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A New York Jewish childhood at the Dalton School where privilege met progressivism
I am what is called “a Dalton lifer.” I was born in Manhattan on Dec. 1, 1943, at Lenox Hill Hospital and was a New Yorker all my life before I married and moved away. For 14 of those years, from when I was 3 (going on 4) until I was 18, I attended the Dalton School.
My parents chose Dalton because it was a progressive school that was comfortable for Jewish children, who made up about one-third of the school’s population, and it admitted Black students. There were a number of such schools in Manhattan at the time; influenced by the educational philosophy of John Dewey, they believed learning should be taught by doing, and that education should include active inquiry and problem solving. (My father, in fact, had attended the University of Chicago Lab School that Dewey created in 1896.)
When I was little, I often walked with my older brothers from our apartment at 81st and Park Avenue to 89th where Dalton was located between Park and Lexington. On the way, we would pass a stationery store where adults would put down some change on top of the newspaper pile and take one or two of the papers that the shopkeeper had neatly arranged on a wooden bench outside of the store front. As a child, I sometimes stole some of that change and to this day I am horrified at myself.
By the time I was eight, I would walk back home by myself on Lexington Avenue, which formed the western boundary of Yorkville between 72nd Street and 96th. Yorkville was then populated by Germans and German-speaking immigrants such as Hungarians and Czechs. During the 1930s and World War II, it had been the headquarters of the German Bund. It was less than a decade after the end of World War II, and as Jews, my parents were keenly aware of Yorkville’s past. While they shopped on Lexington, they warned us it could be dangerous, and indeed, one of my brothers got held up there. My parents were reluctant to allow me, as a girl, to walk east of 86th and Lex – where there were still dance halls and beer parlors and clubs that seemed to me both alien and alluring.
Nevertheless, I strode down Lexington by myself, entranced by the wonderful shops. There was a fabulous marzipan store; I loved that candy, molded into tiny figurines small apples and lemons, hand-sculpted dogs and statuettes, and seasonal Christmas and Easter pieces. Near 82nd Street, there was a drug store with a soda counter that sold sandwiches and drinks where my mother would always order an egg salad sandwich and a coffee milkshake. There was an old-fashioned health-food store that sold specialty items such as nut bread, yogurt and whole grains.
Lexington was still a two-way street, and the bus price had recently gone up from a nickel to a dime. Later, when we were in high school, we would cheat on both the bus and subway and shove a whole bunch of us through without paying for everyone. But fixed in my memory is that contrast between the still-living fear of American Nazis that my parents embodied and the richness of store life on Lexington Avenue.
A privileged childhood
Of course, memories are tricky, and mine are probably filled with biases and mistakes. We misremember to be sure. And we imagine our childhood recollections through the prism of who we were. I was from a privileged German-Jewish family. At the time I did not think of myself as especially fortunate. It was just who I was.
When I went to college, I encountered the wonderful post-Civil-War writer, Henry Adams. Near the beginning of his masterpiece, The Education of Henry Adams, he tells the story of being about 5 or 6, and playing on the grounds of his grandfather John Quincy Adams’ house. Adams’ gardener declared that young Henry probably believed that he would grow up to be president too. Henry recalled that it had never occurred to him that he would not become president; that’s what his family did.
Not only are my recollections filtered through an unconscious perception of privilege, they are also intertwined with my identity as a young Jew. When I was a student in Dalton’s lower school, I don’t remember if I was aware of the double luck of having been born into money and what we then called culture; and into an America with no close relatives who had been murdered in the Holocaust. My grandmother worried about some of her family back in Europe; she’d been told some of them were still alive, but she could not find them.
In the 1940s and 1950s, America was still a country made up largely of white European nationals and Blacks whose grandparents or great-grandparents had been born into slavery. The distinctions between European nationalities defined much of my world. I knew I was not Irish, Italian, or Polish Catholic, nor was I German-Lutheran or Scandinavian Most of the white children — other than the Jews — who attended Dalton were WASPs and I wasn’t one of those either. I remember only one boy who was Catholic, Fitzhugh Seamus MacManus Mullin whose father’s family was Irish and whose mother’s family was Spanish. His grandfather would come to Dalton, sit on a chair in our wonderful theater, and enrapture us by reciting Celtic tales. I assume that he was Seumas MacManus, who according to Wikipedia was considered by many to be the last great seanchaí, or storyteller of the ancient oral tradition.
