Strange Times Mag Interview: Francis Ford Coppola the Fascist?

Deborah Solomon, a Romanian Jew, grilled Coppola about his choice to produce a film based on a book by Mircea Eliade. In the seventies Eliade was considered one of the premier historians of religion. I read his "The Sacred and the Profane" my first week as a grad student at Brown in a Religious Studies seminar taught by Barney Twiss. I thought it was profound. In the eighties Eliade was discredited for his Fascist politics. I was sad.

Deborah Solomon was discredited recently for misrepresenting her weekly column as an interview when in fact it is a highly edited and reworked composite of interviews that she conducted. Her column ends now with the disclaimer, "Interview conducted, condensed and edited by Deborah Solomon."

I am sad that she threw out this grenade about Eliade's Fascism and failed to link it in any substantive way to the story that comprises Coppola's film. Francis seems to have fielded the grenade and tossed it aside. But still, this was a bizarre item to hurl at one of the world's greatest directors.

Here is the Times' text.

Questions for Francis Ford Coppola

Independent Streak
Interview by DEBORAH SOLOMON

After enjoying one of the most celebrated careers in Hollywood, you’ve decided to go the art-house route and make “Youth Without Youth,” a Romanian fable about an age-defying linguist and his lover who is reincarnated as a seventh-century Indian. Is the film intended for a mass audience? No, not at all.

How much did it cost to make? Under $15 million.

Do you care if you earn the money back? No. When I finished “The Rainmaker,” I thought, This is the last movie I am going to do basically as a job for money.

That was your last film, and it was made 10 years ago. You’re right. The clock is ticking.

Your new film is based on a philosophical novella of the same name by Mircea Eliade, the great Romanian scholar who believed archaic religions created a kind of time-outside-of-time. That’s his big book, “The Myth of the Eternal Return.” What I understand of it is that all things come back in some sort of cycle that is regenerative. Or, in the words of the Lion King, it’s the circle of life.

How are you going to be an indie director if you compare your work with “The Lion King”? God, I think you’re right. I am sure the Eliade notion was more subtle. They said about Eliade that he never had a thought he didn’t publish, so there are about 400 books he wrote.

His reputation has been tainted by his politics. He was one of several well-known Romanian intellectuals who reportedly had fascist leanings and supported the Iron Guard in the ’30s. Does that make you uncomfortable? It’s sort of like saying my grandfather was an Italian fascist. In those days, in 1937, or even earlier, all the Italians were fascists. It might have been like the Communist thing in this country. If you were young in the ’30s, and very humanistic, you might have flirted with Communism, and then it came to haunt you.

No, Communism was rooted in a utopian vision, the Iron Guard was rooted in hatred. Well, there were people who felt that the Communist effort in the ’20s and ’30s among our writers was orchestrated by Stalin, but the people who got into it I’m sure got into it for idealistic reasons.

It’s hard for me to talk about this with you, because my father was born in Romania and fled as a child in 1938. That’s like going to Miami and talking about Cuba. Oh, boy, is that tricky.

Yes. Are you religious? I think I am very religious.

You’re an observant Catholic? Oh, no, no, no. I was raised as a Catholic, but I didn’t like the Catholic Church at all. I thought the nuns were mean.

Do you believe in the afterlife? I sort of think that the people I have loved and lost are somehow still there. I can’t believe that something so specific is gone.

If you were given the chance to relive your life, like the hero of your latest film, would you do it? It would be the same life. When I die, I am not going to be there saying, Oh, I wish I had done this, and I wish I had done that. Because I did it.

You must regret some things. Are there any movies you regret making, like “Jack”? “Jack” is sort of fun. I would do “Jack” again. Movie-wise, there is nothing I wouldn’t do again. It’s not possible to make one perfect movie every time. I don’t know of anyone who has done it. I guess Kurosawa has come the closest.

You sound very analyzed. I never went to a psychologist or psychiatrist in my life. Never. You know Italians are a little prejudiced against that kind of thing.

We haven’t mentioned “The Godfather.” Is there anything left to be said about it? I am very proud of “The Godfather,” and it is obviously what I will be remembered for. I don’t care.

Is there something you would prefer to be remembered for? If I have to be remembered for something, I want it remembered that I really liked children and was a good camp counselor.

