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Why a liberal Zionist rabbi isn’t taking to the streets over Israel’s judicial reform plan
(JTA) — Israel’s 75th anniversary was supposed to be a blowout birthday party for its supporters, but that was before the country was convulsed by street protests over the right-wing government’s proposal to overhaul its judiciary. Critics call it an unprecedented threat to Israel’s democracy, and supporters of Israel found themselves conflicted. In synagogues across North America, rabbis found themselves giving “yes, but” sermons: Yes, Israel’s existence is a miracle, but its democracy is fragile and in danger.
One of those sermons was given a week ago Saturday by Rabbi Ammiel Hirsch of Manhattan’s Stephen Wise Free Synagogue, expressing his “dismay” over the government’s actions. Hirsch is the former head of ARZA, the Reform movement’s Zionist organization, and the founder of a new organization, Amplify Israel, meant to promote Zionism among Reform Jews. He is often quoted as an example of a mainstream non-Orthodox rabbi who not only criticizes anti-Zionism on the far left but who insists that his liberal colleagues are not doing enough to defend the Jewish state from its critics.
Many on the Jewish left, meanwhile, say Jewish establishment figures, even liberals like Hirsch, have been too reluctant to call out Israel on, for example, its treatment of the Palestinians — thereby enabling the country’s extremists.
In March, however, he warned that the “Israeli government is tearing Israeli society apart and bringing world Jewry along for the dangerous ride.” That is uncharacteristically strong language from a rabbi whose forthcoming book, “The Lilac Tree: A Rabbi’s Reflections on Love, Courage, and History,” includes a number of essays on the limits of criticizing Israel. When does such criticism give “comfort to left-wing hatred of Israel,” as he writes in his book, and when does failure to criticize Israel appear to condone extremism?
Although the book includes essays on God, Torah, history and antisemitism, in a recent interview we focused on the Israel-Diaspora divide, the role of Israel in the lives of Diaspora Jews and why the synagogue remains the “central Jewish institution.”
The interview was edited for length and clarity.
Jewish Telegraphic Agency: You gave a sermon earlier this month about the 75th anniversary of Israel’s founding, which is usually a time of celebration in American synagogues, but you also said you were “dismayed” by the “political extremism” and “religious fundamentalism” of the current government. Was that difficult as a pulpit rabbi?
Rabbi Ammiel Hirsch: The approach is more difficult now with the election of the new government than it has been in all the years of the past. Because we can’t sanitize supremacism, elitism, extremism, fundamentalism, and we’re not going to. Israel is in what’s probably the most serious domestic crisis in the 75-year history of the state. And what happens in Israel affects American Jewry directly. It’s Israeli citizens who elect their representatives, but that’s not the end of the discussion neither for Israelis or for American Jews. At the insistence of both parties, both parties say the relationship is fundamental and critical and it not only entitles but requires Israelis and world Jews to be involved in each other’s affairs.
For American Jewry, in its relationship with Israel, our broadest objective is to sustain that relationship, deepen that relationship, and encourage people to be involved in the affairs in Israel and to go to Israel, spend time in Israel and so forth, and that’s a difficult thing to do and at the same time be critical.
American Jews have been demonstrating here in solidarity with the Israelis who have been protesting the recent judicial overhaul proposals in Israel. Is that a place for liberal American Jews to make their voices heard on what happens in Israel?
I would like to believe that if I were living in Israel, I would be at every single one of those demonstrations on Saturday night, but I don’t participate in demonstrations here because the context of our world and how we operate is different from in Israel when an Israeli citizen goes out and marches on Kaplan Street in Tel Aviv. It’s presumed that they’re Zionists and they’re speaking to their own government. I’m not critical of other people who reach a different perspective in the United States, but for me, our context is different. Even if we say the identical words in Tel Aviv or on West 68th Street, they’re perceived in a different way and they operate in a different context.
What then is the appropriate way for American Jews to express themselves if they are critical of an action by the Israeli government?
My strongest guidance is don’t disengage, don’t turn your back, double down, be more supportive of those who support your worldview and are fighting for it in Israel. Polls seem to suggest that the large majority of Israelis are opposed to these reforms being proposed. Double down on those who are supportive of our worldview.
You lament in your book that the connections to Israel are weakening among world Jewry, especially among Jewish liberals.