I knew there were barriers between Jews and Christians, but they never impeded upon my sense of self. Park Avenue apartment buildings were either Jewish or gentile, and my building, 941 Park Avenue, was occupied entirely by Jewish families. The only non-Jews with whom I interacted in my building worked for one the families who lived there, or for the building itself; they were maids and supers and doormen, and they were white and largely Irish.
When I was little and in the lower school, I did not think about religion. Most of my family had come from Germany and had been in America since before the Civil War. They were not observant, in fact quite the opposite. My parents believed that religion was the opiate of the masses, and we ate shellfish and ham. My father banned uncured pork as in pork chops, so my mother often served lamb chops, which was unusual in the America of that time. Both of my parents grew up in Chicago, my mother in the northern suburb of Kenilworth, my father on the south side of the city near the University of Chicago. My mother’s family was wealthy and lived in a very large house where I happily played as a child and where my best companion there was the son of my grandparents’ chauffeur, whose family lived in an apartment above the garage.
Their world was German-Jewish, and my grandfather was one of the founders of that communities’ local country club. My grandparents, seeking spiritual meaning in their lives, followed Christian Science, but they still considered themselves Jewish, though as members of the upper-class German-Jewish world they would never have considered joining a Conservative or Orthodox community.
My father’s family was split between Eastern and Central Europe. His father was Lithuanian and Orthodox, his mother was German and reform, and that divide contributed to my paternal grandparents’ divorce. After my parents had married and moved to New York, our father would take us on excursions to the Lower East Side where we would buy challah, which we never ate on Friday night. I understood — without knowing the word — that we were part of what the larger Jewish world called Yekke. That is, we were of German and Central European descent and our grandparents and their parents before them did not speak Yiddish. This was in contrast to the Jews from the areas of Eastern Europe where Jews did speak Yiddish, who had not yet assimilated into American culture and language as we had, were often poorer, and were looked down upon by the Yekke.
My parents may have disliked organized religion, but they certainly felt Jewish. In the late 1930s, my mother and her mother sponsored Jews trying to get out of Germany. My mother had a letter from Albert Einstein, written in German and addressed to Fraulein Spiegel (her maiden name) thanking her for trying to help a Jewish family of mathematicians. And in retrospect, their Jewish identity must also have been reinforced in 1948 by the establishment of Israel, then a small, scrappy, underdog state. Like most American Jews, they thought of Israel as a symbol of survival: Hitler had not wiped us off the face of the earth.
Later I learned that my parents’ largest contribution every year was to the United Jewish Appeal (UJA). But this was true of the vast majority of Jews of their generation, and I would guess was so for the parents of virtually every Jewish child in Dalton’s lower and middle school. One of the girls in my Dalton class was Elizabeth Rosenwald (Varet), the daughter of William Rosenwald (and granddaughter of Julius Rosenwald) who, along with much of his family, helped found the UJA. Another was Ruth Slawson, daughter of John Slawson, who was director of the American Jewish Committee from 1943 to 1968. But, in the lower school I felt simply part of my environment, and a very large part of that environment was Dalton.
A world of progressives and universalists
When we were in kindergarten, our schoolroom had its own sandbox: Dalton allowed us to play and simply grow. When we started 1st grade, however, we were meant to learn how to read. But I had no interest in reading except for comic books, especially Tarzan. Not knowing how to crack the code to read all those words contained in the bubbles attached to each character’s head, I happily made up my own stories. A group of us remained illiterate until the fall of 3rd grade, when we attended a remedial class and I learned how to decode letters and symbols. When we each finally conquered the art of literacy, we were given a very small penknife clad in mother of pearl. Comics were never the same.