Huckabee Ad Video: Please go back to your Christian Church

The world is complex and dangerous. We cannot risk a president who puts Santa Claus before politics. We cannot balance the budget with Church bake sales. We don't want a Reverend-in-chief "Christian Leader" in the White House. We want an American Leader. Vote Democrat. Stop Huckabee.

The Church-State Taboo is Dead

I cannot predict what the outcome will be now that the Church-State taboo has been killed off. It has been - and that is a fact.

I suppose it started when Ronald Reagan closed his eyes (as if he was praying) at prayer breakfasts.

George W. has made a mockery of pandering to religious groups (and delivering to them a host of credibility but very little money).

Nowadays you cannot pick up the paper without reading about the "Faith Wars" in the presidential campaign. Or about the Rev. Mike Hucksterbee's slimey insults of Mormons in an article by a Jewish reporter.

Who knows what Mike says to other reporters about the Jews!

I remember the good old days when Church and State were held apart as our founders wanted. Ah yes. That was such a nice time, an idyllic period.

But it's over now. Call it "values" if you want to encode it. But hey, who needs to encode it anymore?

I'll say it's not good for the Jews. It's not good for America. But that's rhetoric - no matter how I would flesh it out.

Let's start reacting as we should. Let's remove the tax-exemption from the Evangelical Churches. That should cool things off quickly.

Rabbis for the Rich and Famous Part II

New Yorker wrote about Aish HaTorah. UPI followed up now with a blurb from the NY Post and a little more about the price tags for their services. UPI sent it out under the "Quirks" news category. To me it is distasteful to say the least.

Service offers rabbis day in and day out

Published: Dec. 16, 2007 at 10:48 PM

NEW YORK, Dec. 16 (UPI) -- For $10,000 per year, busy New York Jews can keep a rabbi on call to meet with them anywhere and almost any time.

The service, offered by the Aish New York non-profit Jewish educational center, has four rabbis on call five days a week who meet with clients in conference rooms and at coffee houses to discuss religious texts, relationships, and sometimes even recipes, The New York Post reported Sunday.

Clients of the Executive Learning Program -- who include Kirk Douglas and executives from finance giants like JPMorgan -- say it helps them get in touch with their religion in a way that their schedule would not otherwise allow, the newspaper said.

In return, the center asks clients to make a minimum donation of $10,000 per year -- though some give as much as $250,000 -- and refer their Jewish friends.

For the less well-heeled, the center offers group study sessions and Shabbat dinners for singles, the Post said.

Times: Satmar in Kiryas Joel Bully a Woman (This is News?)

As I said, this is news? This is part of the essence of their style of religion. They preach a theology of a menacing G-d who brought the Holocaust on the Jews to punish them for their Zionism, socialism and secularism. And they practice what they preach. So?

Kiryas Joel Journal
A Display of Disapproval That Turned Menacing
By DAN LEVIN

KIRYAS JOEL, N.Y.

It was late one night over the summer when the Greenberg family was frightened by a menacing phone call. Then came threats, and then vandalized cars. As the days turned into weeks and the police canvassed the neighborhood, knocking on doors and interviewing potential witnesses, they were met with silence.

This was not the troubled streets of the city, nor were the witnesses fearful of gang retribution. Rather, this was Orange County, and the victims — a husband and wife who are members of the Hasidic sect known as Satmars — said they were being harassed by those in their own insular world here.

The woman, Toby Greenberg, told the police that the root of the harassment was her decision to deviate slightly from the culture of modesty that defines and reinforces this Orthodox Jewish enclave of bewigged women in long-sleeved shirts and ankle-length skirts and bearded men in black hats and long black coats.

According to the police, Mrs. Greenberg said she was singled out because she chose to wear denim skirts, long, natural-looking wigs made of human hair, and stockings without a visible seam — traditionally worn because they show that women’s legs are not bare.

The incidents offered a rare glimpse into the strict social dynamics that govern life in this village of 20,000 people, an hour from Manhattan and not far from West Point. It is a place where television and the Internet are forbidden and women do not drive, restrictions intended to provide a haven from the temptations of the outside world.

