Members of the Tribe

by Zev Chafets

  The leader of the HST Regulars is Whitey Warnetsky, a pink-faced fellow of indeterminate middle age. Whitey is central casting’s notion of a Lower East Side politico, from his flashing diamond pinky ring to his aromatic J&R alternative Honduran corona. He has been district leader since the early 1970s, and in the most recent election he had been returned to office unanimously. It takes a pretty good politician to run uncontested anyplace west of Rumania and I figured that he would have some interesting insights into the nature of power in a district of eight thousand mostly Orthodox Jewish voters.

  On the way to the HST clubhouse it began to snow heavily. Given the inclement weather and Warnetsky’s recent landslide, I wondered if he would show up. But reliability is one of the leader’s secrets; when I arrived I found him and two associates seated behind a cheesecloth-covered card table on heraldic chairs that looked like they came from the set of Camelot. The three men were there to receive members of the voting public, a twice-weekly ritual that keeps Warnetsky in touch with the people of his district.

  Warnetsky welcomed me warmly and introduced me to his colleagues—fellow cigar-smoker Dave Weinberger, a powerfully built young man in a yarmulke who serves as the HST sergeant-at-arms (“I throw people out if they need it,” he explained genially); and treasurer Harry Tuerack, a Kent smoker with the worried expression of a man who handles audited money. The public, less intrepid than its servants, had stayed home that night, and so I had the three statesmen all to myself.

  “We have problems down here that other districts don’t encounter—Jewish problems, if you see what I mean,” Warnetsky said, puffing easily on his corona. “For example, let’s say with the traffic department. People who can’t drive on the Sabbath have a problem with alternate side parking.” He lowered his voice and adopted a tone of utmost piety. “This isn’t a parking issue, it’s a spiritual issue. We have some extremely religious people in this district. And, luckily, we’ve been able to help them out.”

  Whitey regards himself as a big brother to his constituents. “I’ve helped many a young person down here get a position in life, but I never remind them of it. I don’t say, ‘Hey, look what I’ve done for you.’ Why not? I’ll be truthful with you, it doesn’t do any good. People aren’t grateful—that’s human nature.”

  Harry the treasurer shook his head sorrowfully, contemplating the ingratitude. “You gotta have a strong stomach, some of the things you gotta put up with in this business,” he said.

  Warnetsky and his fellow HST Regulars are careful to keep their beneficence on a strictly nonpartisan and nonsectarian basis. “I live by our law, the law of the Talmud,” he said. “People are hungry, feed them—that’s not hard to remember, know what I mean?” The HST organization passes out Passover bundles every year and distributes food and goodies before other Jewish holidays. “And that’s without reference to religion, race, or party affiliation,” said Dave Weinberger reverently.

  There are quite a few gentiles on the Lower East Side, but it is not so easy to find Republicans. In Milwaukee, the boys at A.B. Data had said that Jews are genetically Democrats; and that certainly seems true in the cradle of American Jewry. According to Whitey, in the 1986 election, Democratic Assemblyman Sheldon Silver, a former yeshiva basketball star, carried the district ten to one. “We got a pretty smooth working organization down here,” Warnetsky said with modest understatement.

  The leader has a couple of simple principles that enable him to keep things functioning on an even keel. “First, as it is written, do your good deeds in private. Our sage, Rabbi Maimonides, taught that.” Hallmark greeting cards provide the other pillar of his philosophy: “Second, it’s nice to be important, but it’s important to be nice. Those two things, in a nutshell, are what I believe,” said Whitey.

  But politics on the Lower East Side aren’t all philosophy. Whitey is a practical man, and he has some more mundane rules for success. For one thing, he never discusses his work with his wife. And he is careful to respect other people’s privacy. “Let’s say you’re having dinner with a guy in a restaurant, and another guy comes over to the table. In that situation, I always get up and go to the bathroom. See, he might be offering the other guy something, see what I mean? And this is something I might be better off not knowing. So I walk away. It helps your longevity in my profession.”

  Unlike Nassau County’s Ninth District, where the Berman-Skelos state senate race turned on foreign policy, people on the Lower East Side are concerned primarily with domestic issues. Support for Israel is a given; Lower East Siders are concerned more with the small services that help them live as their parents and grandparents did before them. The HST Regulars are there to provide those services. But that doesn’t mean they are indifferent to international affairs, which roughly speaking begin a block or two above East Broadway.