Each lower school grade was split into two classes, each with its own teacher. The lower school teacher I remember best was Ellie Seeger, a fabulous storyteller who regaled our class with stories until the other second grade class got so jealous she had to stop. Her husband was John Seeger, brother of Pete Seeger. John Seeger taught middle school geography where we made papier mâché maps, something I adored doing. He would sing for us sometimes, and although I became a great fan of Pete Seeger, I think John was just as good.
School at Dalton would frequently begin with a morning assembly. We would march into our wonderful proscenium theater with red-covered theater seats to piano music. It was there that John Seeger sang for us. It was there that we put on plays and made costumes in a wonderful anteroom space. And it was also there that Dalton held its Christmas Pageant, a re-enactment of the birth of Jesus and the story of the wisemen from the east, to which none of our Jewish parents objected.
In 1951, we went on a trip to Otis, a farm in Massachusetts. We crossed over a gully or a stream on a log. I still have a photo of myself milking a cow into a metal bucket
I was friends with a Black girl named Judy Walker and we had sleepover dates. She would come with us to our summer house in Connecticut, and I went with her to the vacation home her family was building, and to her home in Harlem. Her father was a chemist and one morning at her house I woke up to music, thinking it was the theme to the Lone Ranger. Her parents must have liked classical music because it was the William Tell Overture.
The biggest event of 5th grade was the Greek Festival — a very Dewey-inspired production. Tessie Ross was our teacher, and we loved her. She taught at Dalton for 43 years beginning in 1944 after she had fled to the U.S. from Belgium and she led the Greek Festival, which took place in the gym and had carriages and spears and shields and armor. We played at being Greeks — Athenians against the Spartans, with parents as our audience.
In high school, I had one other teacher who was a refugee from Europe, our history teacher Nora Hodges. Mrs. Hodges was born in 1899 as Nora August Warndorfer, from Vienna. She came from a family of wealthy Jews, and fortunately she got out of Vienna many years before the Anschluss. She went back to Austria in the mid-1930’s and told us how she had listened to the radio, and, hearing a magnetic voice come over the air, felt captivated — until she learned that it was Adolph Hitler.
In the lower school, girls got to wear pants on Fridays. That was a big deal then because girls still wore skirts and dresses. Always. I remember mine as being corduroy with an elastic waist. I believe that going casual on Fridays, however, was not simply a symptom of Dalton progressive philosophy, but an indicator that it was populated by well-off families. Of course, the America of the 1950s was not as divided between rich and poor as it is now, and those who were upper middle class, or even rich, were not inclined to be ostentatious. But many families had either country homes or were members of country clubs. So, the school allowed girls to sport trousers on Fridays so they would be dressed to go to their second homes.
Not that all families were wealthy. Robert Newman, whose daughter Hila was a class or two above me, was a radio-drama playwright turned children’s book writer. Wally Shawn’s father WIlliam was the editor of The New Yorker, so he was very well-known but wasn’t paid a banker’s salary. Bettye George Dockery’s father was a dentist. Michael Lerner’s father, Max Lerner, was a writer, professor, and public intellectual, and also famous, but not wealthy. Pebble Baker’s father was a journalist for Time.
We ended our school year with a festival called “Arch Day.” Each class went through an arch on the auditorium stage. We went in as part of one grade and exited as part of the next. There were skits as well. My brother Paul finished 8th grade in 1954, when so many Americans were obsessed with the McCarthy hearings, so Paul’s class put together a skit entitled “Point of Order.”
Most Dalton students, and I assume most of the teachers, were liberal, but establishment liberal. We all assumed Alger Hiss was innocent. His son Tony went to Dalton and was a few years ahead of me. One of his lawyers was Helen Buttenweiser. The Buttenweiser children went to Dalton. She and her husband Benjamin were wealthy German Jewish New York philanthropists..
But while we were all aware of Joseph McCarthy, of the House Un-American Affairs Committee (HUAC), and of Alger Hiss, we never talked about Ethel and Julius Rosenberg. Ethel Greenglass was a secretary and a member of the Young Communist League. Julius’ parents were immigrants from Russia who grew up on the Lower East Side and he also was a communist. Alger Hiss was accepted by much of German Jewish Yekke Manhattan, though he himself was not Jewish, but the Rosenbergs were not. They were the wrong kind of Jews — the ones who would never have sent their sons to Dalton.
