No event more graphically reveals the tensions that the Palestinian intifada has brought to the large Jewish community of Los Angeles than the ill-fated rally held by Peace Now on a Sunday afternoon last March, a week before Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir's visit to the city.
Some 300 people came to Roxbury Park in Beverly Hills hoping to hear such luminaries as the writer and critic Irving Howe; the novelist and Israeli Labor Party leader Yael Dayan; the feminist Betty Friedan; Gerald Bubis, director of the School of Communal Service at Hebrew Union College; Rabbi Laura Geller, director of the Hillel Jewish Center at the University of Southern California; her counterpart at the University of California in Los Angeles, Rabbi Chaim Seidler-Feller; and the actor Richard Dreyfuss.
They were met by another 200 irate, sign-carrying demonstrators--Orthodox Jews, die-hard Kahanists and other hard-line supporters of the Israeli occupation--who were visibly determined to disrupt Peace Now's rally.
What followed would be described by Howe, after an unsuccessful attempt at pacifying the crowd, as a "shanda and a charpa"--a shame and a disgrace. For this utterance, Howe, editor of Dissent and author of The World of Our Fathers and works on Yiddish literature and poetry, was shouted down and called a self-hating Jew.
Dayan was similarly denigrated as a traitor to her people and a bane to the memory of her father, Moshe Dayan. Friedan, Geller and Bubis faced merciless and often obscene jeering. Jostling, fist-waving, scuffling and occasional surges against the speakers' platform might have transformed the scene into the Jewish equivalent of a gang rumble but for the efforts of uniformed Beverly Hills police. But the most intense rage of the counterdemonstrators was largely reserved for Richard Dreyfuss.
As he walked up to the microphone, the diminutive, bearded actor brought a hush to the crowd. Whatever his message, the man was a star--even to his opponents. Even in the presence of glitz, however, their reverence proved short-lived. When Dreyfuss declared that God Himself must surely frown at Israel's policy of beatings in the territories, many among the counterdemonstrators would have offered Dreyfuss a taste of that policy but for the police guarding him.
Finally, as a phalanx of police escorted Dreyfuss out of the park to his car--with several of his detractors launching a few well-placed kicks at his legs when they could--the crowd was asked for silence so that a prayer for Israel could be offered and its national anthem, "Hatikva," sung.
Demonstrator and counterdemonstrator joined the chorus, but it was clear that two entirely different anthems were being sung, two wildly disparate hopes articulated.
That afternoon, Rabbi Laura Geller returned to her office aware that a new, raw element had entered into the equation of Los Angeles's hitherto placid and occasionally even somnolent Jewish life.
Although a veteran of numerous demonstrations during the 1960s, she had never before felt the threat of bodily harm at the hands of fellow Jews. It was certainly the first time Jews had ever called her a "Nazi."
It had been a difficult year for the 38-year-old director of the Hillel Jewish Center at U.S.C.
Early during the Palestinian uprising, Palestinian students and their supporters at U.S.C. had staged a graphic street-theater protest against what they called Israeli brutality in the occupied territories. For 15 minutes, a contingent of the Palestinian Cultural Club sprawled out "dead" in mid-campus, splattered with fake blood and dripping gore, while puzzled passersby gazed on. This was, after all, Hollywood.
Student newspapers throughout the city directed a steady stream of op-ed abuse at the Jewish state. Jewish students both on Geller's campus and at U.C.L.A. found themselves challenged to respond effectively.
Even more worrisome, however, was the effect the intifada seemed to be having within the Jewish community of Los Angeles. For the first time since Geller could remember, the vitriolic polarization of the Israeli political arena seemed to be creeping into West Coast Jewish life. And that was as frightening as any street theater.
In February, for instance--two months after the outbreak of rebellion in the West Bank and Gaza Strip--Rabbi Abner Weiss, spiritual leader of the largest Orthodox synagogue in Los Angeles, Beth Jacob, tried to persuade the Jewish Federation Council of Greater Los Angeles to oust the left-wing New Jewish Agenda from its ranks.