  “You look at Jimmy Carter and his sweet mother,” said Harry, his voice dripping with sarcasm. “I don’t like to say anything about a dead woman, but she and her son weren’t too wild about Jews, that’s for sure.” The others nodded in agreement.

  Anti-Semitism has pretty much been licked on the Lower East Side, but the district leaders keep a wary eye on the rest of the country. For the next few minutes they traded horror stories, gleaned mostly from the Orthodox Jewish Press of Brooklyn, about Ku Klux Klan atrocities in Alabama, Connecticut, and other such godless precincts. They pronounced the names with distaste, shaking their heads at the mere mention of these exotic regions—places where you couldn’t fix alternate side parking even for Yom Kippur and people wouldn’t know what to do with a Passover bundle if you put one on their table.

  In some ways the Lower East Side is Manhattan; in others, it resembles the smallest hick towns of Whitey Warnetsky’s nightmares. It has, for example, a general store—Bistritzky’s Kosher Specialties. The shop is a community institution, and when Warren Feierstein and I dropped in late the next afternoon, it was crowded with neighbors who were there to gossip and look over the fancy new kosher products now the vogue among modern Orthodox Jews.

  There are other delicatessens in the area, but none has the crackerbarrel appeal of Bistritzky’s. Its owner, Leibel Bistritzky, is a genial Chasid with a white Santa beard. He and Warren are old friends, and he greeted us warmly, leading us to an aromatic little office in the rear of the shop. Bistritzky is a dispatcher for Hatzollah, and his shortwave radio crackled from time to time as he told us about himself and his neighborhood.

  Leibel Bistritzky was born in Germany, and although he came to the United States as a boy, he still has a thick Yiddish accent. He started out raising chickens in Vineland, New Jersey, in the Jewish farm belt, and later he peddled eggs from door to door. But he needed more money to feed his ten children, so in the 1960s he and his wife opened up their shop. In those days Jews were still leaving the neighborhood for the suburbs; but in recent years, thanks to new middle-income housing, the community has stabilized.

  Naturally this has been good for business, but Leibel Bistritzky considers himself more than just a businessman. Every day he closes his shop for an hour or so, invites fellow merchants to drop by, and leads them in afternoon prayers. The daily minyan, a neighborhood tradition, is not universally popular. As we were standing near the frozen food section, Leibel was accosted by a dissenter, a young man in a flannel shirt with a black yarmulke on his head.

  “It’s a shonda what you’re doing, Bistritzky,” he said in a loud, aggressive tone. “A minyan belongs in shul, not with salami. You’re taking Jews out of shul. It’s a shonda!”

  The man had a small cart of goodies, and Leibel listened to his tirade without comment; after all, the customer is always right. But after he left, Bistritzky cautioned me not to take him seriously. “The man’s a ‘ba’al tshuva’ [newly Orthodox],” he said. “I think he’s what they call ‘faced out.’ ”

  The shelves of Bistritzky’s are stocked with products not usually available at your local A&P—Dagim white-chunk fancy tuna, Kemach Oreo cookies, an
d yellow and pink kosher El Bubble bubblegum cigars. There is also an assortment of gourmet kosher cheeses and health food products. The main customers for these delicacies are the “ba’ali tshuva” who live in the neighborhood.

  The “ba’ali tshuva” movement is a much-discussed phenomenon in American Jewish life; not long after my visit to Bistritzky’s, it was elevated to the status of social phenomenon by New York Magazine, which reported on the trendy life-styles of young formerly assimilated Jews who have become observant. Many of them attend the uptown Lincoln Square Synagogue, the last word in designer Orthodoxy. Some rabbis and sociologists point to the movement as proof that young American-born Jews are returning to traditional Judaism. Similar claims were made a generation ago by Reform and Conservative thinkers about the Chavura movement. The truth is that these “trends” aren’t as important as their supporters would like them to be; the numbers in both cases are small. Still, “ba’ali tshuva” are good customers, and Leibel Bistritzky has become something of an expert on their habits.

