would go with me to Rosh Hashanah or Yom Kippur services. So we tried to keep up somewhat in both.”

I make one more attempt to get at whether his daughter's divergent, intensive religious career has been complicated for him. “She stands on her own feet,” he says. “And it's her life. Moreover, she's not embarrassed about me, I hope—any more than any other child is about their parents. So what she does is great. And of course it's interesting and unusual.” I assume that their dinner table conversations must be fascinating. “It's normal, family dinner conversation,” he says dismissively. “I have one child who is an Episcopal priest. I have one (Nell, thirty-four, a Yale graduate) who considers herself Jewish, and I have one (Michael, thirty-one, a Stanford graduate) who considers himself not religious. So I think that really what's important is that the children themselves are satisfied with their spiritual lives. I think they are. That's what a parent wants.”

He said it's what his parents wanted for him. “What my parents wanted was that I be happy,” he says. “I think today the Jewish community as well as the non-Jewish community is more accepting of mixed marriages. So I think if I had been married in 1997 instead of 1967, it's possible it would have seemed a more natural thing for an intermarried couple to have fuller participation in Jewish community life. But there wasn't hostility.”

We are drinking tea from a silver pot, sitting in two chairs alongside his large desk. Justice Breyer is dressed in a gray herringbone suit with a blue shirt and red tie. His round wire-rimmed glasses frame sleepy eyelids, but there is no lethargy about him; he speaks with distinct formality but also noticeable joviality. “Like most Jews—or people in any religion—being Jewish is part of my life. There we are. It's normal. I'm certain that some of my reactions—legally speaking—grow out of that heritage. Why is it that, like my father—who I think was a pretty practical person—why is it that my favorite way of looking at things is what Hillel said: ‘If I am not for myself who will be for me? If I am only for myself, what am I? If not now, when?' That captures it to me. The heritage of law in this country is to make people's lives better, to make certain there's a reasonable level of social equality, to make certain people's basic freedoms are guaranteed. Everyone who is a judge in the United States traces that back to the founding of this nation, and the Jews are immediately aware that it goes far further back than that.”

Breyer, sixty-six, says his Hebrew school and Jewish summer camp experiences “made an impression,” though not necessarily because he recalls any specific lesson. “You learn things in Sunday school—‘justice flowing like the waters,' for instance. But it isn't exactly being able to attach the name of the right prophet to the right quotation. It is in discussions and the atmosphere, in learning the history of the Jews, in understanding what the holidays are about. For instance, that Passover is a holiday that commemorates freedom. And I have to say it took place many, many years before the Fourth of July. Does that make it more important? No. Does that make it original? No. It's that both as Americans and as Jews, you see in the background that same commemoration of human liberty that people in this country, and I think in the law, have a special responsibility to live every day.”

Breyer, a graduate of Stanford, Harvard Law, and Oxford, does not, however, feel that his being Jewish confers any added responsibility or spotlight when it comes to his decisions on the Court. “I feel zero pressure. The fact that you might be ruling this way because you're Jewish, or the fact that you have to be careful to rule the other way to make certain nobody thinks you are, you know this kind of psychological you-get-so-mixed-up-you-can't-figure-out-what-is-the-real-reason-I'm-doing-this-or-that . . . I would say, luckily for me, the pressure even to get into that is, today, zero.”

I ask if he was surprised that his religion was a non-issue in his confirmation hearings—a fact reporters noted when he was nominated in May 1994. “I was a little surprised,” he says. “And I would say that my parents would have been
more
surprised. I wish my parents were alive when I was appointed, but they were not, unfortunately. My mother's father came to this country at the turn of the century, and if he had thought that his grandson would be appointed to the Supreme Court, he would have thought that was hard to believe. My
mother
would have believed it.” He laughs. “But if you told my grandfather that there would be two Jews on the Supreme Court at the same time and nobody would make an issue of that, he would have found that to be impossible.