This attempt--the second in a year, the first having been launched by Rabbi Julian White, the local leader of the right-wing Americans for a Safe Israel, or A.F.S.I.--ultimately failed. The federation, always loath to involve itself in openly divisive issues, merely chastised N.J.A. instead. But Geller, who had witnessed the crushing of the left-wing Jewish movement Breira by Jewish organizations and leaders during the 1970s, feared any attempt to question an organization's Jewishness on the basis of its political leanings.
In a sense, Geller could understand the outrage against N.J.A. for joining local Arab-American organizations in conspicuously anti-Israeli demonstrations. Geller herself had strenuously urged the group to bypass the Palestinians and to work with mainstream Jewish organizations instead.
But if N.J.A.'s right to membership in the Jewish community was challenged because of its stance on the occupied territories, how long would it be before groups and parties more firmly within the Zionist camp came under attack by the zealots?
Geller didn't have to wait long for an answer. Less than a month, actually. On March 13 Peace Now held its rally.
Geller was, in fact, astonished that an Israeli organization having a significant mainstream, Zionist constituency within the Jewish state could become the target of a campaign of vilification and suppression no less virulent than that directed against New Jewish Agenda.
This much was clear: A small minority of Jews had successfully demonstrated that zeal and organization could produce tangible results, especially in a town where most Jews remained determinedly unaffiliated.
Orthodox groups may, in fact, find it easier to operate politically in Los Angeles than on the East Coast. Unlike New York, where there is a sizable and concentrated Orthodox presence, Los Angeles sprawls out for hundreds of miles. The Hebrew Union College demographer Bruce Phillips notes that, as a consequence, in Los Angeles it is easy for Jews to get lost. Indeed, outside of the Beverly/Fairfax neighborhood and some small sections of the San Fernando Valley, the Jewish community in Los Angeles is largely invisible.
Jewish life on the West Coast becomes a matter of organizational affiliation. But Jews in the Los Angeles area, who tend not to be as rooted to a European past as Jews in the East, are only half as likely to belong to Jewish organizations.
Although this makes mainstream Jewish fund-raising difficult, it can be a blessing for tightly knit Jewish subcultures such as the Orthodox groups. On the West Coast, where the vast majority of Jews remain uninvolved with affairs of communal interest, these groups and their allies have found it relatively easy to present themselves as vested arbiters of Jewish law, custom and--most recently--Israeli policy. In a political vacuum, who is going to argue the point?
Thus the Gentile television viewer in, say, the wilds of Whittier, a town in the San Gabriel Valley, witnessed the fracas at Roxbury Park on the evening news convinced that the Jewish community of Los Angeles had slid into a state of civil war over events in the Middle East. It would not, indeed could not, have occurred to this viewer, whose exposure to Jews and things Jewish has been limited, that most Los Angeles Jews continued about their affairs largely unaffected either by events abroad or, for that matter, by internecine rumblings at home. Through the prism of such rarified perceptions, Jews are Jews, whether sporting sidecurls and Talmuds or Hawaiian tans and tennis rackets.
This has certainly been the case in Sacramento, the state capital, where the Orthodox group Agudath Israel--whose constituents on the whole did not participate in the Roxbury Park counterdemonstration--has garnered approval in the Legislature for five of its bills. Indeed, according to Tom Waldman, a journalist who covers politics for California Journal, Agudath Israel forged an unlikely alliance with liberal Assemblyman Tom Hayden in 1985, convincing him to sponsor two bills guaranteeing the rights of employees and students who observe the Jewish Sabbath.
There aren't many Agudah members lobbying Sacramento, Waldman said, but the few who make periodic trips to the Legislature bring with them some 65 years of collective political savvy developed in New York.
The mainstream Jewish community has regarded Agudah's success with both envy and concern. Many of the Jewish federation's misgivings stem from Agudah's willingness to form coalitions with the religious right on issues such as school prayer and state tax credits for parochial schools. But few within the community--and certainly no one within the top ranks of the federation--have been prepared to voice this openly.
Indeed, the Orthodox, who number 60,000 out of the 600,000 Jews in Greater Los Angeles, represent, in the eyes of federation fund-raisers, a major untapped source of financial support. A high proportion are doctors, lawyers and accountants, making them an affluent group of potential donors. This has been especially important in recent years because the federation's funding campaign has struggled mightily and often against the current to reach a $50 million campaign goal by 1988.