That divide, between Hiss and the Rosenbergs, perhaps illuminates my Dalton world in the 1950s. We were comfortable progressives and post-World War II universalists. We believed in Civil Rights and the future of Blacks in the United States. We supported John Lindsay for congress and mayor. My father once chaperoned me and a friend to a Pete Seeger concert, and he was terrified by how Pete Seeger could whip up a crowd — it reminded him too much of Adolph Hitler.
In the 7th or 8th grade, I read The Diary of Anne Frank. I devoured it one summer when I was at my parents’ vacation house in Martha’s Vineyard. There was a great tick scare that summer, so I lay in my bed, clenching my teeth to ward off any ticks, reading Anne Frank and refashioning my identity.
By middle school, questions of my own identity began to intertwine with my Dalton childhood. My mother once told me that some of the girls whose parents sent them to Dalton in the lower and middle school did so in order to provide their children with a diverse environment but then put them elsewhere for high school so that they would not become romantically attached to a Jewish boy or too acculturated into Jewish (or at least Yekke) life.
A story worth preserving
When I went through the arch in June of 1957, I entered as an 8th grader and emerged as a high school student. Four years later, in 1961, I graduated — 65 years ago. America was a different world then. The gap between rich and poor was not as yawning, and the wealthy were not as excessive. For Jewish children today, the memory of the Holocaust is often a nearly untouchable past that they learn about in Hebrew School; the story of Anne Frank is recalled from a school assignment; and secular Jews like my family have left the emotional ghetto in which my parents still lived. Our public and private contexts have changed. And so I have decided to tell my story of one German Jewish child living in Manhattan in the 1940s and 1950s, attending one progressive grade school, during one slice of time that I feel is worth preserving.
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The Jewish friendship that let David Hockney experience ‘dangerous perfection’
Think of the British painter David Hockney, who died Thursday at 88, and you think of color. 1967’s “A Bigger Splash,” almost certainly his most famous work, is a study in blue so profound that it’s nearly synesthetic: The pool is such a saturated cool that you can feel the water lap your feet, and the sky so rich with California sunlight that your shoulders burn. When Hockney turned more toward landscapes in later years, trees came in every color of the rainbow — here a pink trunk, there a purple — and roads were streaked salmon and teal.
Which makes it stranger that one of the works of his that I find most evocative has no color at all. It’s a 1975 pen and ink drawing of the American Jewish artist R.B. Kitaj, one of Hockney’s dearest friends, sitting on a bench outside an art school in Vienna.
Kitaj, head propped in his hand, looks out toward the left side of the page. His face is the lone area of detail in a scene thrown together with brisk, expressive lines. There is a sense of place around him, but that place is in the act of disappearing. As the scene spreads to the right and lower edges of the page — the areas that would fall outside Kitaj’s line of sight — it ceases to exist. Kitaj’s bench is slatted, rounded and real, but the bench abutting it is depicted in a few brief strokes. The buildings and street are sketched with light attention within what seems to be Kitaj’s periphery line, and are nonexistent beyond it.
The picture is a study of a man in deep focus. Hockney draws Kitaj’s head — and by inference, everything within it — as real and lifelike. But beyond the scope of Kitaj’s vision — the material the world presents him, possibly to be made into art — Hockney shows his surroundings as being valuable only as perspective lines, helping to situate the subject in space.
To be caught thinking is a vulnerable experience. To have someone restore your sense of your own physical self is a shock. By sketching Kitaj in his moment of remove, Hockney gave a renowned and somewhat glamorous friendship a sense of life. And he gave a sense of life, too, to the thing that made his own art so attractive: the impression of a rare and gorgeous intensity of vision, one that could draw a viewer’s attention so completely that it seemed what was on the canvas was the only real thing on earth.
