From the street, the Grace Building looks like any other New York City skyscraper. Located on the corner of Sixth Avenue and 42nd Street, its lobby promises nothing more than the standard Manhattan offices listed on the building’s directory. But unknown to most of its tenants, for one week every year, during the Feast of Tabernacles, the Grace Building is transformed into the pedestal of a penthouse shrine—the fabled Succah in the Sky.
The heart of the Succah is located twenty-four floors below, in the offices of Swig, Weiler, and Arnow, real estate. The company owns the Succah. It also owns the building on which it sits, and many other buildings in New York and around the country. And its principals, the Weiler and Arnow families, own a considerable chunk of Jewish community leadership in the United States as well.
In the pluralistic, mobile society of America, Jews can live anywhere and be anybody; but belonging to the Jewish community requires involvement in the decentralized but intensely organized web of synagogues, institutions, and organizations that circle the country and are headquartered in Manhattan. Woody Allen, Sandy Koufax, Bob Dylan, and Henry Kissinger have all profoundly influenced the Jews of America, but none of them belongs to the community. David Arnow, the thirty-eight-year-old grandson of real estate mogul Jack Weiler, is the head of the New Israel Fund. He is not only a member of the community, but a leader.
Leadership in the American Jewish community is about money—raising it, distributing it, and then raising more. Every year, Jewish federations throughout the United States conduct fundraising campaigns that collect hundreds of millions of dollars. About half goes to Israel via the United Jewish Appeal; the rest is used to finance local community projects. In addition to the federation campaign, independent organizations like the New Israel Fund raise money for their own agendas. The money comes from federated Jews, people whose credo is, “I give, therefore I am.”
Those who give the most can, if they choose, become Jewish leaders. Dozens of megarich businessmen form an informal national network, dominating organizations, setting priorities, and overseeing the activities of the multifaceted community. Some of their names are well known, at least in establishment circles—Edgar Bronfman, head of the World Jewish Congress; Jerald Hoffberger, chairman of the board of governors of the Jewish Agency; Larry Weinberg of AIPAC; and Detroit’s Max Fisher. A few, like Ivan Boesky, former head of the New York federation, are notorious. And some, like David Arnow, are just beginning to come into prominence.
Arnow is a new-breed leader, a child of the sixties with a Ph.D. in psychology from Boston University, a left-leaning ideology, and an inherited fortune well into eight figures. His grandfather, Jack Weiler, came to America as an immigrant from Eastern Europe, made millions in real estate, and helped establish the United Jewish Appeal in America. The family tradition of philanthropy was carried on by Jack Weiler’s son Robert. Now the torch is being passed to a third generation, to David Arnow, a prince of the American Jewish establishment.
When I arrived at the office of Swig, Weiler, and Arnow I was greeted in the waiting room by Jonathan Jacoby, Arnow’s advisor on Jewish affairs. The room was quietly tasteful, decorated in subdued pastels and grays and dominated by a picture window with a dramatic view of the skyline. A marble coffee table was stacked with Sotheby catalogues and copies of The New Yorker and Moment, a liberal Jewish journal published in Boston.
Like the decor, Jacoby was understated and mellow, a soft-spoken Californian in his early thirties with an open, friendly manner. Rich people dominate America’s Jewish organizations, but day-to-day operations are run by professionals with strong Jewish backgrounds. Jacoby, who was raised in a Conservative home in Los Angeles and spent three years in Israel, is no exception. Like David Arnow, he is a political liberal, dedicated to supporting left-wing causes in Israel. Unlike Arnow, however, he has to work for a living, and his job includes taking visitors like me on tours of the premises.
Our first stop was a small model of what was once Einstein Hospital in New York. “They took off Einstein’s name and now they call it the Jack D. Weiler Hospital,” Jacoby said without a hint of irony. Sic transit gloria—if Einstein had wanted a hospital, he should have gone into real estate.
Next to the model hospital hung a warmly inscribed photograph of Chaim Weizmann, the first president of Israel. The picture is a family heirloom, a symbol of the Weiler-Arnow association with Israel since before the founding of the country.
There is an obvious lack of symmetry in the relationship. Israel’s prime ministers and presidents don’t hang pictures of American Jewish millionaires on their walls. In fact, they don’t regard them as leaders. The businessmen are considered go-betweens, tax collectors, field officers in the campaign for Israel’s survival and prosperity. This junior partner status is implicit in the American Jewish community’s relationship with Israel; clearly, people who have paid their dues take precedence over those who only foot the bills.
This disparity rankles Arnow and Jacoby, and they would like to change it. They grew up with Israel and take it for granted. Unlike their elders, they are not in awe of the country or its officials. They feel they have wisdom as well as money to contribute. Their goal is not to make life easier for the Shamirs, Pereses, and Rabins, but to prod them into making Israel their kind of place, the sort of country that would meet the approval of the ACLU, The Nation magazine, and the Sierra Club.
Jacoby led me down a carpeted hall to a large empty conference room, which he entered with the reverence of a high priest coming into the Holy of Holies. “If you’re looking for American Judaism, this is a good place to start,” he said, gesturing broadly. “This is American Judaism. In this room, Abba Eban and Yitzhak Rabin and just about every other important Israeli has come to meet with the establishment. And now, thanks to us, they can hear others, too—people like Rafik Halabi, for example.” Halabi, a Druze television newsman and author, is the kind of Israeli the New Israel Fund is anxious to support: bright, hip, and at odds with his country’s traditional policies and attitudes. As I contemplated the possibility that his autographed picture might someday hang next to Weizmann’s, we were joined by David Arnow.
Arnow is a small, neat baby-boomer with the suspicious, pseudodeferential manner of a rich kid who wants to be liked for himself. He let Jacoby talk about the New Israel agenda while he sized me up. After a few minutes, he suggested an elevator ride to the Succah in the Sky. “I think you’ll like the view,” he said shyly.
Fifty-eight floors is only halfway up in Manhattan, and when we reached the roof of the Grace Building we were still surrounded by buildings twenty or thirty stories higher. But none of them have a succah—Arnow’s is the tallest tabernacle in the world. During the holidays, VIPs take their meals there. When we arrived, just after lunch, white-jacketed waiters were clearing away the kosher dishes and gathering up the empty Israeli wine bottles. Jacoby and Arnow and I stood looking out at Manhattan from under a canopy of plastic apples, pears, and grapes. The artificial fruit is a ceremonial reminder of the sweet harvests of the ancestral fields of the Holy Land. But the Succah in the Sky is a modern symbol as well—a monument to the confluence of Big Money and Big Judaism that constitutes community leadership in America.
After a tour of the Succah, Arnow led us back down to his office on the thirty-fourth floor. He poured coffee into styrofoam cups, leaned back in his chair, and explained his version of Jewish leadership.
“My family has been involved with Jewish things for years, and I share their commitment,” he said. “I’m totally dedicated to helping Israel. But the question is, what kind of Israel? And what kind of help is appropriate? Things aren’t as simple as they seemed twenty or forty years ago.”