The federation has not opposed the Orthodox community in Sacramento or elsewhere on issues of school prayer, tuition tax credits or Israel. In fact, the federation has taken the Orthodox community to its bosom, involving it in the affairs of its Bureau of Jewish Education, its Jewish Family and Jewish Vocational Services programs and its kosher meals program. Most recently, the federation has also started setting up the groundwork within the Orthodox community for eventual fund-raising.
But for the most part, Orthodox Jewry in Los Angeles, especially groups such as Agudath Israel, has only looked to the mainstream community to stay out of its way. This is because if the Orthodox are to succeed in Sacramento, the Legislature must believe that they are not opposed by mainstream Jewry. The last thing California legislators want is to get in the middle of a war between Jewish factions.
Most Orthodox synagogues in Los Angeles function as empires unto themselves. In such Orthodox strongholds as Hancock Park in Los Angeles or North Hollywood in the San Fernando Valley--areas that have experienced recent real-estate booms as families seek housing within walking distance of their shuls--the synagogues run their own schools, support their own charities in Israel and set their own agendas.
Deciding on the shape and fate of the Jewish state, however, was--particularly for that portion of the Orthodox population most ardently nationalistic in its regard for Israel--another matter. Peace Now, many believed, offered Israel precious few options but national suicide and spiritual bankruptcy--the virtual betrayal of God's trust. The organization, some proponents of a hard-line approach in the Middle East correctly perceived, had few adherents in Southern California and, it was thought, could safely be run out of town, duly tarred and feathered, on a rail.
Despite the fact that Los Angeles is the second largest "Jewish city" in the country, Peace Now found itself unable to attract even 1,000 supporters to a posh public park on a gorgeous, smog- and haze-free Sunday last March--not even with actor Richard Dreyfuss and other prominent speakers taking the rostrum.
A survey published by the Los Angeles Times a month after the event revealed that American Jews did not uniformly support Israel's iron-fist policies in the West Bank and Gaza. And in fact, both the Times survey and a separate poll conducted that year by the American Jewish Committee indicated that a majority of American Jews favored publicly expressing their doubts about Israeli policies.
But Peace Now had already learned firsthand that it would take more than movie stars to translate any unease among local Jews into a public discussion. "We were warned that Los Angeles Jews don't turn out for demonstrations," said Robert Eshman, head of the Los Angeles Friends of Peace Now.
Stanley Treitel, cochairman of Agudath Israel's Commission on Legislation, said that it is hard to compel Jews in Los Angeles to demonstrate for or against anything. Whether the cause has been Soviet Jewry or the Times's allegedly unbalanced coverage of the Palestinian uprising, Los Angeles Jewry has adopted a couch-potato approach to protests.
The Roxbury Park counterdemonstrators made good use of this inertia. They knew that in a town where mainstream Jewry will do almost anything to avoid a public commotion that would pit Jew against Jew, they might not only silence Peace Now, but also saddle it with responsibility for the ensuing debacle.
The Yellow Pages serving the West Bank town of Efrat describe Eddie Harrow as a "podiatrist." Unfortunately, not many Israelis know what a podiatrist is--a shame really, because those interminable stretcher marches the army subjects its young people to can wreck one's feet for life. But though Harrow's medical skills may have gone largely unappreciated by his neighbors, the kippa-sporting foot doctor still carried some weight in his native Los Angeles.
When Harrow received a Los Angeles Jewish newspaper that informed him of Peace Now's plans for the March 13 rally, he was outraged. He telephoned his sister-in-law, Eve Harrow, a homemaker with a graduate degree in psychology who would soon be moving her family from the heavily Jewish Pico-Robertson area of Los Angeles to Efrat.
At Harrow's behest, Eve told me, she telephoned Rabbi Dov Aharoni, head of the ultra-Orthodox Beit Hamidrash of Woodland Hills and a Gush Emunim activist. Aharoni placed an ad calling for a counterdemonstration in the B'nai B'rith Messenger, a Jewish weekly in Los Angeles. The wording--"Drown out the Hamans--Bring your groggers!"--was Aharoni's idea.
