I live at the center of it all. Hollywood, for those who do not know, is just a neighborhood in Los Angeles. Hollywood Boulevard, until a few years ago when it was cleaned up, was a center of prostitution, drug addicts and other forms of decay. It remains, as always, the major tourist attraction in Los Angeles, with thousands walking daily along the star-strewn blocks from La Brea eastward through the Kodak and Grauman’s Chinese Theater.
I grew up in a small city of thirty some thousand, along the hills of the mountains separating Los Angeles and its multitude of cities from the Valley. Nestled along those hills are multi-million dollar mansions, unimaginable wealth and power. Yet, many of the directors and stars do not live here in Beverly Hills, rather in nearby neighborhoods like Pacific Palisades, Brentwood and Bel Air.
Many things have changed over the decades. Nowadays one can see buses, either extended limousine buses or double-deckers (like in London) taking tourists around showing them a twenty-foot-high fence with stories of who lives or used to live in this or that mansion. [One can make up any stories one likes, there is no one to refute them.] I myself still take our guests on a personal tour, and I too do tell a story and two.
Imagine a story that is colored black and white, and shades of grey. There are two instances in this story of a young girl in a red dress. Once wandering around while a selection takes place (to death or to life), the other time on a cart, dead, as she is taken to be burned. There is a third scene that is in color of Shabbat Candles being lit, and the flame is its usual blue and yellow. All else is still black and white and grey.
Only when the story comes to an end, a very long row of people standing on the hills of Jerusalem, in the free and modern Jewish country, every detail is in full color. More than six thousand descendants of those rescued by one righteous gentile, Oskar Schindler, against a line of text that reads that at the end of WWII only some 4,000 Jews survived in Poland.
The story is told by master storyteller, Steven Spielberg, himself a Jew. Through the lens of the camera he re-creates the horrors of the Holocaust in a way that a human being can fathom, internalize and walk away.
The movie from 1993 won seven academy awards. It is the beginning of the second decade of a different century, and the movie is now playing on cable. The academy awards now are given at the new Kodak Theater (abutting the Grauman’s Chinese Theater). I used to park on the street next to the Chinese Theater when taking guests to see the hand and foot prints of those from the movie industry, including Spielberg’s. The street is now gone, a shopping complex stands on top.
The Holocaust is not part of history any more. It is again a battleground. The World is now told, via one denier after another scientific / historical conference, the Holocaust did not occur. We are all told time and again that this fiction was created by the Jews to justify a claim to a land-not-theirs. Yet, interestingly, Israel is also blamed of committing Nazi-like atrocities (I cannot reconcile how can a people commit atrocities which never happened in the first place according to those casting the blame). But let us return to my local bus tour, you are my guests.
This is my community, where I grew up. I went to Beverly (Hills High School). The connections to Spielberg are many – from his mother’s Kosher restaurant on Pico Boulevard (where we bring out-of-towners to be greeted by her, a very special welcome to each, and then eat the cheese blintzes or the pasta with pine nuts which I like less, but fall prey every time to her deliciously inviting description) to the building in Beverly Hills’ “Industrial Zone” that was built to house Spielberg’s Dream Team, which they never did occupy and is now the home of AOL. There are many other footprints, but allow me to focus on one that hurts me in particular.
When my sister, my brother and I were old enough to think we know it all and need not hear, see or learn anything else, my parents insisted we go as a family to see Schindler’s List. I did not realize this was some 17 years ago. Two decades almost. My parents forgot, but I did not. We objected, like I did years before and did not join to see The King and I, the last time Yul Brynner played in the leading role just before his death.
I remember the young girl in red and the long row of people – descendants living today in Israel – at the end of the movie. I will also never forget the music which drives the movie as much as the magically crafted scenes.
There is something rebellious in youth insisting they need not go with their parents to share some of their parents’ history, childhood nightmares, experiences the parents cannot find words to describe or afraid to let their voices allow to come back alive.
My parents were young children at the time. My mother was born the same year as WWII, her brother four years older. My father was two, his cousin three years older. Together, my brother and his cousin escaped the Warsaw Ghetto just before the uprising and have become brothers rather than cousins. My parents would meet in Israel. They survived the horrors, and they know the story must be told.
Who will remain to tell the story? Those who were of age during the war and survived are almost all gone. Those who were young children must talk, paint, sculpture, express the pain and tell. They must because we must know. We must record so that we can tell, each in one’s own way. We must record for all eternity to know for the time has come that these testimonies are needed, the horrors forgotten, the story changing. Steven Spielberg did it, and through his lenses a story remains. A story that even today is already being refuted, the storyteller rebuked.
How can one capture the imagination and the heart of another, so that the memory remains, and is passed like that blue and yellow flame of a candle? Spielberg represents an industry that had Jewish elements from its very foundation almost a century ago. In recent years, however, money blinded all and the Jewish members of the entertainment industry lost their way. They must come back, they are needed now not to capture the past but to lead the battle.
With great power and influence, a great responsibility is carried. The Jewish members of the entertainment industry here and their counterparts in Israel, albeit with a tiny sphere of influence though no less virulent, have turned against the Jewish State. They must change course, they must recover their identity for they will be judged.
There is no room for liberal, Democratic self-loathing. There is no place today for criticizing Israel (“we are not anti-Semitic, we simply have the legitimate right to criticize Israel”). Spend the 195 minutes required to see Schindler’s List and come back to your senses. The hatred to the Jews of eight decades ago has exploded once again and has now infected every part of the universe.
No Jew will be spared – Democrat or Republican, liberal or conservative, reform or orthodox. Rham Emanuel and his brother, with unimaginable powers, both in the White House and in the Entertainment Industry, will be no different from any other Jew when the blame will be directed at “us.” “We,” then, will have to fight together for their sins, for their arrogance, for disconnecting themselves from their roots. They will be no less hated than we for embracing their liberal views, but only for being Jews.
The roots today are not the way one practices religion. The roots are a tiny country along the eastern shores of the Mediterranean, extending some 40 miles to the Jordan River. This country from the Golan Heights to the Sinai Peninsula is all that Jews have, 14 million around the world, just one tiny country and no more. Less than half live today in Israel, but a day will come, still in our life time, that we will all have no choice, that we will all converge onto this homeland, our shelter, our home.
Israel will forgive all her children when they come home, but if destroyed, there may not be a warm home to which come back. Will there be room for us all, left or right, after it has been cut up and quartered like a sacrificial lamb? If there is not enough room for everyone, who shall remain in harm’s way outside the safety of her borders?
Israel is not divisible. Stop dividing and arguing, cease the bickering and the inner hatred, stand together – we will soon know how urgently a united front is necessary. We must all pray this knowledge will not come too late.