Occasionally someone defies the social mores — whether it is a young man frequenting bars in the nearby village of Monroe or a woman dressing inappropriately or flirting. That is when the “vaad hatznius,” the rabbinically appointed modesty committee that enforces the village’s rules of behavior and appearance, intervenes.

“If we find they have a TV or a married woman won’t wear a wig, we will invite them to speak with us and try to convince them it’s unacceptable, or next year we will not accept their children into the school system,” said David Ekstein, the vice president of the village’s leading congregation, Yetev Lev, and one of eight men who make up the committee, hand-picked by Rabbi Aaron Teitelbaum, the town’s spiritual leader.

Mr. Ekstein, 62, the president of an insurance company, said that the committee was widely respected for its role in protecting the community, especially children. “There has to be some kind of watchdog,” he said. “But do we have any real power? We’re not a government.”

In the case of Mrs. Greenberg, he insisted, “This had nothing to do with the vaad or the community.” He called the harassment a “chilul hashem,” a desecration of God’s name.

But weeks after the incidents began, the New York State Police started to investigate the case of Mrs. Greenberg, the 25-year-old mother of a young daughter, and her husband, Yoel, who accused the vaad hatznius of orchestrating the harassment. According to the police, leaflets calling the couple immoral and threatening them with expulsion were scattered in the streets and delivered to their home.

In September, the tires of their Chevrolet Impala were slashed and the warning “Get out, defiled person” was slathered in Yiddish in white paint on a window of their Mazda CX-7. That was when Mrs. Greenberg approached the authorities — a rare move in a community that is loath to attract attention from secular law enforcement.

Hella Winston, the author of “Unchosen: The Hidden Lives of Hasidic Rebels,” said that it was not uncommon for women who defy their strictly codified role in such communities to become targets.

Ms. Winston, an assistant professor of sociology at Queens College, said that because these sects can not legally discipline nonconformists, they must resort to public shaming. “Their power is in fear and intimidation,” she said, though “blacklisting children from schools can at times cross the line into threats and violence.”

The efforts to silence the Greenbergs appear to have worked. Reached at her home, Mrs. Greenberg, with worry in her voice, declined to comment.

Kiryas Joel is no stranger to social discord and outbursts of violence. Since its inception in the 1970s, residents considered to be flouting the village’s stringent rules have been victims of vandalism, beatings and arson, as well as expulsion.

A decade ago, a faction of the town’s Satmars sued its rivals in federal court for religious persecution and intimidation. The dissidents claimed they had been assaulted, their cars set on fire and the windows in their homes smashed because they were defying the authorities chosen by Rabbi Teitelbaum. The two sides reconciled only so that Rabbi Teitelbaum would not have to take the witness stand.

On a recent day, villagers on the main commercial street here condemned the vigilantes and the harassment, although they also voiced disapproval of Mrs. Greenberg’s actions.

“People are hot-blooded. They see her on the street and have asked her nicely to stop wearing tight-fitted clothing, but she wouldn’t listen,” said a woman working at Kiryas Joel Shoes, who identified herself only as Sarah. “If she had behaved as she does inside the four walls of her house, it would have been fine, but on the street is different. She turned it into a dirty public thing.”

And although Sarah, a mother of 11 children, did not condone any efforts to drive the Greenbergs from the community, she said: “They’re not after you if you go off a little bit. You really have to do something to bring shame.”

After two months of fruitless inquiries, the police closed the investigation last month. “Pick any ethnic group and people are suspicious at times,” said Sgt. Warner Hein of the State Police. “They don’t want to be seen as cooperating, even at the expense of tragedies in their own community.”

My Top Ten Amazon Kindle Questions

10. Do I get points when I play the page-pong game with the super-sensitive next-page/prev-page levers?
9. Wasn't black and white TV great?
8. How many pages does this book have anyway?
7. Is there any way to straighten out these crooked little chicklet keys?
6. Who sent me these weird screen savers?
5. Where is the stylus for this palm pilot?
4. Isn't that page flicker just adorable?
3. Who needs a mouse anyway when you have a thermometer?
2. Isn't that "experimental" Web thingy just darling?
1. If I turn it upside down and shake it can I start a whole new sketch?

San Diego Union -Tribune: Reform Jews Learn About Worship from Pastor Rick Warren

This story speaks for itself...