The liberal part of the Jewish world is where I am and where the people I serve are by and large, and where at least 80% of American Jewry resides. It’s a difficult process because we’re operating here in a context of weakening relationship: a rapidly increasing emphasis on universal values, what we sometimes call tikkun olam [social justice], and not as a reflection of Jewish particularism, but often at the expense of Jewish particularism.
There is a counter-argument, however, which you describe in your book: “some left-wing Jewish activists contend that alienation from Israel, especially among the younger generations, is a result of the failures of the American Jewish establishment” — that is, by not doing more to express their concerns about the dangers of Jewish settlement in the West Bank, for example, the establishment alienated young liberal Jews. You’re skeptical of that argument. Tell me why.
Fundamentally I believe that identification with Israel is a reflection of identity. If you have a strong Jewish identity, the tendency is to have a strong connection with the state of Israel and to believe that the Jewish state is an important component of your Jewish identity. I think that surveys bear that out. No doubt the Palestinian question will have an impact on the relationship between American Jews in Israel as long as it’s not resolved, it will be an outstanding irritant because it raises moral dilemmas that should disturb every thinking and caring Jew. And I’ve been active in trying to oppose ultra-Orthodox coercion in Israel. But fundamentally, while these certainly are components putting pressure on the relationship between Israel and Diaspora Jewry, in particular among the elites of the American Jewish leadership, for the majority of American Jews, the relationship with Israel is a reflection of their relationship with Judaism. And if that relationship is weak and weakening, as day follows night, the relationship with Israel will weaken as well.
But what about the criticism that has come from, let’s say, deep within the tent? I am thinking of the American rabbinical students who in 2021 issued a public letter accusing Israel of apartheid and calling on American Jewish communities to hold Israel accountable for the “violent suppression of human rights.” They were certainly engaged Jews, and they might say that they were warning the establishment about the kinds of right-wing tendencies in Israel that you and others in the establishment are criticizing now.
Almost every time I speak about Israel and those who are critical of Israel, I hold that the concept of criticism is central to Jewish tradition. Judaism unfolds through an ongoing process of disputation, disagreement, argumentation, and debate. I’m a pluralist, both politically as well as intellectually.
In response to your question, I would say two things. First of all, I distinguish between those who are Zionist, pro-Israel, active Jews with a strong Jewish identity who criticize this or that policy of the Israeli government, and between those who are anti-Zionists, because anti-Zionism asserts that the Jewish people has no right to a Jewish state, at least in that part of the world. And that inevitably leads to anti-Jewish feelings and very often to antisemitism.
When it came to the students, I didn’t respond at all because I was a student once too, and there are views that I hold today that I didn’t hold when I was a student. Their original article was published in the Forward, if I’m not mistaken, and it generated some debate in all the liberal seminaries. I didn’t respond at all until it became a huge, multi-thousand word piece in The New York Times. Once it left the internal Jewish scene, it seemed to me that I had an obligation to respond. Not that I believe that they’re anti-Zionist — I do not. I didn’t put them in the BDS camp [of those who support the boycott of Israel]. I just simply criticized them.
Hundreds of Jews protest the proposed Israeli court reform outside the Israeli consulate in New York City on Feb. 21, 2023. (Gili Getz)
You signed a letter with other rabbis noting that the students’ petition came during Israel’s war with Hamas that May, writing that “those who aspire to be future leaders of the Jewish people must possess and model empathy for their brothers and sisters in Israel, especially when they are attacked by a terrorist organization whose stated goal is to kill Jews and destroy the Jewish State.”
My main point was that the essence of the Jewish condition is that all Jews feel responsible one for the another — Kol yisrael arevim zeh bazeh. And that relationship starts with emotions. It starts with a feeling of belongingness to the Jewish people, and a feeling of concern for our people who are attacked in the Jewish state. My criticism was based, in the middle of a war, on expressing compassion, support for our people who are under indiscriminate and terrorist assault. I uphold that and even especially in retrospect two years later, why anyone would consider that to be offensive in any way is still beyond me.
You were executive director of ARZA, the Reform Zionist organization, and you write in your book that Israel “is the primary source of our people’s collective energy — the engine for the recreation and restoration of the national home and the national spirit of the Jewish people.” A number of your essays put Israel at the center of the present-day Jewish story. You are a rabbi in New York City. So what’s the role or function of the Diaspora?
