Stars of David (8 page)

I ask if he ever felt conscious of being a Jew in the State Department. “My religion, and whether I had one leg or two eyes or one nostril, had no impact whatsoever on my ability to tell the foreign service that, ‘This is what the president of the United States wants you to do.' Period.

“Now, I will acknowledge that the Clinton Administration happened to have had a very large number of Jews in the national security area, working especially on the subject of Israel. And that was the subject of a lot of written commentaries in the Arab world, and perhaps here as well . . . Arguably and objectively, the Clinton Administration had a tougher love policy towards Israel than the Bush Administration, which has few prominent Jewish-Americans involved in policy at all. So I don't think one's religion had any impact on one's policy prescriptions or presumptions or proclivities. And I don't feel in any way that my being Jewish affected how the foreign service responded to the Secretary of State.”

But surely he felt heightened scrutiny when he dealt with Israel and issues surrounding the conflict there. “Yeah, I felt the self-hating Jew accusation if we were being tough on Israel, and I felt the Arabs using my being Jewish against me, but I didn't have any guilt about the whole thing. I believed that one could believe strongly in the security of the state of Israel and occasionally disagree with the government there. And could disagree about what was best for Israel, let alone what was best for the United States. And I was also very clear that my priority was what was best for the United States.” In other words, the typical suspicion of dual loyalty was immaterial. “I never felt it, I never experienced it, I never saw it. I mean I was aware of that perception floating around often, but for me, it was always quite clear: I was there to protect, pursue, advance American interests, and ninety-nine percent of the time that was consistent with Israeli interests; and if it wasn't, it wasn't a close call.”

Despite his unsentimental attitude toward Israel, he says its reason for being remains clear. “My whole life, the Holocaust has colored my understanding of world history. It's been high up on the list of things that I understood from a very young age as the ultimate in evil. I did my share of reading and moviegoing about the subject and I've been to Yad Vashem half a dozen times. I have complicated views on exactly what one should and shouldn't do between Israelis and the Palestinians; but one thing I do believe is that until Palestinians and Arabs appreciate the magnitude of the suffering of the Holocaust, and
believe
it, that it will be very hard to have peace in the Middle East. So I believe that is extremely important to Jews and to humanity.

“It came into play for me as a government official when I was in office and Bosnia was happening and I remember saying, ‘What am I doing? Should I leave the State Department if we don't do anything to intervene?' And then, I hope, I played a small role in helping the president and others come to the conclusion that they should do something about it. Because that was the modern-day version of the Holocaust in Europe. Not that it was the same in magnitude, or even in conception, but it was a people being destroyed in the heart of Europe. And we could do something about it. And ultimately we did—far too late—but we did. So that's how the Holocaust has affected me.”

He does not, however, live with the feeling that “it could happen again,” and is disdainful of those who say it could. “I've never felt ever that the world which we inhabit—meaning social and material world—is one in which I feel threatened. I've never felt that way. Do I believe that anti-Semitism still exists? Yes. In a variety of forms, it exists. But look: I climbed fairly high in government, and I had no sponsors, no family connections, I had nothing. I made it on merit, I hope. And my last name is about as Jewish a last name as you can have. So I don't feel that my religion interfered with my ability to climb very high—relatively speaking— on the ladder of government and power in America.”

It's getting late, and I know Rubin has dinner plans at Centolire, an Italian restaurant in the neighborhood, but I can't let him go without hearing his take on the brouhaha over his former boss and close friend, Madeleine Albright. In 2001, it was revealed that her father was Jewish and her grandparents perished in the Holocaust; many Jews accused her of lying about the fact that she was learning this for the first time. “I have very strong views on that,” Rubin says, leaning forward on the couch, “because I was a participant; I observed her become aware of it. I'm continually amazed at the cruelty with which people who don't know anything about the story, who've never looked into it, assumed that she knew and was lying. That lack of thoughtfulness I find offensive. Because anyone who looks into it will immediately realize it's a very complex story that involves her father changing the religion, her growing up with her father having told her she was not Jewish her whole life.

“I know her very, very well; she's never been a secretive, manipulative person. But I remember the reaction of many Jews—particularly Jews who fancied themselves as somehow connected to those terrible moments in twentieth-century Europe when great decisions were made by individuals who had real crises in their lives, whose lives were threatened. And most of those people who had the temerity to comment were living comfortable lives, and weren't in Czechoslovakia when the Nazis took over, or other places like that.

“I think she has said this: Knowing what she now knows, are there things she could have done differently, found out earlier, known at all? Yes. But I think that people who judge her without knowing the facts are not doing the facts or their religion any favors.”

Natalie Portman

COURTESY OF NATALIE PORTMAN

ON A COOL OCTOBER MORNING, actress Natalie Portman is wearing a jean jacket and dangling beaded earrings, sipping Earl Grey tea in Schiller's Liquor Bar, a favorite café of hers tucked into Manhattan's Lower East Side.