In retrospect, Eve Harrow said, she wishes he had used a less incendiary slogan. Aharoni, however, remains obstinately proud of it.
Barely a week before the rally, Aharoni scurried about the city, securing approval and cooperation from some of the most prominent rabbis within its modern Orthodox community. Abner Weiss of Beth Jacob in Beverly Hills immediately announced support for this initiative and offered his services as recruiter and adviser.
He also engaged the support of Rabbi Julian White, head of the local A.F.S.I., and Rabbi Isaiah Zeldin, a Likud supporter and leader of the Stephen S. Wise Temple, one of the wealthiest and most influential Reform synagogues in Los Angeles.
News of the planned counterdemonstration spread through the community like a Hollywood Hills brushfire.
Meanwhile, Los Angeles Jews had been up in arms over the Los Angeles Times's coverage of the uprising, which many perceived as being biased in favor of the Palestinian side and lacking the depth required to make sense of so complex an event.
While critics of the Times judged Jerusalem correspondent Dan Fisher to have comported himself professionally, they thought him badly served by copy editors in Los Angeles. Often the headlines cooked up to describe outbreaks of violence in the West Bank gave the appearance of untrammeled Israeli aggression and brutality against the rock throwers and tire burners. The provocation these troops faced was not always given equal play.
But far more onerous to Jewish Los Angeles was the work of Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist Paul Conrad, whose representations of Israel on the newspaper's op-ed pages put many Jews in a frenzy.
When Rabbi Marvin Hier's turn came to speak at a federation meeting on press coverage, he ignored the press issue altogether. Instead, he chose to share his discovery that the Palestinians with whom he had talked in the West Bank and Gaza had made no bones about their unwillingness to accept any Jewish state on either side of the Green Line.
According to Gerald Bubis, Hier concluded his report with a biblical reference to the 12 spies dispatched by Moses to reconnoiter the land of Canaan. Their report, Hier said, was found insufficiently laudatory of conditions in the Holy Land. They were lacking in proportion, which in the eyes of God made the spies traitors against the Jewish people, as would be the case of those promising to demonstrate that Sunday at Roxbury Park.
Robert Eshman defended Peace Now against charges that it was undermining Israel. The organization, which had been languishing both here and in Israel since the Lebanese war, acted, he told me, out of its perception of Israel's best interests.
Peace Now argues that the more than two-decade forced marriage between Israel and the Palestinians under its control in the occupied territories is bleeding the Jewish state dry and corrupting its moral stature. If both peoples wish to survive their danse macabre, a divorce is in order.
Steven Windmueller, executive director of the federation's community relations committee, was pleased with the outcome of the general meeting. His mandate had always been to foster consensus in a sometimes contention-ridden community. It seemed to him that bringing together political opponents, if only to blow off steam, contributed to the good of the community.
"Jews here are desperately in need of a process of venting," he said.
During the week before the March 13 rally, the venting continued, particularly on the right. On the Saturday morning preceding the rally, Abner Weiss reminded his congregation to dust off their Purim noisemakers for the following day's festivities.
In retrospect, the counterdemonstration received mixed reviews within the Orthodox community of Los Angeles. Privately, the event was often spoken of in triumphant tones. Publicly, some expressed regret, though Peace Now was still blamed for bringing the wrath of the community down on itself.
Stanley Treitel of Agudath Israel was virtually alone among Orthodox leaders in maintaining that the entire Jewish community would have fared better had the counterdemonstrators stayed at home.
"I certainly don't support the Peace Now line," he said, "but nor do I approve of disruption, which breeds disunity. Those people had a right to be heard."
Dov Aharoni had no qualms at all over the events of that day. "I'm not just proud of the outcome," he told me. "I'm thrilled."
"Where does it talk about free speech or democracy in the Bible?" asked another Orthodox leader, who did not wish to be named.
Eve Harrow, however, said she thought "the whole thing got out of hand."
On the liberal left, meanwhile, there was the feeling that the tenor of Jewish life in Los Angeles had changed, perhaps irrevocably.