In those days the Weiler family gave huge sums of money and helped to raise even more. Israel is dotted with monuments to their philanthropy. I mentioned that there is a Ben Swig Memorial Park—donated by Jack Weiler in honor of his late partner—on the corner of my street in Jerusalem. “There’s a whole neighborhood, Kiriat Jack Weiler, named after my grandfather in Jerusalem,” Arnow said, putting the park into perspective.
David Arnow could have a park of his own, or even a neighborhood; it’s all a matter of money. But he wants influence, not honors. He has a vision of Israel, and he wants to use his organization to further it.
“I’m focused on Israel because the ultimate value of the Jewish people will be decided there,” he said. “We can’t create an oppressor state. I have a vision of us as a light unto the nations, a vision of pluralism where the lion lies down with the lamb sort of thing. We can live together—I believe that, I really do.
“Look, I have a Ph.D. in psychology. And it’s well known that usually people who go from the bottom to the top tend to do the same things to the people at the bottom that were done to them. It’s a problem of going from a position of relative weakness to relative strength.
“We want people to face reality—in Israel and here, too,” Arnow continued. “American Jews don’t know, and they don’t care to know, that Arabs live in Israel. The country could become like South Africa, and we just can’t let that happen.”
Arnow reached over to his desk and took out a sheet of paper that listed the goals of his organization. “ ‘We are primarily concerned with strengthening the democratic fabric of Israel and supporting efforts to create a society based on justice and tolerance,’ ” he read. “That’s the kind of country we should have.”
I winced at the “we,” and Jacoby quickly intervened. “I want to stress that the New Israel Fund is an international organization, not just an American one,” he said. “Israelis are involved in every aspect of our activity. They have input into the grant process and we have an Israeli vice president.” He sounded very much like the earnest white liberals who once dominated civil rights organizations in America and were devastated when blacks, intent on running their own lives, kicked them out.
For more than an hour we sat discussing David Arnow’s agenda for Israel. From time to time I tried to nudge the conversation in the direction of American problems—intermarriage, shrinking numbers, the state of American Jewish education—but they didn’t elicit much interest. Arnow’s concept of what Israel should be may differ from his grandfather’s, but Israel is no less central in his view of the Jewish people.
“Don’t you think it would be more appropriate for you to move to Israel and work from the inside?” I asked as our conversation drew to a close. Arnow paused to consider, and Jacoby took over.
“I’ve just about given up on mass immigration to Israel from America,” he said. “It’s unrealistic. American Jews won’t go, they’ll give money—love money and guilt money. But they don’t want to know the truth about Israel, they don’t want to be confused by reality. Now personally, I’m torn. I have one foot in Israel and the other here. I’ll probably move there for good someday.”
David Arnow felt no such conflict. “We’re all one people, but we can’t all live in one place,” he said. “I don’t advocate moving to Israel, making aliyah. After all, how can I send people to a place that I’m not prepared to live in? That doesn’t seem fair.”
David Arnow and Jonathan Jacoby have a vision of Israel—they want the Jewish State to be a light unto the nations. But like other American Jewish leaders, they prefer to see that light from a distance, from the vantage point of the great American Succah in the Sky.
“You want to know how I got my organization? Simple—I stole it!” said Israel Singer when I stopped by to see him at the headquarters of the World Jewish Congress on Madison Avenue in New York. The Congress is located in a suite of offices considerably less grand than Arnow’s, but that is more a matter of style than of necessity. The organization belongs to Singer and his senior partner, Edgar Bronfman; and when you’re in business with Bronfman, what do you have to prove?
Singer’s monthly trips to Israel are guided by this same tasteful understatement. Although he flies first class, he prefers to stay in modest five-star hotels. “Bronfman can afford the King David,” he said with a mischievous grin. “That’s where all the big American makhers stay. But I don’t stay there on principle. I don’t need to.”
I found Singer’s cheerful cynicism a refreshing change from the patrician earnestness of the New Israel Fund. Unlike David Arnow, Singer is a self-made man, the son of Chasidic Jews from Brooklyn. He attended a yeshiva as a boy—his family was so Old World that he spoke nothing but Yiddish until he was twelve. But once he began to talk English, thirty-five years ago, it has been hard to shut him up. Singer is an amusing monologuist with a conversational style that is part Talmudic erudition, part Brooklyn street jive. He sees himself as a kind of organizational Robin Hood, a man who steals from the rich to give to the Bronfmans.
Until Israel Singer came along, the World Jewish Congress (WJC) was a moribund outfit that labored for years under the brilliant but eccentric leadership of Nahum Goldmann. Then Singer teamed up with Edgar Bronfman, who was looking to get into the Jewish leadership game. Israel Singer, who knew a great deal about Jewish life, convinced Edgar Bronfman, who knew almost nothing, that the WJC would make a perfect vehicle. “I studied the techniques of Garibaldi,” he told me enthusiastically. “I studied the techniques of Juan Perón. And here we are.” He waved his hand grandly at his cramped office, a man with an empire.
Under Singer’s guidance, Edgar Bronfman has emerged as a major American Jewish figure, and the Congress has become an important, if somewhat maverick player in the Jewish community. Its greatest coup was its role in uncovering Kurt Waldheim’s Nazi past, an achievement that Singer dismissed with uncharacteristic modesty. “Waldheim was important,” he told me, “but believe me, I’ve got bigger things on my agenda.”
Singer’s master plan involves another theft. “I want to steal one hundred twenty million dollars from the Jewish Agency,” he said with an expansive grin. “I want to take it out of their budget for education and aliyah and use it to set up Jewish schools.”
Singer is an Orthodox Jew of some flexibility, who believes that Orthodoxy is the wave of the American Jewish future. “There are 120,000 kids in Jewish day schools in this country today, and ninety percent of them are Orthodox,” he said. By the year 2000, according to his projections, the American Jewish community will have shrunk from its present 5.5 million to about 1.5 million unless there is a drastic change in the education of American Jews. “That’s my priority—not catching Nazi war criminals,” he said.
What does Bronfman think of all this? I wondered. Edgar Bronfman, whose family made a huge amount of money in the liquor business, is not exactly renowned for his piety. Singer gave me a cheerful smile and fingered the fringes of his prayer shawl. “Bronfman and I are partners. My tzitzes make up for his shikseh wife.”
Despite Singer’s blithe attitude, this is a sore point. Bronfman is far from the only Jewish leader in America with a Christian wife; and a very large number of these leaders have children who are not Jewish or are married to non-Jews. This may account for the thunderous silence of many Jewish organizations on the subject of intermarriage.
Singer was interrupted by a transatlantic telephone call. “It’s Hungary on the line,” he said grandly, covering the mouthpiece with his hand in a conspiratorial gesture, obviously delighted to be at the fulcrum of international diplomacy. “We’re going there next month for a meeting.”
Jewish leadership in America offers rewards not normally available to the owners of distilleries, or even run-of-the-mill billionaires. There are consultations at the White House, international conferences, meetings with heads of state, a chance to play on the world stage. Israel Singer hijacked an organization for himself and Edgar Bronfman and, like the legendary chariot of Sir Moses Montefiore, they use it to ride to the rescue of Jews in distress—accompanied, as Sir Moses was not, by minicams and wire service reporters.