Creating Those Connections: Pastor's aim is to cultivate spiritual and personal bonds

By Sandi Dolbee

UNION-TRIBUNE RELIGION & ETHICS EDITOR

December 15, 2007

Christmas is what marketing specialists might call a window of opportunity. People who spend their Sundays doing everything but going to church will find themselves inside sanctuaries on Christmas Eve, drawn by family or tradition or some other holiday force.

SEAN M. HAFFEY / Union-Tribune Pastor Rick Warren addressed the Union for Reform Judaism Convention in San Diego Thursday night.

Rick Warren knows about these folks. He calls them the “lily and poinsettia people” – because they tend to show up at Easter and Christmas.

So how does a pastor get them to stay?

Warren, who heads the humongous Saddleback Church in southern Orange County, said the key is to get them involved in a small group.

“We believe congregations have to grow large and small at the same time,” Warren said Thursday afternoon via cell phone. He was boarding a plane on the East Coast, where he spoke at a White House meeting on HIV/AIDS, (see related story on E4) and was on his way to San Diego, where he spoke Thursday night at the Union for Reform Judaism's biennial convention.

Saddleback's turnout for weekend services – usually about 22,000 people – is what Warren calls “the crowd.” But the weekly small group meetings – 3,800 of them from Malibu to Carlsbad – are what he calls “the congregation.” “A crowd is not the church,” said Warren, who may be best known as the author of the mega-selling, spiritual how-to book, “The Purpose-Driven Life.”

He added: “We don't really feel like people are in the congregation until they're in small groups.”

Warren urges clergy to use the crowded moments – like holiday services – to get the word out about other programs. Saddleback's small groups range from Bible studies to stress management sessions. People can plug into the groups via the church's Web site.

Despite America's penchant for traveling alone, dining alone and even bowling alone, Warren argues that people are hungry for relationship.

“We have a pandemic of loneliness,” he said. “We weren't meant to go through life by ourself.”

A few hours later, at the San Diego Convention Center, Warren shared his advice on building community with several-thousand leaders of Reform Judaism in North America.

“There are some principles that apply regardless of our faith, if it's Jewish or Christian,” he told the convention. The biennial meeting of the largest branch of Judaism in the U.S. began Wednesday and continues through tomorrow in downtown San Diego.

One of Warren's principles: “Just be nice to people. Smile.”

Warren was joined on the stage by two successful Southern California rabbis – Laura Geller of Temple Emanuel in Beverly Hills and David Wolpe of Sinai Temple in Los Angeles. He spoke for a few minutes at the podium and then settled into chairs alongside the rabbis for a kind of living-room chat about strengthening congregational life.

Among the ideas they shared:

• Allow people to tell their stories. “Ultimately, what we need to do is deepen relationships,” said Geller.
• Think like a visitor. “We have to look at everything from an outsider's viewpoint,” said Warren, who spoke of simplifying worship terms.
• Make strangers feel welcome. Go up and talk to them. Use greeters from a range of ages at each service (with kids greeting visiting kids and seniors greeting visiting seniors).
• Cultivate your music programs. “Nothing moves people like music,” said Wolpe.
• Encourage conversations. Geller's synagogue emphasizes opportunities for people to meet together one-on-one to get to know each other better.

Warren told the audience of arriving in Southern California in 1980 to start a church. He was fresh out of seminary, with “no building, no members and no money.”

Twenty-seven years later, Saddleback Church in Lake Forest, will have 14 services for Christmas, drawing an estimated 45,000 people.

“The congregation that really loves people, you have to lock the doors to keep people out,” he said.

Biblical & Religious Dolls are Selling Out! Idolatry, Heresy or Just Cute?

After the recent scandal over the Muhammed Teddy Bear, the news of Christian religious dolls and talking action figures selling out in stores for the holidays presents a stark contrast and a special irony for students of comparative religion.

The Star Tribune reports:

Talking Jesus doll sales are on the ascent
By JOHN EWOLDT, Star Tribune

Jesus is selling out.

Out of Wal-Mart and Target, that is. The 12-inch, $20 Jesus Messenger of Faith talking action figure has become a holiday hit of biblical proportions. Online mega-retailers Wal-Mart.com and Amazon.com are sold out. Target.com's supply is likely to disappear within a few days.