In his drawing of Kitaj, the line is blurred between his subject’s concentration and his own. Is it really that Kitaj is so immersed in the act of seeing — or that Hockney is, his gaze so rapt upon his friend as to make him able to capture, briefly, what it was like to see through Kitaj’s eyes?
From the first days of their friendship at the Royal College of Art, Hockney and Kitaj existed on two planes for one another: human and artistic. As each worked to find the right way to reflect their own humanity in their art, their concepts of both themselves and their work influenced one another. “I was painting about my Jews and my books and Hockney was just coming out of the closet, so I said paint that,” Kitaj once said. And another time: “He switched to his gay culture as I began on my Jewish culture in its first forms.”
When Kitaj married the painter Sandra Fisher in 1983 — after Hockney introduced them in the 1970s — Hockney was his best man. “Those orthodox Rabbis had never seen such a gang under the chuppa,” Hockney told 032c magazine in 2025. At that moment, he said, “life for me had reached a dangerous perfection.”
A “dangerous perfection.” What did that mean? I see a glimpse of the answer in Hockney’s drawing of Kitaj — a sense of connection so complete as to threaten the boundaries of selfhood. At Kitaj’s wedding, Hockney experienced that threat as a kind of transcendence: Look, how wonderful being alive among other people can be. The experience captured in his drawing of Kitaj is different, but related. It’s that of a kind of looking, and seeing, that briefly gives total knowledge.
That kind of completeness is one of the aims of friendship, and also of art. There will be much to miss about Hockney, an artist who was easy to love. But the rare experience of absolute immersion that his best work gave its viewers may have made, out of all he accomplished, the biggest splash.
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Aristotle, Jewish ethics and the vexing case of Graham Platner
In last Tuesday’s Democratic Senate primary in Maine, nearly three quarters of voters decided that Graham Platner — Iraq War veteran, oysterman, Reddit misogynist and SS tattoo bearer — was their best hope to defeat the Republican incumbent, Susan Collins, come November. While the result was wildly cheered by his supporters, other Democrats and independents were left deeply uneasy.
There are good reasons, philosophical no less than political, for this disquiet. For some Democrats, the winning approach to the election is not necessarily one that leads to victory, but instead one that leads from virtue.
Much attention has been given to the political issues raised by Platner’s candidacy. His embrace of economic populism and excoriation of our country’s oligarchy, his denunciation of forever wars and defense of the common man were and remain compelling stances. That Platner speaks his own mind, and does so simply but rarely simplistically, rather than from a script bolted together by handlers, is clearly a plus as well.
But the matter of his character also raises a serious ethical issue not just for Platner, but also for those who voted for him this spring and plan to do so again this fall. It is less a matter of achieving a good result, than of affirming the good itself.
Moral philosophy comes in three flavors: consequentialism, deontology, and virtue ethics. For reasons of space, let’s focus on the first and last. As the name suggests, consequentialism focuses not on the means but instead on the ends. But this does not mean, as some think, that any end can justify any means. Instead, philosophical consequentialists argue that acts must be judged by a simple measure: seeking the greatest good at the least moral cost.
For a hypothetical example, say I have a student who is floundering in one of my classes. They are doing their best, but for various reasons their best will probably not help them avoid a failing grade. Afraid to disappoint or depress the student, I allow them to continue in the class. Consequently, the student sinks rather than swims by semester’s end. Or, instead, I can sit down with the student earlier in the semester and suggest that they withdraw today and try again a later day when they are better prepared. The result is the least cruel and most good: some suffering in the short term rather than greater suffering in the long run.
Yet, consequentialism can be complicated. Consider the election of John Fetterman to the Senate in 2022. Faced by the prospect of voting for the Republican candidate, Democrats and independents gave Fetterman the winning margin despite a stroke he suffered during the campaign, one that raised serious questions about his capacity to hold the office. For reasons that are hard to parse, Fetterman has since broken with his fellow Democrats on several vital issues.
Rather than realizing the greater good, some Pennsylvania voters may now realize their reasoning was misplaced.