Our existence in the Diaspora needs no justification. For practically all of the last 2,000 years, Jewish life has existed in the Diaspora. It’s only for the last 75 years and if you count the beginning of the Zionist movement, the last 125 years or so that Jews have begun en masse to live in the land of Israel. Much of the values of what we call now Judaism was developed in the Diaspora. Moreover, the American Jewish community is the strongest, most influential, most glorious of all the Jewish Diasporas in Jewish history.
And yet, the only place in the Jewish world where the Jewish community is growing is in Israel. More Jewish children now live in Israel than all the other places in the world combined. The central value that powers the sustainability, viability and continuity of the Jewish people is peoplehood. It’s not the values that have sustained the Jewish people in the Diaspora and over the last 2,000 years, which was Torah or God, what we would call religion. I’m a rabbi. I believe in the centrality of God, Torah and religion to sustain Jewish identity. But in the 21st century, Israel is the most eloquent concept of the value of Jewish peoplehood. And therefore, I do not believe that there is enough energy, enough power, enough sustainability in the classical concept of Judaism to sustain continuity in the Diaspora. The concept of Jewish peoplehood is the most powerful way that we can sustain Jewish continuity in the 21st century.
But doesn’t that negate the importance of American Jewry?
In my view, it augments the sustainability of American Jewry. If American Jews disengage from Israel, and from the concept of Jewish peoplehood, and also don’t consider religion to be at the center of their existence, then what’s left? Now there’s a lot of activity, for example, on tikkun olam, which is a part of Jewish tradition. But tikkun olam in Judaism always was a blend between Jewish particularism and universalism — concern for humanity at large but rooted in the concept of Jewish peoplehood. But very often now, tikkun olam in the Diaspora is practiced not as a part of the concept of Jewish particularism but, as I said before, at the expense of Jewish particularism. That will not be enough to sustain Jewish communities going into the 21st century.
I want to ask about the health of the American synagogue as an institution. Considering your concern about the waning centrality of Torah and God in people’s lives — especially among the non-Orthodox — do you feel optimistic about it as an institution? Does it have to change?
I’ve believed since the beginning of my career that there’s no substitute in the Diaspora for the synagogue as the central Jewish institution. We harm ourselves when we underemphasize the central role of the synagogue. Any issue that is being done by one of the hundreds of Jewish agencies that we’ve created rests on our ability as a community to produce Jews into the next generation. And what are those institutions that produce that are most responsible for the production of Jewish continuity? Synagogues, day schools and summer camps, and of the three synagogues are by far the most important for the following reasons: First, we’re the only institution that defines ourselves as and whose purpose is what we call cradle to grave. Second, for most American Jews, if they end up in any institution at all it will be a synagogue. Far fewer American Jews will receive a day school education and or go to Jewish summer camps. That should have ramifications across the board for American Jewish policy, including how we budget Jewish institutions. We should be focusing many, many more resources on these three institutions, and at the core of that is the institution of the synagogue.
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Ford was the most pro-Israel president in US history, and we need his playbook now
If you ask historians to name the most pro-Israel president in U.S. history, you’ll generally hear variations of the same responses. Harry Truman recognized the Jewish state; Ronald Reagan and Joe Biden defended Zionism; George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Donald Trump have all, at various points, been dubbed “the first Jewish president.”
Gerald Ford almost never makes the list. He is usually lumped in with Dwight D. Eisenhower and George H.W. Bush as a president who was hostile to Israel. I would argue, contrary to the popular perception, he belongs at the very top. In Israel’s hour of need, Ford provided what only a true friend can offer: tough love.
After the 1973 Yom Kippur War shattered Israel’s self-confidence, Ford perceived what many in Israel could not: Militarism as a substitute for diplomacy is self-destructive.
Much like today, the wars of 1967 and 1973 involved remarkable technical feats on the part of Israel; they also nearly triggered global nuclear conflict. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara described the U.S. and Soviet Union as being a “hair’s breadth” away from war in 1967. In 1973, with Richard Nixon and Leonid Brezhnev drinking heavily, the CIA reported that the Soviets had moved nuclear weapons to Alexandria, Egypt; the U.S. subsequently went to DEFCON III. What made 1973 so deeply troubling was that Egypt’s Anwar Sadat had secretly attempted to avert war and pursue peace. Still more troubling is the fact that King Hussein of Jordan had personally flown to Israel to warn of the imminence of an Arab attack.
