Wednesday, October 21, 2015

Gee, Ms. Bacall, You Don't Look It




"If you ever forget you're a Jew there will always be a gentile around to remind you." - Isaac Bashevis Singer

This lesson was forcefully brought home to a few hundred thousand assimilated German Jews in 1933. Adolph Hitler was around to remind them that, in spite of their best efforts to blend into the Arian nation, they were still "strangers in a strange land."  Lauren Bacall, on the other hand, didn't need anyone to remind her. As hard as she tried to live as a gentile among gentiles, she couldn't forget her birthright. In her autobiography, By Myself, and Then Some, Betty Bacall describes herself as a "nice Jewish girl" who didn't even drink, socially. Yet who seemed to favor the stereotypical "shicker goy" (drunken gentile) as a life partner.

Betty Joan Perske was born in the Bronx to a middle class Jewish couple who divorced before she got to know her father. Her mother then reverted to her maiden name, Bacal. When Betty broke into the movie business, at the age of nineteen, she adopted the name Lauren. and added an "l" to her surname (which sounded too much like "bagel.") 

She didn't tell her Hollywood mentor, director Howard Hawks, that she was Jewish because she suspected (correctly) that he was an anti-Semite. Even Humphrey Bogart, her forty-five year old co-star, didn't discover her ethnicity until shortly before their father/daughter love affair blossomed into a marriage. Bogie didn't ask and Betty didn't tell. 

They had two children, a boy and a girl, whom Bogie, a non-practicing Episcopalian, thought should be baptized. Betty had no problem with that. She enrolled her children in Sunday school, and brought them up as Christians.

When Bogie died, his young widow, still in her early thirties, was already romantically involved with fellow Rat Packer, Frank Sinatra. They became secretly engaged but when the secret was leaked to Louella Parsons, by their common agent, Swifty Lazar, Frank blamed Betty and dumped her.  So she had to settle for Jason Robards Jr., another pedigreed gentile, who made his hard-drinking predecessor look like a teetotaler. 

She and Robards had one child, a boy they named Sam, whom they also brought up as a Christian. After a few years of putting up with her second husband's binges, Bacall showed him the door. It was an amicable divorce and they remained friends. She was upset with Robards but tried not to be too judgmental. Alcoholism was an illness. Her ex-husband's one unforgivable sin was showing up one Christmas without bringing Sam a present.

Betty's next love interest was the co-star of her 1st Broadway musical Applause; a local boy whose name will be familiar to readers of this journal. In addition to sharing a birth sign (Virgo) Lauren Bacall and Bill Marantz have only one degree of separation: Len Cariou. 

With a growing family Betty was prepared to settle down with a sober gentile, for a change, but her new love interest had other plans. A few months before the end of the show's two-year run (for which Betty would win a Tony Award) Len headed for greener pastures.

And the rest, as they say, is history.

Len Carriou was married three times (once, I believe, to a "nice Jewish girl") but Lauren Bacall never remarried. She filled the void in her personal life with her extensive network of showbiz friends. Thoughtful mentors like Katy Hepburn, Spence Tracy, The Oliviers (Larry & Vivian), The Nivens (David and Hjordis); the luminaries she worshipped as a star-struck girl had become intimates. 

She was also friendly with pedigreed gentile politicians like Adlai Stevenson and Jack Kennedy. Reading Ms. Bacall's autobiography you would think there were no Jews in show business.

The only one she mentions is Kirk Douglas, whom she had a crush on when she was a teenager. Betty and Kirk were roughly the same age but the other people in her inner circle were Bogie's contemporaries. As the years passed, so did virtually all of the colleagues and friends she loved and admired.

As her life drew to a close, Betty/Lauren/Bacall/Bogart/Robarts, who chose to live as a gentile among gentiles, claims the only thing she was left with was her Jewish identity.

Seriously, Betty?

According to tradition, and the State of Israel, Lauren Bacall qualifies as a Jew because her mother was Jewish. But that doesn't explain why a woman whose favorite holiday was Christmas, whose favorite food was Mexican, and whose three children were members of the Christian church would still feel Jewish.

It's almost as puzzling as the fact that a tribe of dessert nomads, too insignificant to be mentioned in history books, would not only outlive the Greek, Roman and Babylonian empires but give birth to a religion that is practiced (in modified variations) by 1/3 of the world's population. What are the odds that a tiny nation of former slaves would rise from the ashes, after thousands of years, and survive an endless war being waged by genocidal neighbors who outnumber her 100 to 1? 

How could this insignificant dot on the world map, in a little over half a century, become a world leader in internet technology, agricultural innovation, medicine, physics, etc.

It's almost as miraculous as the fact that the Nobel committee would award 22% of it's prizes to an ethnic group that constituting 0.2% of the world's population, in spite of the fact that everyone hates them?

Well, not everyone. A handful of admirers, in every generation, actually join the club.

"It's hard to be a Jew," the saying goes, but its not impossible.

Judaism isn't an evangelical religion, but the study house door is always open. Converting to Judaism is the opposite of qualifying for the Catholic priesthood: no one is called but anyone can become one of the "Chosen."

The Nazi characterization of the Jews as a "race" ignores the fact that "Jewish blood" (one drop of which is enough to pollute the stream) is indistinguishable from gentile blood. Ditto "Jewish noses." Jews come in all shapes, sizes and colors of the rainbow.

Judaism has nothing to do with genetics and everything to do with ethics. Being born a Jew does not entitle you to special status, like "white privilege." Rather it burdens you with special obligations and responsibilities. Keeping kosher, wearing a skull cap, not eating bread on Passover, is not the essence of Judaism; the Ten Commandments are the essence of Judaism.

When a rich businessman asked Rabbi Akiva to sum up the talmud, while "standing on one foot," the learned sage said: "Don't do to anyone else what you wouldn't want them to do to you. All the rest is commentary."

Compassion and tolerance are so integral to being a Jew that when the Sanhedrin (Judaism supreme court during the Roman era) imposed the death penalty, once in 7 years, it was called "a court of murderers." 

Surrounded by fanatical theocracies, that stone young women to death for refusing to wear a veil, the State of Israel has just defeated a motion to impose the death penalty on terrorists by a vote of 96 to 4.

Yet Israel is singled out by the UN as the Middle East's chief perpetrator of "war crimes."

The same old movie has been playing, at a theater near you, for five thousand years. The besieged and vilified Jewish state is determined to follow the biblical admonition to be "a light unto the nations." But when you shine a light in a dark theater it disturbs the patrons. 

So they do their best to snuff it out. 

There's an old joke about the Jew who prayed to God: "Do us a favor; choose someone else." 

The only special status "The Chosen People" are entitled to is priority seating in gas chambers and extermination camps.

Yet we miraculously survive.


Right, Betty?

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