This brings us to virtue ethics, which is now enjoying a second wind among moral philosophers. Inspired by Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, virtue ethicists are less concerned with actions than they are with character. As the philosopher Todd May writes in his book The Decent Life, the key question for consequentialists (and deontologists) is “How should I act?” But for those who promote virtue ethics, the question is “How should I live?”
By this, they mean what Aristotle seems to have meant: how can we live a happy or flourishing life? The answer is by living that life in accord with virtue.
Simply put, virtues are those traits of character — think bravery and constancy, sagacity and generosity—crucial to human flourishing. And to flourish as humans requires a deep disposition to see and feel, choose and respond to the world and others in ways that align with those virtues. In the words of the late Alasdair MacIntyre, the philosopher who reintroduced virtue ethics to modern readers, “The exercise of the virtues is itself a crucial component of the good life for man.”
Inevitably, just as with the other ethical theories, there are problems with virtue ethics. But there are also advantages, principally that it seeks to build character rather than build a calculus of the highest good. This brings us back to Graham Platner. What is at issue with his campaign is not just the character of the candidate, but the character of the nation we wish to realize. The unavoidable question is not whether the ends justifies the means, but whether the means justifies the end—in this case, a nation dedicated not to winning a Senate majority, but to one dedicated to reversing the waning of virtue. Even if this means giving Susan Collins 6 more years.
Modern Jewish thinkers find ties between pagan and Jewish ethics. Yonatan Brafman, who teaches at the Jewish Theological Seminary, points to fascinating parallels between the writings of Aristotle and the medieval philosopher Moses Maimonides. The latter, Brafman suggests, sought various ways to encourage the practice of generosity. “Fulfilling the commandment of matanot le-’evyonim (gifts to the poor) and even prioritizing it over other commandments both expresses and fosters the virtue of generosity,” Brafman writes. “Moreover, in Maimonides’ view, this virtue is central to human flourishing. Generosity enables an individual to achieve divine joy.”
Of course, the exercise of generosity should apply to Platner, a man who insists that he has changed. Come November, we will learn whether this is true for our nation. As for Platner, who insists he has changed, it may take much longer for all of us to know.
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What does it say that Gwyneth Paltrow is advertising luxury Israeli real estate?
What does Gwyneth Paltrow have to do with a new luxury apartment building in Tel Aviv suburb Herzliya?
Not much, it seems, judging from a new ad that dropped this week. It features Paltrow going on a morning jog in the city — New York City, that is. She wakes up, voices some pat complaints about why “mornings have to be so early” and how her “coffee needs a coffee,” before she heads to Central Park. She comes home, showers, then asks her driver to take her to 51 Park.
Her driver asks if she means New York. “Herzliya, Israel,” she clarifies, smiling into the camera, as though the black SUV can drive across the ocean.
The ad makes so little sense that my first instinct was to think that it must be some sort of AI rendition of Paltrow. But a LinkedIn post about the project, from Gabi Attal, the CEO of the ad agency Why Worry, which made it, says that they did indeed shoot the ad in real life, in New York City, and that Paltrow is the face of the ad campaign behind a luxury apartment building called 51Park in Herzliya.
51Park is the name — though seemingly not the address — of an enormous new apartment complex that does not appear to exist yet; the website for the building is written in future tense. In renderings, two 51-story glossy towers, with — depending on which part of the website you read — either 636 or 733 apartments total, shine over a park. The neighborhood, it promises, is about to become the beating heart of Herzliya, bounded by highways, the light rail and Herzliya Park.
Paltrow, who is Jewish, has hawked a lot of weird products in her time — vagina-scented candles, anyone? And in some ways, the luxury building makes sense as a product for the actress, who has often flaunted her wealthy lifestyle. But everything else about the 51Park campaign places it back into Paltrow’s stranger offerings.
First off, of course, is the simple setting of the ad, which is nowhere near the apartment building Paltrow is lending her face to.
“To bring this architectural masterpiece to the Israeli audience, we needed a figure who effortlessly embodies international elegance, a premium lifestyle and uncompromising quality,” Attal wrote in the LinkedIn post about the ad.