“When I was appointed, I was asked by a reporter from a Jewish newspaper, ‘What do you think about two Jews being on the Supreme Court at the same time?' And I said, ‘Fine.'” His intonation is markedly blasé. “Just like that; my tone of voice is important: ‘Fine.' Not so unusual. Not beyond the realm of thinking. Because
that's what we're trying to achieve
. We're trying to achieve a world where, if you say you're Jewish, if you say you're black, if you say you're Hispanic, if you say you're a Muslim, ‘Fine.' Just like that: ‘Fine.'”

Breyer says he doesn't feel the weight of history even though his nomination marked only the second time in the Supreme Court's history that two Jews have served on the nine-justice bench simultaneously. (Louis D. Brandeis and Benjamin Cardozo presided together in the 1930s.) And he doesn't make much of the fact that, for the first time, the Court decided in 2003—at the behest of Breyer and Ginsburg—not to convene on Yom Kippur, even when the holiday falls on the first Monday in October, the date that has always commenced the fall term. “Both of us wanted that and it wasn't a problem,” he says.

It is, however, a departure. When he clerked for Arthur Goldberg, the fourth Jewish justice, from 1964 to 1965, there was no special dispensation for Jewish holidays. But Goldberg celebrated them with gusto. “We used to have these great seders at his house every year,” Breyer says with a smile. “He always invited all the labor leaders, and most of the seder was spent singing various songs that I think came out of the labor movement. It was great.”

After Breyer's nomination, the
New York Times
did a profile in which Breyer's former colleague on the Harvard Law School faculty, Morton Horwitz, criticized him. I read Horwitz's quote to Breyer:

The nominee has little in common with such past Jewish justices as Brandeis, Cardozo and Felix Frankfurter. Breyer's social instincts are conservative . . . If we still believe there is this social justice strand in the best version of the American judiciary, and that's what all these Jewish justices stood for, Breyer doesn't stand for that. The words “social justice” would somewhat embarrass him.

Breyer looks startled. “There, I have no idea. I would say the words ‘social justice' don't embarrass me,” he says. “I guess that was somebody who was opposed to my nomination; ask him.”

I read Breyer a different quote about him, from the same time period—this one in a Jewish newspaper from his younger brother Charles, a U.S. district court judge in San Francisco who is still an active member of their childhood synagogue. “He's very kind,” Charles said of his brother. “He has a dry, self-deprecating sense of humor. And he's a great worrier about everything, little and big. He falls right in with the [ Jewish] tradition.”

Breyer smiles. “He knows me better than Morton Horwitz,” he says.

Aaron Sorkin

“FOR SOME REASON, in our Passover Haggadah, there were ads.”

Screenwriter/playwright Aaron Sorkin has his sneakers propped on the conference table, and he's chain-smoking. “I remember that there was an ad for Maxwell House coffee—four different kinds of Maxwell House coffee—which they called ‘The Fabled Four.' And every time we got to that page in the Haggadah, my brother, my cousin Dave, and I would just lose it.” Sorkin laughs vigorously.

It's an odd day to be visiting Sorkin on the Warner Bros. lot because it's his last day of work as head writer and creator of
The West Wing
. After four seasons and four Emmys, he's leaving the show and his office, which is half-packed in boxes. We're talking in a nondescript room next door that has a long table and some haphazard chairs. The offices have none of the glamour that I imagined the father of a hit show would enjoy.

Sorkin is as gregarious and manic as I've heard him described—he speaks loudly, rapidly, leaving almost no dead space; even when he's between thoughts, there are a lot of “uh-uh-uhs” to fill the thinking time. Meeting him, it's utterly clear why his scripts were infamously last-minute and how he managed to engender a feeling of creative madness on the set. “My first comedy love and playwriting love was Neil Simon,” he says. “I would read his plays over and over again and that rhythm got into my head. So much comedy descends from the borscht belt and those comedians who were then the first ones in live television, whether it was Milton Berle or Sid Caesar. I don't know where the enzyme to entertain a room full of people came from.” He stamps out a cigarette. “Humans are going to be hopeful. We're going to entertain each other and make each other happy. So perhaps the more screwed around you get, the better you're going to get at telling jokes and singing songs.”