The response has been "unbelievable," said Josh Livingston, spokesman for Valencia, Calif.-based One2believe, which also sells talking Moses, Mary, David, Esther and Noah action figures. The company has sold more than 20,000 dolls in the series, with Jesus far and away the most popular.

Also of note, the P31 dolls... [or the Eshes Chayil dolls in Hebrew]...

P31 are a new exclusive collection of high-quality dolls, based on the biblical teaching of Proverbs 31. P31 dolls were specifically designed to provide a Bible-based, Christian alternative to other secular toys on the market, and to encourage young girls to pursue biblical womanhood.... three different P31 dolls: Abigail, Elisabeth and Leah. It is our prayer that the Lord would use these dolls as a means to encourage the girls of today to become Proverbs 31 women of tomorrow!

Not to overlook, are the local East Coast Teaneck distributed Gali Girl Jewish dolls for Jewish girls... Although not biblical, they are cute!

Shalom Auslander's Foreskin

Funny, shocking, multi-layered, ironic, confused, conflicted, self-hating and yet not a prick. That's how Phillip Roth's Portnoy character came across to many of us. A character who stumbles and yearns and progress and grows and yet never even begins. Hapless and misguided by the wrong values, yet not obnoxious.

Auslander's attempt to create an equivalent protagonist for the current generation of American Jews in his new book Foreskin's Lament is a failure. He crafts a mean-spirited little prick of a character whose main preoccupation is to connect his sins -- straying from the laws of the Torah -- with God's punishment of his parents and of the New York Rangers and, heaven forbid, of his new born son.

Forgive me for using the term "prick" but I do so because that is the most evocative term that Auslander can muster to describe his putative relationship with the ribbono shel olam, with G-d, who he addresses with that honorific time and time again.

Let's cut through the rather tedious caricatures of an Orthodox adolescent daring to eat treif on shabbos while shopping with a shikse. Does anyone think this trite stuff has shock value or makes for an interesting vehicle for fictional characterization? Yikes. A number of publishers at the New Yorker and elsewhere do think that.

When one chapter of this book appeared in the New Yorker I was momentarily dazzled. The premise was comical in a way -- that the hero and heroine would walk 14 miles in their Shabbos clothes from Teaneck to Madison Square Garden to watch the Rangers away-game on the jumbotron. But this was no Seinfeld episode. This was no Roth misadventure. The humor evaporated when this became just another tiresome chapter in a protracted "lament".

Okay now. Is the lament fictional? I hope so. I hope Auslander has tried to craft an obnoxious superficial ass of a character. 'Cause that is what he ends up with.

Here are a man and woman in Shalom's world who don't have the patience or courtesy to have a bris for their son. They have him circumcised to avoid the wrath of the "prick" in heaven. But no bris. No care for community, for tribe, for family, for mother. These two are the epitome of the self absorbed, neurotic, obnoxious, nauseating characters of contemporary fiction.

Now finally, all told, Auslander is either a genius who has the ability to craft purely distasteful and unappealing Judaic protagonists whose conflicts revolt us without the least bit of humor or wit. And this in turn crafts an intentionally tepid and repetitive critique of the vacuity of popular contemporary religious thinking, meant to mock the self-seriousness of our would-be media theologians.

Or there is the other possibility, namely that Shalom is adept at selective self reflective and deprecating memoir writing - I hope this is not the case -- a talent which reveals him to us as one of the leading obnoxious "pricks" of his generation of Jews and writers -- with little insight and less intellect than anyone would want to imagine.

Ultimately does this book have any positive redeeming value? For me, yes. This was the first book that I read on my new Amazon Kindle. I got used to the device, practiced turning pages and bookmarking passages and was able to begin forming my critical opinions about that invention. Accordingly, for me, reading Foreskin's Lament was not a total waste of time. [The Village Voice is not as kind in their review.]

New Yorker on Torah for Sale: Executives Only Need Apply

Funny how these nonprofit Jewish-education rabbis only go to the executive suites to teach Torah to millionaires. I guess these men of the "Fire of the Torah" do not reach down to warm up the lower paying corporate cubicles.