No one behind the ad responded to my questions about how Paltrow was selected except the director’s agent, Tal Nathan, who said that he couldn’t comment beyond saying the actress “looks absolutely fantastic.” Still, Paltrow certainly embodies a certain kind of “premium lifestyle” — her lifestyle brand, Goop (tagline: “beauty as wellness”), sells such wealth signifiers as a $425 black tank top and a $55 “sex oil,” and also partners with other luxury brands to market expensive jewelry, clothing, and wellness accessories via Paltrow’s own website as “Gwyneth’s picks.” (These include a $225 “eyelift bioremodeling peptide matrix” and a cream for “mindfulness and intuition.”)
The actress has made her name, at least since her Oscar win in 1999, by defining an ideal of minimalist, luxurious perfection — one with little care for qualities like accessibility, approachability or reality. (She had to pay a fine after Goop sold bespoke jade eggs promising questionable health benefits for one’s “yoni.”) In fact, part of her allure is her lack of those values. Her aesthetic seeks to soar above plebian concerns like pragmatism or cost. Who cares if that $491 pewter cocktail strainer requires regular polishing to maintain its silver sheen? It’s covetable. Similarly, who cares where your luxury building is, the 51Park ad seems to say; the important part is the luxury.
Still, it seems odd to market the building to Israelis via an ad filmed in New York City, in English. Sure, New York might signify wealth and luxury in the international market. But the ad doesn’t highlight the amenities 51Park actually offers, such as proximity to Herzliya Park; it shows Paltrow in a luxury apartment in New York with convenient access to a different, and more famous, park: Central Park.
Instead, it feels as though the ad is directed at Americans, selling the idea that New York City and Herzliya are the same. That’s patently absurd though — even if we were to equate Tel Aviv and NYC, which are really not very similar outside of being their respective countries’ most cosmopolitan cities, Herzliya is neither; it’s a separate, much smaller city. Which means Herzliya is, at best, Hoboken. Perhaps that’s why Paltrow didn’t even bother flying to Israel to film the ad.
Marketing an Israeli home to Americans, however, is a controversial proposition. Over the past couple of years, Israeli companies selling homes and land to Jewish Americans, often at fairs held in synagogues, have been a target for protests. Sure, Herzliya is not in the West Bank. But for an actor to wade into obvious controversy like this, especially when she has a new major project coming up — starring as Belle Burden in an adaptation of the heiress’ best-selling memoir Strangers — is a confusing choice.
The ad was reposted by viral celebrity gossip account PopBase, leading to thousands of retweets and comments accusing her of supporting, as many commenters put it, “gwynocide.” Others said it was tone deaf to market luxury apartment buildings only a few hundred miles from razed apartments in Gaza, and compared her to the Nazi wife who enjoys her garden outside Auschwitz in the Oscar-winning film The Zone of Interest.
Yet, in the ad, Paltrow seems blissfully unaware of all that, or at least doesn’t betray the slightest political statement. It’s not the first time Paltrow has been impressively out of step with public opinion — for example, saying that being a mother while working on movie sets is harder than being a “regular” working mother who is not extremely wealthy and famous, or that she would rather die than let her child eat a “Cup-a-Soup” and would rather do crack than eat cheese out of a tin.
Paltrow’s serene smile in the ad implies she can just float above the political realities tied to Israel without touching them. The idea that one can move to Israel and live a life indistinguishable from the one you once had on Park Ave in NYC, is fundamentally a political statement, of course; not everyone has that freedom of movement, whether due to financial or political realities. But Paltrow has not responded to criticism online or to journalists reaching out to ask what she meant to say with the ad. Though she voiced support for the hostages after Oct. 7, she hasn’t implied that her ad for 51Park is any kind of statement. In fact, she’s carefully avoided making one.
Instead, Paltrow — as is so often the case with the actress famed for her snobbery — has demonstrated that she is not as interested in Israel, Gaza, the war, or Judaism as she is in the disembodied ideal of luxury. As she once said, she “can’t possibly pretend to be someone who makes $25,000 a year.” The rest isn’t important; she can ignore it.
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