The Bronfman-Singer collaboration, and particularly their independent leadership style, have not endeared them to their fellow Jewish leaders. Singer is well aware of his reputation as a prima donna, but he dismisses his critics with a contemptuous wave of his hand. “I’m prepared to include others in our initiatives, like the meeting in Hungary,” he said, “providing they’re willing to pay the price.”
“What price?”
“Loyalty,” said Singer in a level tone.
“Loyalty to what?” I asked, and he paused for a dramatic beat.
“Loyalty to my program; that’s the price,” said the Jewish Perónista from Brooklyn with a smile.
The center of American Jewish communal life is, and always has been, New York City. A few dozen blocks in midtown contain the headquarters of big league Judaism—the Jewish Agency, the United Jewish Appeal, and the offices of various national organizations. In recent years, as American Jews have become more political, Washington, D.C., has become a second power center. AIPAC is located in the capital, and the important national Jewish organizations have branch offices there. Still, New York remains the hub.
In the past few years, however, the primacy of New York and the eastern seaboard has been challenged by Rabbi Marvin Hier—founder and director of the Menachem Begin Yeshiva High School, the West Coast branch of Yeshiva University, and most importantly the Simon Wiesenthal Holocaust Center. Over the past decade, Hier has employed aggressive marketing, astute media management, and emotional appeals to West Coast patriotism in order to create one of the country’s most successful Jewish organizations.
The Wiesenthal Center and its sister institutions are located in a single squat brick complex on Pico Boulevard in Los Angeles. The building, with its dark, lugubrious interior, seems strangely out of place in California, a reminder that Judaism has traditionally been an indoor activity.
The building also reflects the personality of its founder. Marvin Hier, an Orthodox rabbi who looks like a middle-aged Duddy Kravitz, is a small, intense man with piercing black eyes, a prominent hook nose, and a little potbelly that strains at the buttons of his monogrammed shirts. He was born and raised on New York’s Lower East Side, and he remains a traditionalist. On Saturday afternoons, for example, in the bean sprout capital of America, Marvin Hier eats cholent—the heavy meat-and-potato stew that his mother used to make back in New York. But the rabbi is also an iconoclast and a visionary—traits that have enabled him to become one of Jewish America’s most successful entrepreneurs.
Marvin Heir began his career as a congregational rabbi, and eventually he wound up in an Orthodox synagogue in Vancouver, Canada. In those days he used to visit Los Angeles frequently, and during his trips to Babylon he made two interesting discoveries. First, that L.A. was a Jewish boomtown, with hundreds of thousands of people and more pouring in every day; and second, that there was no important national Jewish organization headquartered on the West Coast.
The young rabbi was immediately impressed by the potential this situation offered. Thirty years earlier a fellow New Yorker, Walter O’Malley, had exploited a similar vacuum by moving his baseball team, the Brooklyn Dodgers, across the continent to Chavez Ravine. Hier has emulated him by establishing the first big league Jewish franchise on the West Coast.
“I saw that California, especially Los Angeles, was very underdeveloped from a Jewish point of view,” he said. “The American Jewish investment out here was spread very thin. Until we came along, the entire American Jewish world was tilted toward about thirty square miles on the East Coast. Take them away and there goes your Yiddishkeit.”
Unlike O’Malley, Hier had no organization of his own. But he did have a backer, Sam Belzberg, a multimillionaire congregant in Vancouver. Belzberg, already one of the most prominent Jewish philanthropists in North America, agreed to bankroll the L.A. franchise, provided that it was run on a businesslike basis. Hier accepted the condition, and by the late 1970s the two men were busy setting up shop in Los Angeles.
The move was far from popular. “The local Jews out here didn’t want us and neither did the national organizations,” said Hier. “But the truth is, Jewish growth is in California, not back East. There are already close to one million Jews on the West Coast, and that number is going to grow.”
Hier began by creating a West Coast affiliate of New York’s Orthodox Yeshiva University. Unlike the main school, the West Coast branch, which has an enrollment of about forty, offers only Judaica. The Menachem Begin Yeshiva High School is more ambitious. Established in 1980, it has around three hundred students and a basketball team, the Yeshiva Panthers, that is the class of its division.
“We’ve won the championship three out of the last four years,” Rabbi Abraham Cooper, the school’s headmaster, told me proudly. “And out here, it’s not like in Brooklyn. I mean, it’s not like we’re competing against Flatbush Yeshiva.” In addition to basketball, the school offers secular and Jewish studies—Talmud, Bible, Jewish history—“the whole shmeer,” in Cooper’s words.
The high school and college are important elements in Marvin Hier’s operation, but its centerpiece is the Simon Wiesenthal Holocaust Center, named in honor of the renowned Nazi hunter. Hier wanted an organization that would appeal not only to Orthodox Jews but to the mainstream; and only Israel and the Holocaust have that kind of broad appeal.
“In Jerusalem, Jews gather around the kotel (the Wailing Wall),” he told me. “Here in America, they gather around the Holocaust.” In setting up the Wiesenthal Center, Hier set himself up with the West Coast Holocaust franchise.
Both Marvin Hier and his disciple, Rabbi Cooper, believe in the need to act aggressively in order to counter anti-Semitism in America. In the capital of cool they employ a hot, angry style just short of Meir Kahane’s, and they are constantly on the lookout for issues that appeal to the Jewish sense of vulnerability. Hier took on CBS over its decision to cast the virulently anti-Israel actress Vanessa Redgrave as a Jewish concentration camp inmate; led the attack on Jesse Jackson’s anti-Semitic remarks in the 1984 primary campaign; and has been active in fighting Arab propaganda on the West Coast.
“We address issues that people respond to,” Rabbi Cooper told me. “We monitor anti-Semitic statements, the activities of the neo-Nazis, Arab activities, whatever. The Anti-Defamation League does the same thing? Good, great. There should be four more groups doing it. I mean, there should never be a time when the president of the United States can pick up a telephone and make one call to one Jewish leader and have spoken to everyone. We tried that in the 1930s and it didn’t work out too well.
“Look, after the Holocaust, we have two strikes against us. And Rabbi Hier says that a ballplayer with two strikes has to choke up on the bat, be a little more aggressive, not take any close pitches. That’s our philosophy here, and it makes us a little more militant than some of the other organizations around the country.”
When I mentioned the two-strike analogy to Hier he seemed somewhat vague—his hero is O’Malley, not Pee Wee Reese. But the attitude behind the analogy was plainly his. Hier believes that the threat to Jewry is worldwide, and his advocacy of Jewish rights extends far beyond the borders of California.
“Our focus is on the defense of Jews in America and abroad,” he said. “The threat is everywhere and we will fight for the rights of Jews anywhere. We have contacts in the Middle East, for example, that other Jewish organizations just don’t have. That’s how we got ahold of that anti-Semitic book by Tlas, the Syrian defense minister, even before the Israelis did. We have contacts in Europe, we deal with the Vatican, the British, and French governments. Our efforts are international.”