He recounts an anecdote he wrote for a
West Wing
script to illustrate the perseverance of Jewish humor. “This story was taken from something I'd heard about Robin Williams,” he explains. “A bunch of Germans came backstage to see Robin Williams after a stand-up concert of his and they said, ‘You're so funny; how come we have no one like you in our country?' and he said, ‘You killed them all.'”

I ask Sorkin if he ever thought about the commercial risks of creating Jewish characters, for instance
The West Wing
's Josh Lyman (deputy chief of staff) and Toby Ziegler (director of communications). The question sets off something of a tirade in which he mocks his critics for inferring ethnicity where it doesn't exist. “These characters on
West Wing
are Democrats, and the thing that a lot of Americans find so off-putting about them is they're such smarty-pantses.” Sorkin mimics his detractors:
“‘They think
they're so smart,'”
he whines. “‘They think they're smarter than me; they make me feel so dumb!'” His volume rises. “‘They think they're so smart with their snappy comebacks and their words that they use so fast, so smart—those
Jewish
people on the
West Wing
! It seems like everybody on the show is
Jewish
!'”

He drags on his cigarette. “It doesn't matter how many times I have Martin Sheen [as President Bartlet] talking to
priests
, quoting New Testament
scripture
, talking about how he almost went to the seminary, talking to God in the National Cathedral
in Latin
; doesn't matter how many times I do that.” Sorkin shouts, “‘
He's a fucking liberal smarty-pants
;
he's a Jew!
'” Another inhale. “So. That was a long way of answering your question. Am I aware, when I'm creating a Jewish character on the show, that most of the country is going to see them as a Jewish character and that is not going to be attractive to them? I'm aware of it, and I say, ‘Fuck it; you're getting it anyway; it's not your airtime, it's mine.'”

Sorkin has never been known for reticence. When he wants to fire a shot, he unpacks the howitzer. In one
West Wing
episode, for example, he created a radio talk-show personality based clearly, in part, on Dr. Laura Schlessinger. The character was a coiffed blonde radio host who is visiting the White House and who has said on her radio program that Leviticus 18:22 unambiguously states that homosexuality is “an abomination.” Sorkin lambastes her through his surrogate, President Bartlet, in the following speech, meant to illustrate the absurdity of taking biblical dictates at face value in the modern age:

I'm interested in selling my youngest daughter into slavery as sanctioned in Exodus 21:7. She's a Georgetown sophomore, speaks fluent Italian, always cleaned the table when it was her turn. What would a good price for her be? My chief of staff, Leo McGarry, insists on working on the Sabbath. Exodus 35:2 clearly says he should be put to death. Am I morally obligated to kill him myself or is it okay to call the police? Here's one that's really important 'cause we've got a lot of sports fans in this town: touching the skin of a dead pig makes one unclean. Leviticus 11:7. If they promise to wear gloves can the Washington Redskins still play football? Can Notre Dame? Can West Point? Does the whole town really have to be together to stone my brother, John, for planting different crops side by side? Can I burn my mother in a small family gathering for wearing garments made from two different threads? Think about those questions, would you?

Sorkin's Jewishness, as he describes it, was defined chiefly by his hometown, Scarsdale, New York, which was dominated by Jews, and brainy ones at that. “When I was there, the percentage of graduates going on to college was ninety-nine-point-something; and usually the ones not going to college were going on to become the chief of police. An extremely high percentage of kids were going on to Ivy League schools.” It took him a while to recognize that Scarsdale was atypical. “Before I was sixteen or seventeen, if you had asked me to guess what percentage of this country's population was Jewish, I would have told you probably about forty-five percent. And I was stunned to discover that I was wrong.” He says he wasn't conscious of the Scarsdale stereotype—the ostentatious Jew. “But you knew about the size of noses and money.”