  “These people want kosher gourmet food because they miss certain tastes they got used to,” he explained, pulling a jar of Mrs. Adler’s Kosher Bacon Bits off the shelf. “Like, for example, a person used to eat, God forbid, chazer—pork products. So I give him some of this. They put it on their fried eggs and it tastes to them the same as chazer. Try some.” He shook some brown flakes into my hand and looked at me expectantly. They were made of vegetable and meant to simulate bacon, but the scientists who invented Mrs. Adler’s Kosher Bacon Bits must have been Orthodox Jews unacquainted with the real thing.

  “Nu?” said Leibel, beaming. “How about that? Not bad, eh?”

  He seemed so proud that I hated to disillusion him. “Tell me, Mr. Bistritzky, have you ever eaten bacon?” I asked, and he reacted as if I had thrown a snake into the frozen food section.

  “Me. Eat chazer? God forbid!”

  “Then how do you know that this tastes like bacon? I hate to say it, but it tastes like fish food,” I said.

  “How do I know. People tell me. They come back for more. And besides, so what if it doesn’t taste like chazer—people can’t live without the taste of chazer?”

  There are people who can and people who can’t. Mrs. Adler takes care of the latter. So do Miriam Mizakura and Rabbi Meyer Leifer, who cater to Orthodox Jews who want a little tempura and a few laughs without violating half a dozen commandments. Miriam is the proprietor of Shalom Japan, the only glatt kosher sushi joint and Jewish-Japanese nightclub in New York. Leifer is her rabbi.

  Miriam Mizakura is a slim, attractive Japanese-born woman whose parents converted to Judaism for obscure reasons following World War II, shortly before she was born. In Japan she was an aspiring entertainer, and she came to the United States to break into show business. She didn’t have much success, though, until the day she went to visit a friend in the hospital and met Rabbi Meyer Leifer, spiritual leader of the 23rd Street Synagogue.

  Leifer was intrigued by the young Japanese woman with the Jewish star dangling from her neck, and the two struck up a conversation that blossomed into a kind of partnership. Leifer encouraged her to open a kosher Japanese restaurant-supper club, and provided her with the rabbinical guidance to do it. Mizakura reciprocated by allowing Leifer, a frustrated crooner, to sing in her nightclub.

  The first week it opened, Shalom Japan got more than one hundred telephone calls. “They all wanted to know one thing,” Leifer told me as we sat in the restaurant eating California rolls. “ ‘Where do you get your meat?’ Naturally the restaurant is kosher, and when they heard the answer, people started pouring in. For the first three months you couldn’t get a reservation.”

  Some people come to Shalom Japan for the food, others for the floor show that takes place every Saturday night in the nightclub adjacent to the restaurant. The club’s decor is glatt kitsch—art posters from Tel Aviv and Tokyo, large wall fans, a mezuzah on the door, and a huge hand-painted kabuki set on the wall in back of the small stage. The entertainment, provided by Miriam and occasionally by Leifer, is pure schmaltz.

  The rabbi took me into the deserted nightclub to hear Miriam rehearse. She has a pleasant voice and a one-joke comedy routine based on her dual identity. We sat at a little table and listened to a sample of her patter.

  “How do you do?” she said in a thick oriental accent. “Welcome. I am a real JAP. Do you hear the one about Mr. Yakki who built a succah? Ah yes, people came to eat sukiyaki in Yakki’s succah.” This is a big laugh line on Saturday nights, when men in dark suits and yarmulkes bring their modestly dressed wives in from Kew Gardens, Borough Park, and Paramus for a night of eclectic dining (the menu offers tempura, sake no nikogori, sushi, cholent, corned beef on rye, and matzoh ball soup) and good clean fun.

  Sometimes, when he is in the mood, Meyer Leifer takes the stage and does a little singing. I asked for a demonstration and he grabbed the mike, nodded to Miriam at the piano, and launched into a Tony Bennett-style rendition of the Hebrew standard, “Lila Lila.” He dipped his shoulder, closed his eyes on the high notes, and whipped the microphone cord around with professional ease. Miriam joined him on the chorus, singing the “lilas” with a distinct Japanese r where the l should have been.

  “I love to sing,” Leifer said superfluously, putting down the microphone with reluctance. “I was a child prodigy cantor, I used to appear in synagogues all over the country. I don’t sing love songs, but Hebrew and Yiddish favorites are all right. There’s no reason that a rabbi shouldn’t sing in public. Singing is something that makes people happy.”