This kind of ambition requires big money, and the Wiesenthal Center has been especially successful in raising it. Like A.B. Data in Milwaukee, the center operates mostly through direct mailings, a technique that brought in 350,000 individual contributions in 1986, according to Rabbi Cooper. But not all of the center’s money comes from ten-dollar gifts. “Who runs the biggest fundraising dinner on the West Coast Jewish scene with all the big makhers in attendance?” Hier demanded rhetorically. “We do, that’s who. Why do they come? Because we are effective.”
Marvin Hier’s carpetbagging has excited the anger and jealousy of fellow Jewish leaders. “Some people complain that the Wiesenthal Center duplicates the activities of the Anti-Defamation League, the American Jewish Committee, and other organizations. And, in total honesty, we do to some extent,” he admitted. “But our critics don’t advocate giving all cancer research money to one medical center—they know it’s important to diversify. Hatred and anti-Semitism are not the exclusive concern of any one group. Besides, all Jewish institutions need money to survive, not just the ones in New York. And believe me, there’s enough for everybody.”
Marvin Hier, David Arnow, and Israel Singer are self-appointed Jewish leaders. Singer’s choice of Juan Perón as his model is apt; like the late Argentinian statesman, he and his colleagues function in a world without democracy. The American Jewish community has no electoral process, no constitution, and no publicly chosen representatives. It is, if anything, a plutocracy—anyone with enough money can buy into the leadership business.
The closest thing to a central organization is the Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations. But the conference is only an umbrella group, and it deals exclusively with foreign affairs, such as Israel or Soviet Jewry. Occasionally it has produced an outstanding leader—Rabbi Alexander Schindler of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations comes to mind—but usually it is headed by wealthy, well-meaning lawyers.
The real power in the Jewish community is vested not in the presidents or the Perónistas, but in local Jewish federations around the country. The federations are the definitive expression of the communal consensus in America. Although they reflect the values and ideals of the prosperous, respectable Jewish middle class, they are dominated by millionaires. Edgar Bronfman and David Arnow may be wealthy enough to own separate organizations, but most of the heavy hitters are connected to the federations and, through them, to Israel by way of the United Jewish Appeal.
The UJA divides the country into “good” and “bad” federation towns. Detroit is considered one of the best—a model of efficiency, generosity, and affiliation. I wanted to take a look at how federated Jewish life is organized; and since I grew up in the Motor City, I chose Detroit as my model.
My first stop was my stepfather Joe Colten’s house in suburban West Bloomfield. When I arrived, Joe had just returned home from a two-week UJA mission to Israel. During his absence a great pile of mail had accumulated and his housekeeper had stuffed the letters into three brown Farmer Jack shopping bags and placed them at the foot of the stairs.
Joe was exhausted from the transatlantic flight, but habit made him sit down and begin sorting through the correspondence. He is a youthful man of seventy who looks a little like Jack Benny, and he has an almost adolescent idealism about other people in general and the Jewish world in particular. As a kid growing up in Detroit he was an ardent Boy Scout, and he is still a credit to his troop—honest in business, unflaggingly good-tempered, moderate in his views, and annoyingly free of bad habits. He exercises every day without discussing it, goes bird-watching on Saturday mornings, studies Hebrew on Sundays (something he has done all his life), votes for liberal Democrats, reads The New Yorker, drinks two scotch-on-the-rocks before dinner, roots for all Detroit sports teams, and sometimes races after fire engines with a teenager’s enthusiasm.
The huge stack of letters in the Farmer Jack shopping bags had nothing to do with bird-watching or baseball, however; the letters were from the Jews. Joe Colten is, first and foremost, a federation man, a member of the Jewish community. He has spent his life working for Jewish causes, donating more time and money than he could afford. One result of this dedication is that he has managed to get himself on just about every Jewish mailing list in the country.
Joe had been away from home for only twelve days, but in his absence he had been contacted by dozens of famous people and national and international organizations. The Jewish Welfare Federation wanted him to attend an open house. The Zionist Organization of America sent him a bulletin. There was a solicitation from the Jewish Association for Retarded Citizens, an invitation to participate in a mission to Israel with the Michigan chapter of the Friends of the Hebrew University, and an acknowledgment of a contribution to AIPAC. He got a letter from the Soviet Jewry Committee asking for money, another from the Jewish National Fund beseeching him to plant trees in Israel, and a third exhorting him to “get out the vote” for the World Zionist Congress elections.
And there was a solicitation from the National Jewish Center for Immunology and Respiratory Illness in Denver; a bulletin from the American Society of Israel’s Technion University; a letter from MOPAC, a local Jewish political action committee, asking for $1,000; a note from the Allied Jewish Campaign; and a fundraising appeal from the Friends of the Israel Defense Forces, the only army in the world with a foreign fan club.
And a NATPAC solicitation from Joan Rivers; a letter from Jack Klugman asking for money for the Institute for Jewish Hospice; and a note from Arthur Waskow on behalf of the Shalom Center, for “Jewish perspectives on preventing a nuclear holocaust.” And an invitation to a Polish-Jewish-Ukrainian dialogue sponsored by the American Jewish Committee; a solicitation from the Anti-Defamation League; an imitation leatherette address book from the Yeshiva Gedolah of Greater Detroit (with an attached form for donations); an invitation to a United Hebrew Schools luncheon featuring “Original and Traditional Folk Music Performed Vibrantly by Laslo and Sandor Slomovitz”; and appeals from the Crown Heights Jewish Community Council of Brooklyn, the American Friends of Magen David Adom Society, and the Israel Mobile Mitzvah Centers of the Chabad Chasidim of New York.
“What are you going to do with all this stuff?” I asked when he was finished going through the correspondence. “I’ve never even heard of most of these organizations.”
Joe smiled. He had heard of them all, and then some. “You don’t have to know about Jewish organizations,” he said mildly. “You live in Israel. But for us it’s different. If you can’t do more, at least you can write a check or go to a meeting.”
“Don’t tell me you send money to these outfits. I mean, the Crown Heights Jewish Community Council of Brooklyn? Mobile Mitzvah Centers? You’ve got to be kidding.”
Joe gave an embarrassed laugh. “I won’t send them very much—just a few dollars. Nothing significant. It’s just part of being a member of the community. It’s something you do. Most of my time and whatever donation I make go to the federation anyway; that’s what really counts.”
In Detroit, the federation is a kind of municipal Jewish government in exile. When I was growing up in the 1960s, there were eighty thousand Jews in Detroit, most of them clustered in homogeneous neighborhoods in the city’s northwest corner. But in the summer of 1967, just as I was leaving for Israel, the adjacent black ghettos erupted in one of the worst urban riots in American history. Forty-three people were killed, and large parts of the city were transformed into smoldering ruins.
For people like Joe Colten, who were born and raised in the city, it was a heartbreaking and threatening development. The Jewish community fled Detroit en masse, moving so far and so fast that a lot of people spent the winter in unfinished houses in deserted pastureland ten or fifteen miles north of the old neighborhood.