Sorkin didn't go to Hebrew school, which his parents, at one point, attempted to remedy. “I can remember when my parents, neither of whom had been religious growing up (my father's parents were much too busy being Socialists) maybe twice on Sunday morning asked us to hang out at the kitchen table, and we read the Old Testament. I think they were feeling derelict in their role as teachers,” he muses. “But I don't recall us ever getting past Genesis.”

He decided he wanted a bar mitzvah because his friends' ceremonies reminded him of the theater, which was fast becoming his obsession. “My parents had to take me to see plays because I loved everything that I was seeing,” Sorkin says, “and now I was going to bar mitzvahs and it looked a lot like theater to me: Someone was up there performing, and there was music, singing, languages, wardrobe, and an audience! So my clarion call to Judaism wasn't through Judaism as much as through theater. It was five or six weeks before my thirteenth birthday and I called a father of a classmate of mine who was a rabbi and I said, ‘Rabbi, I'm turning thirteen in six weeks, and I'd like you to teach me the Torah so I can be bar mitzvahed.' He said, ‘Kid, I can't teach you the Torah in six weeks; it takes years.' And I said, ‘No, you don't understand. I have a pretty good ear. If you just say it into a tape recorder, I can learn it phonetically.'”

Sorkin never got his quickie bar mitzvah, but he did pursue a theatrical life that continued to be informed and shaped, in some fundamental way, by the Jews of his suburb. “I went into the world assuming that it was like Scarsdale—that there were going to be lots and lots of people who were smarter than I am. And in developing my taste for what I liked to watch or write in a play or a movie or a TV show, what I began to love was simply
the sound of intelligence
. The way a smart, passionate argument goes. Someone who could argue the other side of the argument as convincingly as they can argue their own. My brother and sister are lawyers, my father was a lawyer, I'm married to a lawyer—we're no longer married, but I
was
married to a lawyer—they all love to debate like that.”

That “sound of intelligence,” as he describes it, is unmistakable in Sorkin's dialogue, though of course it's not usually coming out of the mouths of overtly Jewish characters. When I come back to the issue of whether he thinks explicitly Jewish roles don't work in Hollywood, he scoffs.

“In 1970 a network executive told James L. Brooks [the TV/film writer who created
Rhoda
and
Taxi
] there are four things you can never have on television: people from New York, Jewish people, divorced people, and people with a mustache. If you look at the television landscape now, pretty much every show takes place in New York, characters are Jewish whether they're actually Jewish or not because it's the rhythm of comedy, and it is almost a requirement that these people be single or divorced because one way or another you need to be sending these people out on dates. And Tom Selleck is doing fine with his mustache. So things change.”

Another cigarette. “That said, would a studio head have passed on
Schindler's List
if Steven Spielberg wasn't attached because it was a downer and too Jewish? I'll bet you anything. And it's one of the best films ever made by one of the best filmmakers.

“It's been very recently, to be honest with you, that I've felt in a little way—I don't want to go so far as to say
in touch
with things of the past, but the slightest fingertip connection that makes you feel something. In the post-9/11 world of the entertainment industry, I've realized that, just a few short decades ago, my career would have been ended: to be a forty-year-old man, Jewish, with a political ideology considered to be liberal and with a tendency to make public, critical remarks about the president, my ass would have been hauled in front of crazy people and my bosses—the head of NBC, the head of Warner Bros.—would have been too scared to work with me.”

There is a mound of stubby cigarettes in the ashtray, and it's clear Sorkin needs to get back to his last day on the job. I ask him, finally, if he sees any commonality that explains the amount of creativity that has come from Jewish people over the years. “You can say there is,” he says, “but then what do you say about the Tom Stoppards, the Noël Cowards, and the William Shakespeares? I don't know what to make of it. I think creativity is a wonderfully human quality.”

In other words, he doesn't think Jews are uniquely creative, and his personal imagination is not fueled by his Jewishness; if it seeps in, it's only for the good of the story. “Someone who watches the show—a fan—once wrote a letter wanting to know why, in all four of the Christmas episodes that we've done in the four seasons, does the most significant emotional thing seem to happen to a Jewish character. It's purely coincidence,” he says. “I never tried to get tricky with that.”