Members of the Tribe

by Zev Chafets

  “There’s all kind of Jews, I’ve noticed,” he said, driving carefully through the sparse traffic. “Some of them are what I call real Jews, but a lot of them, they’re Americans.” There was sarcasm in his voice when he said the word. “They might not like that Jewish stuff so much, you know?” (He turned out to be right; Skelos won the election, carrying a larger percentage of the Jewish vote than he had in 1984).

  We arrived at the station and shook hands, but Carbonara had one parting thought. “You know, to my mind there’s nobody better than a good Jew, a real Jew. But last night? I dunno. I mean, there you were and Carol’s introducing you to everybody, like, here’s Ze’ev the writer from Israel. And everybody came up to you and says, ‘Hey, Ze’ev, how ya doin’, Ze’ev, ya know my cousin in Tel Aviv?’ Like that. But I noticed one thing—none of those Jews asked ya if you had a place to stay, nobody said, ‘Come on back to the house for a meal.’ Who asked ya that? Carbonara, the Italian. Sometimes I just don’t know who the real Jews are anymore, know what I mean?”

  CHAPTER THREE

  SUCCAH IN

  THE SKY

  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 an
d 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.