In the suburbs, the Jews rebuilt their communal life around shopping malls, car pools, and designer synagogues. Meanwhile, in the city, Detroit elected its first black mayor, the flamboyant Coleman Young. Young gave Detroit an aggressively black administration that many whites (including many Jews) considered hostile. The tone was set in Young’s inaugural address, when he advised the criminals of Detroit “to hit Eight Mile Road and keep going.” Eight Mile Road separates the city from its northern suburbs, and many of the uprooted Jews took a dim view of the mayor’s suggestion.
The years since 1967 have been hard on Detroit. The aftermath of the riots blended into the prolonged recession of the 1970s and early 1980s, and the city lost both confidence and economic momentum. It also developed a deserved reputation as one of the most violent places in America. I arrived in town shortly after No Crime Day—a Coleman Young–sponsored cease-fire that turned into a fiasco when three people, including a Detroit policeman, were murdered and eight others were shot.
“They’ve even got a murder meter on the Lodge Freeway,” Joe Colten told me unhappily. “It’s like the old automobile production meter except it measures homicides.”
“How are the numbers this year?” I asked. Detroiters follow the statistics of mayhem with the pained expertise of stockbrokers in a bear market.
“We’re still number one in the country, I’m afraid,” he said. “I just don’t think things are getting any better.”
The prosperity and security of the Jewish community contrast markedly with the violence and decay of the city it left behind. Although it is shrinking—there are about fifty-five thousand Jews in the Detroit area, twenty-five thousand less than a generation ago—the community radiates middle-class respectability and good citizenship. Most Jews belong to a synagogue or temple, and perhaps ninety percent donate money to some Jewish cause. The bulk of these donations come during the annual federation fundraising drive, which is the most important activity of the Jewish year.
Detroit has always been a good fundraising town, and in 1987 the federation was going for a new record—twenty-five million dollars. That sounded like an astonishingly large amount of money, but Colten, who was a member of the planning committee, was confident it could be raised. “We’re having our first committee meeting this week,” he told me. “Why don’t you come along and see how it’s done.”
The meeting was held on a Monday morning at eight. As we drove to the suburban Hebrew school where it was to take place, Joe filled me in on how the $25 million would be spent.
“Half of what we raise stays here in Detroit to fund local projects and services. We run two Jewish centers, a year-around camp, three day schools, old-age homes, and vocational and family counseling services. Twelve million dollars may sound like a lot, but you’d be surprised how much it costs to maintain the community. And the other half goes to Israel.”
“Don’t people mind sending so much to Israel?” I asked.
Joe shook his head. “Israel raises money for local projects, not the other way around. If we didn’t have Israel, people wouldn’t give as much.”
“Why do people give so much?” I asked. “I mean, there’s no Jewish I.R.S. Nobody can force them.”
Joe smiled again—a gentle, worldly smile. “People in Detroit have discretionary money, and we expect them to give. It’s a kind of self-tax. People in the community respect that. And if they don’t, well, there’s no reason to be lenient with tax evaders.”
When we arrived at the Hebrew school I found about forty people eating bagels and sipping coffee around long tables. Most of them were men in their forties, fifties, and early sixties. They wore conservative business suits and serious expressions. There was only one woman, Jane Sherman, the daughter of multimillionaire philanthropist Max Fisher; and only one of the men wore a yarmulke. In Detroit and other cities around the country, federation leadership is mostly in the hands of Reform and Conservative Jewish men with a lot of money.
“How rich do you have to be to join this club?” I asked Joe, and he winced at my crassness.
“Put it this way,” he said. “There are three W’s—work, wisdom, and wealth. To be involved in the campaign, you need two of them.” A man sitting nearby overheard the answer and laughed. “Right, two W’s are enough—provided one of them is wealth.”
The cochairman of the campaign, a supermarket mogul, called the meeting to order. The first item on his agenda was a report on a recent UJA junket to Israel. He called on the group’s leader. “We had thirty-nine people on the mission,” the leader said, “and it was a fantastic experience. The total pledges came to, ah, approximately two hundred thousand dollars.”
The room erupted in applause. “Tremendous,” said the cochairman, “that’s just wonderful.” The leader sat down beaming, but the cynic sitting nearby snorted. “Two hundred thousand from forty people? Chicken feed.”
There was a little more old business, and then the chairman gaveled the room to attention and began to discuss the upcoming precampaign. The federation’s computers list approximately ninety percent of the city’s Jews, and there is a special file for eight hundred or so who have given $5,000 or more in the past.
The eight hundred are the primary targets of the precampaign. The chairman called their names out from index cards and people raised their hands, claiming them like bidders at an auction. The idea is to match solicitors with friends or business associates. This makes for a more personal approach; it also makes it harder for solicitees to bluff their way out of contributing. In addition, campaign volunteers pool information about the financial condition of potential donors. In a close-knit community like Detroit, it’s not too hard to come up with this sort of intelligence.
The next order of business was a report on the series of open-house meetings scheduled for the late fall. The first—and by far the most prestigious—is held by tradition at the home of Max Fisher, the godfather of the Detroit Jewish community. To have a successful campaign you need a trickle-down effect, with the richest people providing a yardstick for the rest of the community. In Detroit, the big givers give big; a ticket to the Fisher reception would be a minimum pledge of $100,000, and about thirty people would pay the price of admission.
Joe Cohen’s notions of good citizenship aside, there are a number of reasons people give large sums of money to the campaign—egotism, social climbing, and self-interested public relations are mixed with altruism and a sense of community responsibility. But the motives are of no concern to the federation. People are expected to do the right thing. Those who do are given the benefit of the doubt; those who don’t are punished.
Sanctions take varying forms. Some are social—you cannot, for example, join a Jewish country club in Detroit without making a respectable contribution to the campaign. And for those who don’t care about golf, sterner measures are available.
That morning a man mentioned the name of a large firm whose principal partners—Jews—had refused to give to the campaign. There were angry murmurs. “Does anyone here do business with them?” someone demanded, and one of the others nodded. “I’d like to discuss this with you after the meeting,” he said grimly. It was not difficult to imagine what that conversation would be like. There are, after all, plenty of other firms in Detroit, not all of them Jewish by any means, that know how to do the right thing for the campaign and the community.
As the meeting progressed, I noticed a small group of young lawyers and businessmen who were sitting together. In their late thirties or early forties, they were easily identifiable as Young Leaders, an elite that has sprung up in every American city with an active federation.
The Young Leaders are a conscious creation of the United Jewish Appeal. The question “Who will carry on?” is a constant refrain in Jewish history; but about a decade ago, the UJA realized that for this generation the question has a special acuity. The baby boomers have no personal memories of Eastern Europe, the Holocaust, or the founding of Israel. They are not assimilating into American life—they are already assimilated. Unlike their grandparents, membership in the Jewish community is neither necessary nor automatic; they have other options. Raised on the words “cool” and “relevance,” many of them find the bourgeois world of federated Jewry stodgy, parochial, and somewhat embarrassing.
