By Donald H. Harrison

LA JOLLA, Calif.—Sitting in the Intensive Care Unit by the bed of my father-in-law, Sam Zeiden, or in a nearby waiting room at Scripps Green Hospital, I am grateful to Abigail Pogrebin, a former producer for Sixty Minutes, for writing Stars of David, a book in which she interviewed more than 60 celebrities about being Jewish.  

Published last year, Stars of David gave me many other things to reflect upon as dad, under sedation, slowly, but slowly, recovers from heart valve replacement surgery and quadruple bypass surgery.  He is 87 and the operation would be hard on a patient half his age, so we are cautioned not to expect quick progress.

Pogrebin conducted interviews with Jews who are prominent in fields such as the law, medicine, journalism, and most especially entertainment, and touched on a litany of Jewish subjects in many of the interviews:  Jewish observance in the home, intermarriage, synagogue attendance, Israel, and the Holocaust.  

I found myself taking notes on the comments made by the various celebrities about the Holocaust, then lumping them into seven overlapping categories to better understand how formative the Shoah has been in shaping Jewish identities.  

Some of the interviewees offered overviews of the Holocaust as part of a longer Jewish history; others used it as a moral compass, in some cases engaging in self-criticism; others expressed their continuing feelings of vulnerability as Jews; some told of the connection they feel to those who perished; a few told how the Holocaust transformed their belief systems, and some recounted post-Holocaust encounters with Germans.

Of course, in an article such as this, I cannot deal with each and every one of these themes, so I sincerely recommend that you either purchase Pogrebin's book or check it out from the library—as I did from the San Carlos branch of the San Diego Public Library.  But to give you a taste, let me address two of the recurring themes: Post Holocaust Encounters, and the Holocaust as a Moral Compass.

Post Holocaust Encounters

*Actor Dustin Hoffman told of stopping to buy baguettes to take with him on a planned trip to Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.  A man, recognizing him, shouted "Dustin Hoffman—Juden!" and the actor's blood froze. He didn't reply, just stood there like a deer in the headlights.  No one else said anything either. The man was escorted out of the store.  Life resumed.

* Ronald O. Perelman, chairman of Revlon, was at a New York City restaurant when he heard some Germans, who possibly had just seen the play The Producers, disparaging Jews.  Perelman completely lost his composure, screaming at the tourists. "I have never seen such a bunch of fucking assholes as you people... you guys don't know what the fuck you're talking about, and if you don't like it, you should get the fuck out of here."  It was amazing that Perelman told this story on himself, showing how inarticulate any of us—even the head of a multinational corporation—can become when confronted with the old horror.

* Actor Richard Dreyfuss similarly exploded at as press conference in Germany. Asked how he felt being a Jew in Germany, he made headlines by responding: "hostile, I would like to kill everyone I see over forty-five years."  He told Pogrebin: "I honestly divided it by age.  If you were over forty-five, where the fuck were you when Jews were slaughtered?..."

* Leonard Nimoy had a very different experience.  As the actor who played Spock, he attended a Star Trek convention in Germany, wanting to find a way to tell his audience he was Jewish.  In a question-and-answer session, one person asked how he happened to portray in a movie  Mel Mermelstein, who sued a Holocaust denier. Nimoy told them of his background, explaining that he drew on being Jewish when playing Spock.  The spread-finger hand greeting of Spock was copied from the way rabbis give blessings.  "When I finished, the place started applauding and they would not stop.  When I tell you they wouldn't stop, I mean they would not stop.  They went on and on.  I started crying.  They were on their feet and they started cheering.  It was incredible..."

* Mark Spitz told of being a Jewish swimmer at the 1972 Munich Olympic games.  They were supposed to be a coming out party for a renewed, civilized German people.  He won seven gold medals, but Arab terrorists murdered 11 Israeli athletes.  "So there was simultaneously the triumph of my accomplishment and the tragedy of the Israelis; these two were incredibly linked."

Moral Compass

*James P. Rubin, the former assistant secretary of State for public affairs under President Bill Clinton, told Pogrebin that his passion for helping the Bosnian people "was partially and substantially" a reflection of his determination as a Jew that a Holocaust should never happen again.  "Bosnia was a very powerful issue because it didn't affect national interests directly...I found a correlation between Jewish people and caring about Muslims in Bosnia.  That's the part of being Jewish that means a lot to me..."

*Richard Holbrooke, who served as an assistant secretary of  State for Europe, and at another time, for Asia, under President Clinton, also had served as an ambassador to Germany.  He told Pogrebin that as ambassador, he told the Germans "they can be proud of the fact that they faced up to the Holocaust in retrospect, but they ought to not ignore the fact that there are only one hundred thousand Jews in Germany today, but there are four million Turks, and they ought to face up tot he Turkish problem that is real and present."

*U.S. Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.), who quips that he is a triple minority—Jewish, gay, and left-handed—suggested that with a common history of being discriminated against, and having relatives who were killed in the Holocaust, Jews understand what it means to be "unfairly treated because of who you are.  That is one of the reasons I think Jews are as supportive on gay rights as they are..."

*Producer Mike Nichols recalled leaving Germany as a 7-year-old during the time of the Russian-German pact—important, because his father has a Russian passport.  The family went from consulate to consulate trying to obtain a visa, finally getting approved to go to the U.S. after a cousin pledged to financially guarantee that the four members of his family would not be a burden for the rest of their lives.  Such a requirement, said Nichols pointedly, is a far cry from the promise on the base of the Statue of Liberty, telling the world to send its "huddled masses."

Other categories
There are numerous other reflections on the Holocaust within this worthy book.  In the Post-Holocaust Trauma category, I also placed the thoughts of Al Franken, Morley Safer, Krya Sedgwick and Aaron Sorkin. In the Overview category, I lumped Edgar Bronfman, Aaron Brown, David Copperfield, Fran Drescher,  Max Frankel, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Ellen Goodman and  Leon Wieseltier.

Those whose comments seemed focus on Jewish vulnerability were Jason Alexander, Alan Dershowitz,  Ed Koch, William Kristol, Ruth Reichl, Steven Spielberg, and Wendy Wasserstein. Self-criticism, including criticism of Israel, was the category I assigned to Kenneth Cole, Nora Ephron, Don Hewitt, Norman Lear and  Mike Wallace.

Those who expressed some form of connection with Holocaust victims included Linda Fairstein, Charles Grodin, Jerome Groopman, Tony Kushner, Barry Levinson, Sarah Jessica Parker, Natalie Portman, Joan Rivers, Gloria Steinem,  Diane von Furstenberg, and Gene Wilder.  In some cases, the identification was so deep as to lead non-Jews to embrace Judaism.  This kind of transformation can be seen in the comment of Kati Marton and Laura Schlessinger.

Other interviewees simply did not touch substantively on the Holocaust, the time of the interview taken up by other subjects.  In this category were Alan and Marilyn Bergman, Steven Breyer, Shawn Green, Kitty Carlisle Hart, Larry King, Paul Mazursky, Richard Meier, Harold Prince, William Shatner, Beverly Sills, Neil Simon, Stephen Sondheim, Elliot Spitzer, and Jeff Zucker. 

There was one interviewee whose comments were so clipped, it was hard to know how to categorize them.  Pogrebin asked Alan "Ace" Greenberg, the chief executive officer of Bear Sterns, whether the Holocaust had a strong impact on him.  "No, I don't think so," he said.  "I obviously felt very bad about it."