Stars of David (47 page)

Linda Fairstein

LINDA FAIRSTEIN PHOTOGRAPHED IN 1994 BY JILL KREMENTZ

“JEW BITCH.”

That's what Linda Fairstein was called when she was prosecuting some of her most high-profile cases as head of the Manhattan Sex Crimes Unit for twenty years. “Interestingly, I heard it first during the Robert Chambers trial.” She refers to the 1986 case in which eighteen-year-old Robert Chambers killed eighteen-year-old Jennifer Levin in Central Park in what came to be known as “The Preppy Murder.” “Robert Chambers was Catholic and very warmly supported by the Catholic clergy, who first bailed him out,” says Fairstein, now a best-selling author of the Alex Cooper crime novels. “Jennifer Levin was ‘The Jew' and she was called that in very derogatory terms. A lot of Robert's friends called me ‘The Jew Bitch' in and out of the courtroom when I passed them every day. It was about the ugliest thing I'd ever heard.”

She heard it again during the Central Park jogger trial in 1989—where five black teenagers were accused of accosting a young jogger in a brutal attack, also in Central Park. “Whenever I came or went from the court-house, that's what they called me. And this was done by the black and Hispanic advocates for the defendants.” I ask if it upset her. “I was certainly fazed. But I always had a phalanx of detectives around me. What it brings strikingly home is how frightening it is when it happens and people don't have the kind of protection I had. And it was disturbing how it resonated with people who want an easy catchphrase.”

It was a far cry from her law school days at the University of Virginia, when the few Jews and blacks there became close friends, in part because of their common ground. “There were only a handful of Jews in my law school class, a handful of women, and a handful of African Americans,” says Fairstein, sitting on her hunter green couch wearing a blue blazer with gold buttons and what looks like a man's gold watch. “Within the first two weeks of school, the Jews and the blacks sort of found each other and bonded.”

When she was being called names by blacks during the jogger trial, did part of her want to trumpet her enduring law school friendships as evidence to the contrary? “It would never have occurred to me,” she answers. “I remember growing up with that ‘some of my best friends are Jews' kind of thing. I mean, what's the point? In those trials, it was more important for me to simply say, ‘Look at the facts.'”

Fairstein's no-nonsense instincts were instilled, she says, by her Jewish father: “The importance of one's name and integrity came from him,” she says. “There were just things that Jews didn't do. If a bad event happened and a Jew was responsible for it, there was a tremendous sense of shame in our home.”

She brought some of that shame on her father when she first prosecuted a Jew. “In 1977, I prosecuted a dentist from Westchester who practiced in Manhattan, named Marvin Teicher, who had been accused, and was convicted at trial, of sexually abusing women who he had drugged for dental procedures in his office. It was the first case I'd had that got highprofile media attention, and it pained my father that this was a Jew. On top of the shame of doing what this dentist was doing, this was bad for the Jews.”

Fairstein, fifty-five, is the product of an interfaith marriage. Her mother was Episcopalian by birth and converted when she married Fairstein's father. Their romance is the stuff of movie scripts: “They met while working in the same hospital—she was a nurse, my father was a young doctor. She was pretty, he was handsome. They fell madly in love. Her conversion was really to please his parents, who were devastated at the idea that their son was going to marry a Christian. They got married in June of 1943 in Norfolk, then went by bus to Virginia Beach for a honeymoon. Soon after, my father was shipped out to the South Pacific. It was a war story like a lot of people have from my generation, where the father was away for a long time. My brother was born while my father was in the South Pacific, and so my father never saw his son until he was eighteen or twenty months old. My father wrote to my mother almost every day. She's got this chest of letters from the war that I would love to do something with. I used to love to read them.”

Fairstein's mother took her conversion seriously, becoming a dedicated temple member, though she still put up a Christmas tree every year. Young Linda didn't question a Christmas tree in a Jewish home. “When you're a kid, you just do things and you don't think much about it until you're nine or ten and somebody criticizes or makes fun of it,” Fairstein says.

She quit Sunday school when she felt personally insulted by the teacher. “He was explaining that Judaism passes through the mother: you're not Jewish unless your mother is Jewish. He said that although ours was a Reform temple, his personal belief was that converting didn't make my mother a Jew. So therefore I was illegitimate. I came home outraged and defiant. I just said, ‘I'm never going back there.'”

Fairstein says her perspective on her mother's conversion changed dramatically when she was ten or eleven years old. “Like most girls that age, I read Anne Frank for the first time and it changed everything. It made me do everything from starting my own ‘Dear Kitty' diary to having the nightmares about ‘Could this happen again? Could this happen here?' That was the first time that I realized it was remarkable that my mother had the courage to become Jewish. To think back to a time where people were killing Jews, I felt so proud that she embraced a man's faith because she loved him.”

Fairstein has great nostalgia around Jewish ritual and her dad. “On Friday we would drive to temple and my mother would drive home ahead of us. I would take his hand and walk home. I like to do things today that remind me of him.” Like fasting. She says he used to fast, in part, as a symbolic gesture. “He had this old-fashioned sense that as a visible Jew in the community—the town doctor—he should be seen in temple. So I still go and I still fast. There are things like that that I do that are just a little tip of the hat for my father.”

Fairstein herself was married relatively late—at age thirty-nine—to Justin Feldman, an attorney who helped run Robert F. Kennedy's 1964 senate campaign. “I married Justin, who is Jewish and whose first wife was Christian. She didn't convert.” I ask if Fairstein had been looking for a Jewish man. “Sort of. Intellectually I was drawn much more to Jewish men. I know it's stereotypical generalizing, but I love the intelligence and often the spirit of caring, the sense of family.”