The old-line community leadership, composed mostly of businessmen, looked at the problem in entrepreneurial terms—how to sell Jewish involvement to a new generation of picky consumers. As David Hermelin, a leader of the federation in Detroit, told me, they realized that they would have to make the community “the in place to be.” It is hard to sell B’nai B’rith softball leagues and sisterhood kaffeeklatsches to kids who grew up in the sixties; but Israel is something real and concrete and it has become the primary marketing tool for selling Jewish community involvement to the yuppies.
In the 1970s, the UJA began to run tours and “missions” to Israel designed especially for the young Americans. They attracted—and were meant to attract—mostly nonreligious professionals and businesspeople with some money and the prospect of earning or inheriting a great deal more.
The UJA Young Leader missions are aimed more at consciousness raising than fundraising. There is a whole generation of Americans who feel Jewish (or can be made to feel Jewish) but don’t know why. A UJA mission—which often begins with a visit to Polish concentration camps and culminates in Israel, at Masada and Jerusalem—is a crash course, Judaism 101. By offering it, the UJA—nominally a fundraising organization—has become one of the dominant groups in American Jewish life, primarily through its ability to play on the strings of Jewish emotion. A typical mission begins with a visit to Poland and the concentration camps and then proceeds to Israel and the symbols of survival and sovereignty—Masada, an Israeli army camp, a kibbutz, Soviet immigrants, and the like. Usually the trip culminates in a ceremony at the Western Wall or some other symbolic site.
Over the years, UJA groups have become an easy target for Israeli satirists. No one is more aware than Israelis—who live with the crushing burdens of Jewish state building—of the inherent fraud of the UJA slogan—“We are one.” It is easy to resent the wealthy, secure young Americans who want to share in the drama and romance of the contemporary Jewish struggle without paying a price higher than a tax-exempt donation.
And yet, it is hard to deny these missions are an effective way—perhaps the only effective way—of attracting yuppies to the Jewish community. Israel, a place where Jewishness is relevant and cool, a country that can provide a powerful emotional experience, has become the recruiting ground for the next generation of community leaders.
Not incidentally, this form of training and selection ensures that the leaders of federated Jewry will continue to be Israel-oriented. Many of them try to re-ethnicize themselves along Israeli lines—using little Hebrew phrases, hanging Israeli paintings in their living rooms, and serving humos and felafel at their cocktail parties. They take a keen interest in Israeli politics, send their children to Hebrew day schools, and generally visit Israel once a year or more.
These Young Leaders are the fruit of fifteen years of patient labor. They are made Jews: sincere, committed, but not quite authentic, even to themselves. Their presence at the campaign meeting that morning in Detroit was a message to the other Jewish yuppies of the city: It’s hip to be Jewish. You can have it all: Jamaica and Jerusalem, Harvard and Hebrew school, Porsches and Passover. Israel as the Jewish state, and suburbia as the Jewish state of the art.
Federated Judaism is strongest in the American hinterland. New York and Los Angeles—the two biggest Jewish concentrations—have notoriously weak organized communities. Middle-sized cities like Detroit, Pittsburgh, and Cleveland are far more cohesive. But the highest levels of affiliation and Jewish activity are often found in places where Jews feel most isolated—places like Waco, Texas.
“Small towns make good Jews,” said a friend who drove me down to Waco from Austin on a rainy Saturday morning in January. My friend was originally from Massachusetts, and he has a keen eye for the various peculiarities of Texas Judaism.
“Jews down here tend to assume the characteristics of the general population,” he said. “Take Dallas, for example. The worst thing that can happen to a father in North Dallas is to have an ugly daughter. It’s the world’s plastic surgery capital. And a certain amount of that rubs off on the Jews who live there, too. Or Laredo, for example, down near the Mexican border. I went there once to address a Hadassah meeting, and probably a quarter of the women were Mexican converts. When I went in the temple I didn’t know whether to put on a yarmulke or a sombrero.”
Waco, according to my companion, is one of the best communities in the state—well organized, generous, and active. “Young Judea was founded there, of all places, and it still produces a lot of national Jewish leader types,” he said. One of them, Dr. Stanley Hersh, was scheduled to meet us out in Downsville (population 130) at the farm of Justin “J.R.” Rosenfeld.
Rosenfeld and Hersh are a sort of Texas-Jewish odd couple. When we arrived at his spacious brick farmhouse, J.R., a powerfully built man in his late sixties, had just come in from chores. He was dressed in a flannel shirt and suspenders, faded jeans, and worn, hand-tooled Justin cowboy boots.
Hersh, a transplanted Cleveland ophthalmologist in his late forties, was a city slicker by comparison. Dressed in a cashmere sweater, worsted slacks, and polished pennyloafers, he looked like the kind of man somebody like Rosenfeld might run off his property with a twelve-gauge shotgun.
Justin Rosenfeld was born and raised in Germany, where he was a teenage soccer star before Hitler forced him to flee in the late 1930s. Like many other German refugees, his first stop was Washington Heights. But Rosenfeld wanted to be a farmer, and there were no cows in New York City. He worked his way west instead, and wound up in Waco, where he was welcomed by the Jewish community. At the time, there were almost two thousand Jews in town; today, the number is closer to six hundred.
It took me a minute to realize that Rosenfeld does not have a speech impediment; he has two accents. One is a thick Texas drawl, the other a Germanic hiss, and they are laid one on top of the other, like simultaneous renditions of the same song by Waylon Jennings and Henry Kissinger.
“Ah vas vatchin’ TV the othah day,” he told me, “an’ ah saw dem ole boys mit the fur hats ovah in Jerusalem, raisin’ a ruckus an’ all jus’ becauss some folks vas a-drivin’ on Shabbes.” The accent is a fair representation of Rosenfeld’s life, divided into two unequal parts by his flight from the Nazis.
J.R. follows the news from Israel, but he has a limited familiarity with Jewish politics. He admitted being baffled by a recent midnight phone call from New York, in which someone solicited his vote for the Labor Party slate in the upcoming Zionist Congress elections. “Ah don’t know nothin’ about no Zionist elections,” he told the caller, and then he hung up.
Dr. Hersh laughed fondly at the story. He is an insider, one of the leaders of the Waco Federation and a national UJA activist. He began to explain the complicated web that links Downsville, Texas, to the World Zionist Congress, but Rosenfeld waved his hands in mock protest.
“Now, ahm very Jewish in mah vay,” he said, “but ah just don’t care nothin’ about no organizations. I’ve been to Israel and I giff a little to hep out; but the truth is, I’d rather travel around the U.S. with another dairy farmer who’s a gentile. I can talk to Jews for about a day or two about Israel and whatnot, and then I’m plumb out of conversation. But if I’m with another farmer, I don’t never run out of things to talk about.”
Rosenfeld knows a great deal more about the Dairy Farmers Association than about the Jewish Agency, the Council of Jewish Federations, or any of the other national organizations that his friend Stanley Hersh belongs to. “But ahm right proud to be a Jew,” he said, “and if something comes up at a dairyman’s meeting, vell, I let them know vere I stand right quick.”