Gerald Bubis said he was particularly worried by what he called the "false symmetry" that now appeared to exist in the perception of the Jewish-American mainstream between the far right, as exemplified by A.F.S.I. and the supporters of Gush Emunim, and Peace Now, whose strategic outlook was shared even by many within the Israel Defense Force's general staff.
But equally troublesome, Bubis said, was the lack of civility that had come to characterize some aspects of Jewish life in the wake of the uprising. Rational discussion of the issues facing Israel, he said, was no longer possible.
David Lehrer, West Coast regional director of the Anti-Defamation League, concurred with Bubis that "the shouting, the confrontation, the public disputes, are different from what has gone on before. This hits closer to some real hard decisions over the future of Israel," he said. "People feel they are fighting for the nature, the quality and the demography of the Jewish state."
Laura Geller believed the right acted as it did because they were "confused over what's going on in Israel and are simply lashing out at available targets, mainly Jews taking moderate positions."
Peace Now leaders said that at a meeting with Stanley Hirsh they got the impression that he and other federation officials blamed Peace Now for bringing misfortune on itself and the rest of the community.
"We were wronged," said one, "but that's not what I was hearing from them."
Hirsh, the owner of the Cooper Fashion Center in Los Angeles, a substantial donor to the federation and until July its president, responded to the attack on Peace Now's rally by acting behind the scenes to arrange a sulha, a reconciliation, between Peace Now and its assailants. Nothing had yet resulted from these efforts.
When pressed to comment on the tactics used to silence Peace Now, Hirsh, who was then the leader of one of the most powerful communal organizations in Southern California, insisted that politics were beyond the scope of his concerns.
"It's not my place as the head of the federation to take sides in a political dispute," he said.
That, said those who feared for the future of legitimate debate within Jewish Los Angeles, may well have been the community's problem all along.
Peace Now's Robert Eshman told me that as a consequence of the Roxbury Park incident, his organization would not hold any more outdoor rallies because there was no way to stop other groups from disrupting them.
The federation, Peace Now activists believed, should have responded to the attack on their rally with a clear-cut, public statement outlining the limits of acceptable behavior governing political discourse within the Jewish community.
As spring dragged into summer and summer into autumn and no such pronouncement was forthcoming, Peace Now turned its attention to organizing indoor events, including one large gathering that drew some 800 people to hear prominent Israeli dove Yehoshafat Harkabi speak. Peace Now in Los Angeles also managed to generate more members and funds than any other branch of the organization in the United States.
Indeed, even by the time the Jewish community held its annual festival commemorating Israeli Independence Day last May at Rancho Park--probably the only public Jewish event capable of guaranteeing a crowd of 30,000--the debacle at Roxbury Park appeared to have been forgotten.
The federation's reluctance to enforce the norms and values professed by most of its component organizations made it possible for the Jewish Defense League and its Kach Party associates to assemble one of the largest booths at the festival. The federation had effected an embargo against their participation several years before, but it had never been enforced.
This, in fact, is the Los Angeles Jewish community's problem in a nutshell. The appearance of unity has become a paramount necessity. Disunity makes it hard for Jewish organizations to raise funds. And fund-raising is of greater consequence than the fact that consensus has become a fiction.
This remains true even now, when the ultimate fate of Israel, the focus of most fund-raising activity, most obviously hangs in the balance. Yitzhak Shamir may profess to be prepared for another nine years of Palestinian unrest, but before then something will have to give. It may be Israel's democratic character and institutions; it may be the continued Palestinian presence in the West Bank and in Gaza. Whatever the outcome, the conflict cannot continue in its present form indefinitely.
Unfortunately the Jewish Federation Council in Los Angeles, through its obsession with maintaining a false consensus, has made it easier for extremists to set the tone for whatever passes for legitimate debate in Los Angeles.
Sheldon Teitelbaum is a frequent contributor to the Los Angeles Times, and covers the film industry for the magazine Cinefantastique. He served for five years as an officer in the Israel Defense Force and has written extensively for the Jerusalem Post, Ma'ariv and Monitin.