Leaning on a white marble table that sits on a black and white checkered floor, ceiling fans overhead, Portman talks about the difference between Jews in Israel and Jews in Long Island. “I definitely know what being Jewish in Israel means and what being Jewish in America means,” says this twenty-four-year-old, who was born in Israel to an Israeli father, fertility specialist Dr. Avner Hershlag, and an American mother, artist Shelley Hershlag.

They moved to the United States when she was three, and they return to Israel every year to visit family. Portman, who uses her grandmother's maiden name professionally, attended Jewish day schools until eighth grade—mostly, she says, because her parents wanted her to keep up her Hebrew. But the Hershlags were not a religious family, nor involved in the local synagogue. “I grew up in the classic American Jewish suburbia, which has a whole different sense of what it means to be Jewish than anywhere else in the world.”

I ask her to elaborate. “The people I grew up with on Long Island are wonderful people. But I have friends who grew up in five-million-dollar homes, they all drive BMWs, and the only places they've been to outside the United States are the islands in the Caribbean. Which is fine, it's a choice, and I don't want to be critical of that. But I am. I think it can definitely be a problem, especially since American Jews are the ones who are in a position—politically and financially—to help other Jews around the world who are facing problems that we can't conceive of.”

Folding her bobbed hair behind her ears, Portman explains why she never felt a pull to be a part of Jewish life in her Syosset neighborhood. “I never liked going to temple on Long Island because it just had that aura of someone's fake party to me, which always made me uncomfortable. So I never went to temple at home, I never got bat mitzvahed, I just sort of rejected that whole thing; it seemed so tied up with values that I hated. But on the other hand, when I go to Israel, I always want to go to temple on the High Holy Days even if no one in my family is going with me. I'll fast. One year in Israel, my family went to Jaffa to get pizza on Pesach and I would not do that. [No flour is to be eaten during Passover week.] You know, I get much more Jewish in Israel because I
like
the way that religion is done there. Not all the time; I would never step foot in Orthodox temples. But in Israel, it's about what it's about.”

She says it wasn't a big deal in her family when she decided to forgo a bat mitzvah. “All my friends were doing it,” she recalls. “But people were having hundred-thousand-dollar parties that totally took the meaning out of it.”

As she describes some of her Long Island girlfriends, the slur “JAP” pops into my head and I ask how she feels when someone uses the word. “Because it's one of those stereotypes that seems to derive from something that does exist, I don't get offended by it as many people do,” she says, sipping her tea. “I mean, I grew up in a Long Island public school that was sixty to seventy percent Jewish and I know what a JAP is. But obviously the word shouldn't be misused. I wouldn't want to have stereotypes used in derogatory ways by people outside the Jewish community, but I think it is something from within the community that we need to examine and be self-critical about, because it's how we're raising our young people. Do they know or care about the outside world? Do they know or care about things other than having a nice car or a nice purse? It's something that we have to be careful of because we are a successful community that doesn't have day-to-day confrontations with poverty, violence, or danger that some of our counterparts in other parts of the world are facing.”

She says she was also disappointed by the fact that the American Jewish community, as she watched it growing up, was not focused on giving back. “You see church groups doing community service, but you don't see that as much among Jewish kids in America. Maybe I'm talking about my specific experience, but I also see this among kids from Chicago, L.A. suburbia. Of course there are exceptions, I can't make any sweeping statements. But I don't think it's a value that's instilled early on. The values that you do see instilled are, for example, everyone getting nice cars for their sixteenth birthdays.

“I had a fashion designer tell me that when I wear a dress of his, it sells out across the country because Jewish girls ‘look to me,' and Jewish girls are the ones that buy expensive dresses. It made me sort of sad, because I want to be an influence in ways other than by a pretty dress.”

Portman is careful to point out that she sees virtues, too, in today's Jewish community. “There's also so much goodness there, and such a value placed on education, which is sort of universal among Jews around the world. I appreciate that obviously; to be a part of that.”

But she can't help but return to her obvious frustration with the ideals she saw as a kid. “You belong to a temple and it's totally for social purposes; it's the bar mitzvah–wedding–Rosh Hashanah place where you go and see what everyone's wearing. And it serves its purpose too. But I think the major problem today with American Jews is materialism.”

I ask her where she feels more herself as a Jew—in Israel or in America. “It's hard, because I was raised in the Long Island atmosphere, but I
admire
the Israeli atmosphere. So I'm in this strange middle ground.” She says starting college at Harvard changed her perspective somewhat, because she found herself feeling pulled toward the Jewish community on campus. “I think you always sort of look for where you belong once you get to school,” says Portman. “The first time I felt comfortable in an American religious institution was in college, because campus Hillel was inclusive. And it's nice having Shabbat dinner every week with everyone. Anyone was welcome, so we'd bring all our friends to dinner because the Hillel Shabbat meal was so much better and they served Manischewitz.” She laughs. “It was so exciting to get alcohol in the dining hall.”