“Let me tell you something about Justin Rosenfeld,” said Hersh. “He’s the kind of man who’s there when you need him. He may live way out here and spend his days with cows, but he’s a member of the community. You want to know my definition of a Jew in a small town? Somebody who affiliates, who gives money to support Jewish causes and fellow Jews.”
Hersh is a very smart, articulate man who takes a hard line on Jewish slackers. “A few years ago I was president of the Conservative synagogue here in town, and one day I got a call from someone I had never heard of, asking if he could bury his father in our cemetery. It turned out that he and his family had been in town for years, but they had never bothered to make contact with the community or to join any kind of Jewish institution. I said, ‘Sure we’ll bury him, it’ll cost four thousand dollars.’ The son almost blew up. ‘Four thousand dollars for a funeral is outrageous,’ he said. I told him, ‘It’s one thousand for the funeral and three thousand for the back dues you owe us for keeping up the cemetery all these years.’ You know what? He paid the money.”
Hersh, a Jewish political sophisticate, is well aware of the controversy surrounding Reform and Conservative religious legitimacy in Israel. But in Waco, criteria for affiliation are somewhat less rigid. When I asked him if the Jewish community ever checked into anyone’s Jewish credentials, he seemed surprised by the question.
“Actually, I don’t think anyone has ever been checked. If somebody says he’s Jewish, that’s good enough,” he said.
And what, I wondered, would get somebody kicked out of the community? Again, Hersh seemed puzzled. “Kicked out? Frankly, I can’t think of anything,” he said.
“What if someone got up in shul and said he believed that Jesus Christ was the Messiah?” I asked.
“Well, in that case, I’d send him over to the Reform temple,” he said, laughing.
As a community leader, Stanley Hersh is primarily concerned with consensus and unity. When he saw me jotting down his joke about the temple, he quickly pointed out that he had been kidding.
“As Jews, we should avoid the issues that divide us, and concentrate on the ones that unite us, especially in a small town like Waco,” he said. “And Israel is the great unifier, the cause that every Jew can rally around. I happen to be a Republican, but I support liberal Democrats who are bad for my interests as a physician if they are good for Israel.”
For Hersh, who grew up in Cleveland in the 1950s, Israel is more than a tool for achieving Jewish solidarity. “It made us acceptable in this country as Jews,” he said. “The Six-Day War was the turning point, wouldn’t you say, Justin?”
Rosenfeld nodded emphatically. “Yup, Israel’s wars haff changed mah image here in Waco, no doubt about that.”
The federated Jews of Waco, like federated Jews everywhere, express support for Israel primarily through fundraising. In 1985, the community collected $650,000, not including a special appeal for Ethiopian Jewry. “On that one, we got everybody together at the synagogue and said, ‘You can save a human life for $6,000. We raised $70,000 in one night,” Hersh said proudly.
“Yeah, this Hersh is tough,” said Rosenfeld with an affectionate grin. “Every year he comes by for the UJA and if you giff him five dollahs, he asks you for fifteen. Then, ah come around for a contribution for the fire brigade dance, and the Jews in Waco make a beeline in the other direction.” It was an old joke between friends. The Jews of Waco are civic-spirited, and contribute to any number of local causes, including the Downsville volunteer fire brigade dance. And J.R. Rosenfeld, despite his lack of interest in New York Jewish organizations and the intricacies of national Jewish politics, gives a great deal more than fifteen dollars to the community each year.
We sat around the massive wood table in Rosenfeld’s kitchen, sipping coffee and eating huge slabs of pumpkin pie. Although both Hersh and Rosenfeld are transplanted Texans, they have a native love of anecdote, and they swapped tall tales about life in Waco.
“Justin, you remember that convert we had, the one who had ten kids?” asked Hersh, and Rosenfeld grinned, anticipating a well-known story. Hersh turned to me. “See, there was this guy, a real hillbilly, he converted to Judaism. He was sort of strange and he never had a job, but he had ten kids and he was a Jew. So we helped him out, gave him food packages and money to tide him over. And then, one day he got himself a job as a truck driver. And do you know the first thing he did after he got his paycheck? He quit the synagogue and joined the Reform temple.” Both men laughed and I joined in, remembering Vernon and Mary Lou, the converts of my boyhood.
“Yeah, ah remember that feller,” said Rosenfeld. “Wonder whatever happened to him?”
Hersh shrugged. The man eventually resigned from the temple and is no longer a member of the Jewish community. And for Dr. Stanley Hersh—a federation man in a small town—a Jew without a paid-up membership is no more real than a tree falling in an empty forest.
The day after my visit to Downsville I flew out of Dallas to Las Vegas in the company of two hundred more-than-usually-optimistic Texans. The sky, rainy all weekend, was suddenly blue, Bloody Marys flowed; and the hopeful, many of whom seemed to know each other, hooted and hollered across the aisles in a camaraderie of shared expectation and greed. Some would return in an even better mood; most would lose a little and enjoy the trip; and an unlucky few would tap out and come home to Texas by Greyhound.
On the other end of the line, Las Vegas was waiting. Like Mecca, the Vatican, or any other place organized around and dedicated to a single infallible principle, it is a patient city. A certain percentage of humanity will always want to get rich quick; greed is a constant. Once the gambling houses along the strip were owned by hoodlums named Siegel and Lansky and Dalitz. Today they have been taken over by faceless corporations. But the principle is the same, the logic of the odds just as inexorable.
Actually, there are two Las Vegases. One is the outgrowth of the original town, a frontier outpost now firmly in the political grip of the dour elders of the Mormon Church. It is a conservative place, full of playgrounds and churches, schools and libraries, built mostly from money generated by what is euphemistically called “the gaming industry.”
The other Las Vegas is the Strip—casinos and showgirls and come-on $3.99 steak dinners. This Vegas is an outgrowth of the vision of Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel, who founded the first major casino, the Flamingo, in the late 1940s. Siegel’s dream of creating a gambling empire in the desert came true, but he wasn’t there to see it. The Flamingo lost money, a violation of the inexorable principle, and his partners relieved him of control by having him shot through the head.
Today there are approximately twenty thousand Jews in Las Vegas. Roughly eighteen thousand are residents of the Strip—gamblers, casino employees, and transients in a town where people change addresses on an average of every three months. The other two thousand live in Las Vegas proper and make up the city’s federated community.
Las Vegas is not an easy city to organize; a man like Stanley Hersh would go out of his mind chasing down the unaffiliated Jews. For years Jerry Countess had that job, and he is glad to be out of it. A wiry little man with a George Burns delivery, he came to Vegas from New York in the early seventies to run the federation. Now retired, he still keeps in close touch with the Jewish community, and he has fond memories of its glory days.
“It used to be very easy to run a federation campaign in this town,” he said. “We’d get a dozen biggies from the casinos together and someone would say, ‘Okay, this year you give twenty-five grand, you give fifty grand,’ like that. In a couple of hours we had our whole campaign. But the biggies are all gone now. How can you solicit some corporation in Cleveland? We can’t even get them to comp us for rooms anymore.”