From the New Yorker,

Pinstripes Dept.
Dial-a-Rabbi
by Lizzie Widdicombe

Rabbi Stuart Shiff, one of six New York rabbis employed by Aish HaTorah, a nonprofit Jewish-education organization, carries two pieces of equipment: a BlackBerry and a book of the Torah. Weekdays, he treks to businesses around the city on behalf of Aish’s Executive Learning Program—for a voluntary donation (average: ten thousand dollars), bosses who are too busy to go to shul can have a rabbi meet them at the office. “Studying the Torah took my mind off the stress,” Lisa Shalett, the C.E.O. of Sanford Bernstein, says in an Aish brochure.

“What this program does is it blows away all the excuses,” Shiff explained recently, in one of Aish’s conference rooms in midtown. “We have almost a postal carrier’s motto: nothing stops us.” It was 9:30 A.M. on the day before Hanukkah, and Shiff—who was wearing a black velvet yarmulke—had a meeting with Seth Horowitz, the former chief executive of Everlast, the boxing-supply company (which he had just sold for a reported hundred and sixty-eight million dollars). Horowitz, who is thirty-one, started studying with Shiff eighteen months ago. “I just needed to talk to someone,” he said, turning off his iPhone. “I’ve gained so much knowledge. This is the beauty of the program—the rabbi comes to your office, you discuss the Torah, and you talk about life.”

They had been reading Genesis 37, where Jacob arrives with his sons in Canaan. “ ‘Jacob settled in the land of his father’s sojournings,’ ” Shiff read. “Now, there’s an interesting extrapolation in the rabbinic commentary. It says vayeshev—that Jacob wanted to dwell. The extrapolation is that he wanted to have a life of ease. He didn’t want to have pressure or issues.” Then disaster happens: Joseph, Jacob’s favorite son, is sold as a slave into Egypt. “It’s a very strange thing here,” Shiff said. “All Jacob wanted was some peace and quiet. What’s so wrong with that?”

Horowitz leaned back in a swivel chair. “It’s kind of the opposite of what we’re here for? Free will? Our opportunity to choose between good and bad?”

Shiff’s exegesis abounded with business-world metaphors: in prison in Egypt, Joseph mistakenly puts “all his trust in his network,” but he later rises to become “like the vice-president” of a company. Shiff had an appointment at eleven, at Bear Stearns. He arrived in a cluttered corner office where an executive in pinstripes was yelling into a telephone. A secretary sat nearby. She explained that although she was not Jewish, she enjoyed listening in on Shiff’s weekly visits. “I love everything about the Jewish faith,” she said. “I think it has a lot of wisdom.” The executive hung up the phone. “Basically, I’m a quasi disbeliever,” he explained. “I like talking to the rabbi, because I challenge him on a lot of the stuff. I like to ask my questions, which are mostly about the rigidity of religious beliefs. I’m probably his worst patient, if you want to call me a patient.”

“Maybe we can talk a little bit about Hanukkah,” Shiff said.

“O.K.,” the executive said. “Seven candles?”

“Eight! We light eight candles to commemorate a miracle. What’s the miracle we’re commemorating?”

“I don’t know.”

“They found oil in a temple that was desecrated by the Syrian-Greek army,” Shiff began. He got as far as the eight days, and the executive interrupted. “Where did they get the idea in the first place? That’s my question—who wrote the book?”

“The Maccabees,” Shiff said. “It’s history.”

“Yeah,” the executive said. “History I can buy.” They discussed the Jewish calendar (it’s both lunar and solar), and got around to Hanukkah presents. “I didn’t have them when I grew up,” the executive said. “I don’t think you should have them.”

Shiff said, “It’s probably better that way.”

When the session was over, Shiff got on the No. 6 train and headed uptown, to meet his twelve-thirty—a neuroscientist at Mount Sinai who was looking to the Kabbalah to illuminate his findings on postpartum depression. (At his last session, the client had become fascinated by the decree, in Genesis, that “in sorrow thou shalt bear forth children.”) “We go everywhere,” Shiff said on the train. “We go to J. P. Morgan, Bear, Bloomberg, Goldman—and everybody is so different. It’s not about conforming to anything. That last guy, I think sometimes he thinks he’s not living up to my expectations of him. But I don’t have any expectations. My whole job is helping him to stay connected. We like questions.” ♦