  Shalom Japan is one of a growing number of kosher nightspots in New York that offer American entertainment to modern Orthodox patrons. American—but not too American. Even the most liberal brand of Orthodoxy requires its adherents to adopt a lifestyle based on values, attitudes, and behavior that are specifically Jewish. A kosher Japanese place without matzoh ball soup on the menu, or with a singer who sings in Japanese instead of Yiddish would be too much like the real thing. Mizakura and Rabbi Leifer have created a parody of a Japanese nightclub, and it is perfect because it spoofs America for its Orthodox patrons while allowing them, in Leibel Bistritzky’s admirable phrase, “a taste of chazer.”

  There is a new sense of ascendency and self-confidence among modern Orthodox Jews in America. When they first came to the United States, most Eastern European Jews were “Orthodox.” But in a process of assimilation and secularization, the majority drifted into other, more easygoing denominations or dropped out of the Jewish community altogether. Alarmists predicted that Orthodox Judaism might disappear altogether in America.

  But the pessimists underestimated the hold of tradition. Through gradual self-selection, a core of perhaps one million Orthodox Jews has crystallized in America. A minority of them are Chasidim, but the great majority—perhaps ninety percent—are modern Orthodox. They are college educated, speak English as their first language, read the sports page, and follow the stock market. They get married young, to other Orthodox Jews; have large families; and send their children to day schools where they are inculcated with a sense of being different from other Americans—and other American Jews. They have apparently found a way to live in America without losing their religion or their identity; and this discovery has given them a new feeling of control and optimism.

  But if the modern Orthodox have found an American modus vivendi, they have yet to resolve their problem with Israel. Other Jews feel no compulsion to move to Israel; American Zionism takes a fan-club approach to the Jewish state. But the Orthodox have no such luxury. Three times a day they face Jerusalem and pray of their longing for Zion. They are required by their own ideology to acknowledge the centrality of Israel and to admit that Jewish life in Jerusalem has a greater validity than in New York. After all, one of their greatest rabbis, Abraham Isaac Kook, taught that “the commandment to live in Israel is as important as all the other commandments combined.”

  Many modern Orthodox Jews have spent
a year or two in an Israeli yeshiva or university. Most have contemplated living there permanently. All of them feel guilty about staying in America. But they stay, because they can make more money, pay less taxes, avoid military duty. They stay because life is easier.

  There are various rationalizations for this violation of the commandment to live in Israel: Old people want to be near their grandchildren; yuppies say they can’t make a living; many claim that their aliyah to Jerusalem is just a matter of time. But none of the rationalizations really work; Israel is the worm in the shiny red apple of modern American Orthodoxy.

  * * *

  The balancing act between the American dream and the demands of the Torah may be a problem in places like the Lower East Side. But across the bridge in Brooklyn there are people who have never heard of sukiyaki, Mrs. Adler’s Kosher Bacon Bits, or kosher El Bubble chewing gum, and who consider living in the state of Israel unnecessary or even blasphemous. They are the Chasidim, the black-garbed ultras of Williamsburg, Borough Park, and Crown Heights.

  A generation ago, there were about thirty thousand Chasidic Jews in Brooklyn; today they have more than tripled, to an estimated one hundred thousand. While the rest of American Jewry puzzles over demographic reports and watches its numbers dwindle, the Chasidim have tripled their size, mostly through natural increase.

  The two superpowers of the Chasidic world are Lubavitch, located in Crown Heights, and Satmar, based in Williamsburg. To the untrained eye their members look as identical as snowflakes, but this is an optical illusion. The Lubavitcher (also known as “Chabad”) Chasidim are Jewish Jesuits—adventurous, relatively sophisticated, pseudointellectual, and extroverted. They regard non-religious Jews as opportunities, and they approach them with the friendly enthusiasm of aluminum siding salesmen.

  Satmar Chasidim, on the other hand, are grumps. They are the hardest kernel of the hard core—introverted, self-absorbed, anti-intellectual, and militantly opposed to Americanization, Reform Judaism, Conservative Judaism, Zionism, the State of Israel, most other Chasidic sects, and the twentieth century. They would no more go to Shalom Japan than they would attend a bullfight or the Miss Universe pageant.