In the sixties, when Jews still ran the casinos, fundraising in Las Vegas was not only easy, it was fun. Some of the top stars in show business were drafted and one year Frank Sinatra himself hosted the main fundraiser.
“That caused somewhat of a problem because Carl Cohen was the chairman of the campaign that year,” said Countess. I looked at him quizzically. “You don’t know who Carl Cohen was,” he said. “Well, Carl was a wonderful man out of Cleveland. And one night at the Sands Hotel, he got into a fight with Sinatra and knocked his front teeth out. That’s who Carl Cohen was.
“Anyway, Carl was the chairman of the campaign, and Frank agreed to host the meeting, so there was a problem. Somebody called up Carl and explained the situation, and he decided not to attend in order not to hurt the campaign. He was a real mensch.”
“How did the fundraiser go?” I asked.
“You mean with Sinatra? It was great. He walked in with this entourage of has-beens that he used to take care of, Joe Louis and José Greco or whoever. He was about half blitzed. He says, ‘I don’t have to tell anyone here about Israel. I pledge fifty thousand dollars.’ And then he looked over at his buddies and began saying, ‘I pledge another two thousand dollars for Joe Louis, and another two thousand dollars for José Greco.’ It wound up costing him another seventeen thousand dollars. What a night. There were biggies in this town in those days.”
The last of the biggies is Moe Dalitz, once alleged to be an important underworld figure and a partner of Meyer Lansky’s. Today he is an old man, full of good works, who spends his days dozing at a gin rummy table in one of the local country clubs. I asked Countess about Dalitz, expecting to hear a disclaimer, and got a testimonial instead.
“He just gave half a million bucks to build a new Reform temple out here. Half a million for a temple,” Countess said, shaking his head in wonderment. “And it was Mr. Dalitz who set up the annual Temple Men’s Club Gin Rummy Tournament at the Desert Inn. Believe me, out here Moe Dalitz is the Zeyde … you know, like the Godfather, only not Italian.”
I had come to Las Vegas to give a lecture at one of the local synagogues and, as he said good-bye, Jerry Countess grimaced convincingly and explained that he would be unable to attend my talk because of a bad back. The move was well executed, and I imagined that he must have used it before; there is a limit, after all, to how many lectures a federation director can reasonably be expected to attend. He told me that I would be having dinner with several community leaders, pointed me in the direction of the Riviera casino, wished me good luck, and said good-bye.
My hosts that night turned out to be a charming, attractive widow in late middle age, now devoting her life to Jewish causes; and a rumpled, personable physician in his forties who had moved to Las Vegas from Cleveland. Neither seemed likely to have any connection with the Strip, and I didn’t want to offend them by implying that they did. To find out about Jewish life in the American Gomorrah, I adopted a strategy of wily indirection.
“I know that the Jews in Las Vegas are mostly business people or professionals, and I’m sure the community has nothing to do with the gambling casinos and nightclubs,” I said. But do you have any, ah, occasional contact with any of the people on the Strip?” I asked.
The lady chewed a shrimp from her salad in silence, and for a moment I thought I had offended her. Then she brightened. “Well, I have an example of what you might mean. A number of years ago, we had a rabbi whom some of the congregation didn’t care for and wanted to replace. They scheduled a meeting to vote on renewing his contract, and a number of us who supported him decided to do a little campaigning.
“Several of the girls from the sisterhood and I went over to the Strip and talked to some of the Jewish men there who belonged to the temple but weren’t really very active. We thought they might make a difference.” Her eyes sparkled at the recollection of this Machiavellian move, and she took a dainty sip of water before continuing.
“Well, they promised to come and vote for the rabbi, but on the night of the meeting, none of them did. The rabbi lost and we were terribly disappointed. The next day I went to one of the casinos to find out what had happened, but no one seemed to know where any of the men were. Finally somebody said, ‘Didn’t you read the papers yesterday? Frank Costello got shot in New York.’ ”
I was waiting for the rest of the story, but the lady seemed to have finished. “Sorry,” I said, “but I don’t see the connection.”
“Oh,” she said, as if addressing a slow child. “You see, it wasn’t their fault. If somebody hit Costello in New York, naturally they had to go underground for a while.”
My delight in the story was obvious, and it precipitated a flood of local folklore. The doctor, who had led the temple building drive, spoke of Moe Dalitz’s generosity in the respectful tone of a Detroit physician talking about Lee Iacocca. The widow, giggling, mentioned that a local Jewish madam had given a talk to a B’nai B’rith meeting. Prostitution is legal in Nevada, and the madam, a Jewish lady named Beverly Hurel, is a highly regarded businesswoman.
As the dinner progressed, the Las Vegas Respectables talked knowledgeably and naturally about the gaming business. They rarely gamble—that is a sucker’s game, and suckers don’t last long in Las Vegas—but the city’s economy depends on the casinos, and keeping abreast of developments there is nothing more than informed citizenship.
“I have several friends who are gambling people,” the physician said. “Dealers, pit bosses, middle-level management. Of course, I don’t see them much, because they work irregular hours. And if the casino is losing money, they change the shifts around, you know, to change the luck.” He explained this as if he were discussing an established scientific principle.
The widow, who had lived in Las Vegas for many years, had some vivid recollections of the Golden Era, when the casinos had been run by Jews. “Jack Entratter, for example, was very active in the community,” she said. “He was president of the Sands Hotel and Temple Beth Sholom at the same time, and he would donate his facilities for our sisterhood meetings. Jack was a wonderful man. He first came out here as a dealer, I think, or perhaps he was muscle, I can’t remember. That was in the days when the Rat Pack used to frequent the Sands. It was a different town in those days.”
The federated Jews of Las Vegas know that life is not all sevens and elevens, and living in the city imposes certain obligations. “In the old days,” said the widow, “if a Jew came to town and got tapped out, he could always get one of the downtown businessmen to loan him enough to get back home. My husband, may he rest in peace, was always bringing people home for the night.” Nowadays, emergency assistance is handled by the Jewish Family Service, which provides a meal, a place to spend the night, and in extreme cases bus fare back home. People who require such aid are viewed as imprudent, but the Jews of Las Vegas, sophisticated about human nature, do not make judgments. “Sometimes you just get a bad run,” the doctor explained with a philosophical shrug.
Dinner broke up and we went to the synagogue, where about two hundred people were gathered to hear a lecture on Israeli politics. Sammy Davis was at the Holiday Inn Casino that night, Kris Kristofferson was playing the Hilton Showroom, and Don Rickles was working the Sands, but the synagogue-going Jews of Las Vegas weren’t interested. Here, on the inside of the great American pinball machine, they gathered to hear a little news from Eretz Israel.
From the platform, they looked like a typical American Jewish audience, middle-class, middle-aged, and intelligent. But when I began by saying that I was happy to be in Las Vegas because I was already seventy dollars up, they burst into a loud cheer. There probably isn’t another synagogue in the United States where such a boast would be met by anything but chilly disapproval. But I was supporting the local economy, and even the most straitlaced sisterhood lady could have no objection to that. And besides, I could almost hear them thinking, Israel can use the money.