And she finds herself feeling a reflexive protectiveness over preserving the Jewish people. “I do very definitely have a concern about it,” she says. “You know, from silly things like looking at the Sunday
New York Times
wedding announcements and seeing who we're losing. I hate to read that a Jew got married and ‘the ceremony was performed by a Buddhist minister . . .' You know, when it's not a rabbi performing the ceremony, it's a sign to me: ‘We've lost one.'”

She herself has lately been more drawn to ritual, suggesting to her husband that they join the Hebrew Center on Martha's Vineyard, where they have a second home. “It's become more and more important in my life as I have gotten older,” Feinstein says. “It's something I've become more fiercely proud of. I haven't talked to many people about it, but I actually reflect on it a lot.”

In fact, she intends to have her fiction's protagonist, Alex Cooper, begin to grapple more with her religion. “One of the only personal things about that character which is true to life is that she's Jewish and her mother was Christian. I use that background, though I haven't explored it terrifically and I want to. But from the moment I created Alex Cooper, I very definitely wanted her to be Jewish.” I ask why. “Because I'm proud of it too,” she says with a smile. “And it made her smart.”

Paul Mazursky

“HALVAH IS PROBABLY the closest thing I have to being religious,” says director/actor Paul Mazursky, sitting in an office so spartan it looks temporary. “I've been on a diet for twenty years, but if you give me a piece of halvah, it's over; I'm going to eat it.”

Mazursky, seventy-five, writer and director of
An Unmarried Woman,
Down and Out in Beverly Hills
, and
Tempest
, among other films, is acting these days in Larry David's
Curb Your Enthusiasm
on HBO. “I don't have a good psychological explanation for why I'm Jewish,” he says from under his baseball cap. “I was born eating kreplach and matzo brei and lox. The Jews don't make good main dishes, by the way. They're only good at making what you call ‘fore spice'—the stuff before the meal. And some of the desserts. Ruggelach is a treasure.”

The Brooklyn-raised Mazursky calls his parents “Holiday Jews” and says his grandmother went to synagogue, but his grandfather stayed home. “I found him eating one day on Yom Kippur while Grandma was in shul, fasting. I was five or six years old. He was eating pickled herring. I said, ‘Grandpa, why is Grandma fasting while you're eating?' He said, ‘Because I'm hungry.' And that told me everything that I had to know about religion.”

Mazursky says his wife isn't Jewish, but she wears a Jewish star “because she likes Jews, she likes Israel.” As for himself, he's “anti-religious”: “For me, religion is one of the things that's ruined mankind and continues to do so every day. Something that used to have meaning and importance has emerged as ‘I'm different than you,' ‘I'm better than you,' and it's endless. We're now in a world situation that I find in many ways the worst I've ever remembered it.”

A messenger enters the office to deliver a package and apologizes for the intrusion. “That's okay,” Mazursky tells the messenger, who is black. “We're talking about Jews. Do you know any Jews?” A nod. “What are you?” Mazursky asks. “Catholic,” the messenger replies. “That's nice,” Mazursky says.

Mazursky's two grown daughters, Jill and Meg, did not marry Jews, but Jill is sending her five-year-old daughter, Molly, to a Jewish school in Los Angeles. “Here's a good story,” Mazursky says. “Molly comes home from school one day and I said, ‘Did you learn anything special today?' She said, ‘I learned a'”—he's trying to remember a Hebrew word—“it wasn't a ‘mitzvah,' but some word for ‘song.' I said, ‘How does it go?' She says”—he suddenly bellows approximated Hebrew—“
Chai ditz shoi la shoi
balla bu!” He smiles. “I started to cry. I literally started to cry. All the Jewish stuff came out of me. I felt, ‘Oh, this is a Jewish kid!' That was fabulous beyond belief. And Steve, the husband, turned purple.”

I ask him which of his movies he would consider Jewish. “Well, of course
Enemies, A Love Story:
It's about a tortured Jewish guy with three wives, who escaped the Holocaust by hiding in an attic. There are about three meals in that movie that are particularly Jewish. See it again and pay attention to the food.”

What about
Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice?
“Nah. That's why it was a hit. If there are Jewish characters, you have very little chance of being a hit. However,
The Producers
is a big hit, so I'm making a huge generalization. But generally speaking in Hollywood, they've always been nervous about big-time Jewish stuff. The ones who are most uncomfortable are Jewish executives. Not the goyim. My movies were usually backed by goyim.”

Would he be bothered if someone described him as a Jewish director? “I don't think I would be bothered, but it wouldn't be a fair description. I'm an American director, I'm an American actor, and I happen to be culturally Jewish and very proud of it and I don't hide it. I've never hidden it in my work.”

Mazursky does feel wistful that the “old-fashioned stuff” he cherishes from his childhood has been lost from Jewish life. “It's not the same now,” he says. “You wouldn't be surprised to see a rabbi in New Balance sneakers, a good jogging outfit, and a hip yarmulke singing Yiddish rap. But we still have the great clichés: Jews still want for their children a great education.

“You know the great joke about the first female president? A Jewish girl becomes president and she says to her mother, ‘You've got to come to the inauguration, Mom.' The mother says, ‘All right, I'll go, I'll go. What am I going to wear? It's so cold. Why did you have to become president? What kind of job is that? You'll have nothing but tsuris.' But she goes to the inauguration, and as her daughter is being sworn in by the chief justice, the mother turns to the senator next to her and says, ‘You see that girl up there? Her brother's a doctor.'”