Portman says she's always fasted on Yom Kippur and continued to do so in college. “I think it's a really amazing thing, and I only recently began to appreciate what it's for. I used to just do it as sort of a dare—to see if I could actually handle it because I really have a hard time not eating.” She laughs. “I really like eating. But a couple years ago, one of my friends got really mad at me and it happened to be on Yom Kippur. Even though this friend wasn't Jewish, it made me go through the actual atonement list on that day, and the hunger associated with it is really helpful. You see why there are kosher rules and why so many religions have rituals associated with food; because you eat three times a day, so every time you have a restriction on your food, you think about why you're restricting yourself. So whether it's not eating milk and meat together, or not eating at all, you think about how you've wronged your friends and how you should change your behavior in the future. You're made to think. It's pretty powerful. And when you see how difficult it is to go one day without food, it really reminds you of what it is to be hungry.”

At Harvard, she took a seminar in Israeli literature (coincidentally, with my former Yale Hebrew professor, Miri Kubovy), and she briefly engaged the Israeli-Palestinian controversy on campus. In the spring of 2003, when a law student named Faisal Chaudhry wrote a column in the
Harvard Crimson
about the racism of Israelis, titled “An Ideology of Oppression,” Portman shot off a letter to the editor. “I was reading my student newspaper and the fact that they published something that was such propaganda really upset me and I wrote back. But it ended up bringing more attention to this guy's story than it got initially, so I was angry. I learned my lesson. I helped him get into the
Washington Post
—they gave him a lot more voice than he was due. I'm sure he's a very intelligent and good person, but I think a lot of people don't know what they're necessarily talking about.”

I ask her to briefly recap their dispute. “His allegations were that Israel is treating the Palestinians poorly because they're racist and it's a conflict of white people against brown people, which is just so absurd.” (Chaudhry wrote, “
White Israeli soldiers destroy refugee camps of the brown people they have
dispossessed for decades.”) “My response was that more than half of Israelis are of Sephardic origin: Many of these Jews come from Arab lands and share the same physical skin color. There was a picture on the cover of
Newsweek
that week in which there were two photographs side by side—a female suicide bomber who exploded herself in a supermarket and an Israeli girl who was killed in that attack. The girls were seventeen and eighteen and almost indistinguishable. That was my point.” In her response to Chaudhry, she wrote,
“Israelis and Arabs are historically cousins. Until we accept the fact that we
are constituents of the same family, we will blunder in believing that a loss for one
‘side'—or, as Chaudhry names it, a ‘color'—is not a loss for all human kind.”

I ask if she's felt pressure, since she graduated, to use her celebrity on behalf of Israeli causes. “I'm very comfortable with that,” she says, “and I'm currently exploring ways to help because I love the country.” She's recently become more protective of Israel, in part because people around her have become more impatient with it. “I have a very close friend who lately has this European, anti-Israel way of thinking, and it's very hard for me to have conversations with him. He says, ‘Can't you be self-critical?' But it's hard to be publicly critical. It has to be done in a very delicate, well-thought-out manner. These issues come up at parties and dinners with people who don't know a lot, and as someone who was born in Israel, you're put in a position of defending Israel because you know how much is at stake. It's become a much bigger part of my identity in recent years because it's become an issue of survival.”

Portman suddenly realizes that she has to put coins in the parking meter and excuses herself to run outside, first asking the waitress to change a dollar. When she returns, rosy-cheeked from the air, I turn the conversation to her career, asking if she feels some Jewish pride in being considered a Hollywood beauty. “Yeah,” she replies. “The hard thing is that people often don't associate me with being Jewish. I'm not someone who you look at and say, ‘You're Jewish.' People ask me if I'm Spanish, Italian, or even WASPy. So I don't think I can be representative. But in another way, I think I look very Jewish because all the Jewish girls I grew up with, we all look the same: small, short, skinny, dark hair, dark eyes. Little noses.” She laughs. “So maybe it is time for a new type. I'd like it if people thought I was Jewish-looking.”

I ask if she's ever felt shy about her ethnicity as a public person. “Not at all. But I don't think that any one characteristic should be overemphasized in your real life when you're an actor, because if I play a nun one day, I don't want someone to be thinking when they see me, ‘Jew, Jew, Jew.'”

She did play an iconic Jew, Anne Frank, on Broadway at the age of sixteen. “It was an amazing experience,” Portman says. The reviews were mixed;
Time
magazine said “Portman's Anne is a little short on stage charisma,” while the
New York Times
said she has “an endlessly poignant quality of spontaneity.” But some of the criticism was personal. “I got a lot of flack,” Portman volunteers. “Cynthia Ozick was awful.” (She refers to the prolific author and essayist who specializes in Jewish subjects.)