Even after Ford took office, Israel’s government did not take Sadat seriously. But Ford and his secretary of state, Henry Kissinger, a Holocaust refugee and a friend of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, did. If Nixon and Kissinger brought out the worst in each other — from supporting the coup in Chile to prolonging the Vietnam war — Ford and Kissinger brought out the best in each other, at least when it came to Middle East diplomacy.
In March 1975, after Israel continued to resist compromises with Egypt, Kissinger advised Ford to take a tougher line with Rabin. On March 21, Ford wrote one of the harshest letters in the history of the U.S.-Israel relationship, indicating that he had ordered “an immediate reassessment of U.S. policy in the area, including our relations with Israel.” Ford subsequently suspended or deferred new arms deliveries, including F-15 fighter jets. These were extremely risky political moves with very little domestic upside. But Ford was not simply another politician looking to the next election; he was a statesman looking to the next generation.
More importantly, Ford was acting as a true ally. Friends do not let friends squander a fleeting chance for peace with a mortal enemy. The Sinai II agreement was signed in 1975, committing Israel and Egypt to resolve their differences through diplomacy rather than warfare, laying the groundwork for the 1979 Camp David Accords. Jimmy Carter rightly gets credit for finishing the job with the former Irgun leader Menachem Begin as Israeli prime minister; but it was Ford who enabled the breakthrough. Six years after Sinai II, Sadat became a martyr for peace; two decades after the agreement (and two years after the first Oslo Accord), Rabin met the same fate.
For nearly half a century, that peace has served as the cornerstone of American and Israeli security in the region. It has survived wars, revolution, and terrorism. Peace with Egypt broke the taboo on Arab-Israeli pacts, demonstrating that coexistence was indeed possible; it paved the way for a treaty with Jordan and, ultimately, the Abraham Accords. To this day, Egypt remains one of Israel’s most vital intelligence partners.
What Ford can teach today’s leaders
Israel’s current leaders appear oblivious to this history. Highly credible reports have indicated that Israel was warned of war by Egyptian and other officials prior to the Oct. 7 attacks, which were themselves strikingly reminiscent of 1973. Remarkably, Egyptian intelligence chief Abbas Kamel is even said to have flown to Israel days before the slaughter to warn Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government. Former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant’s claim that he only learned of these warnings from the media raises profound questions.
Oct. 7 and what followed have demonstrated the absolute bankruptcy of the “escalate to deescalate” doctrine and also the centrality of the Middle East conflict to regional and global security. So, in this world-historic moment, what can we learn from Gerald Ford?
First, like Ford, we must be realistic about the severity and trajectory of the crisis. It is clear that one or more players are inching closer toward the deployment of an unconventional weapon, ground forces, and/or a major conventional attack that would destroy critical infrastructure. Any such action would certainly be reciprocated, taking the global economy off a cliff.
Second, we must insist on known solutions. Former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert confirmed to me that Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas never said no to the map he proposed in 2008. This is because the two men were essentially in agreement. Instead of sending Israel 40,000 one-ton bombs, Trump should do what Ford did. Freeze weapons shipments until Netanyahu negotiates with Abbas in good faith to conclude an agreement along the lines of the Olmert parameters. As its name suggests, the “Axis of Resistance” would be severely undermined by peace with the Palestinians.
Third, we are faced with a simple truth: military escalation in the Persian Gulf cannot achieve what global diplomacy can. We must ask ourselves why China and Russia both supported the first Iran deal. While both countries would love to see the U.S. weakened in the region, does anyone really believe either power desires Iranian nuclear weapons in the Strait of Hormuz any more than the U.S. would desire them in Venezuela’s oil fields or the Panama Canal? History and economics suggest otherwise: Russia, once dubbed the “lesser Satan” by Iran, attempted to dismember the country after World War II, and China currently purchases roughly 90% of Iran’s exported oil. Ford, who used diplomacy with Egypt to weaken the USSR in the Middle East, would recognize these underlying frictions and use them to turn China and Russia against Iran. Today, we have accomplished the exact opposite.
Ford paid a profound political price for his courage, but he did the right thing anyway. When he took the oath of office, his hand rested on the wisdom of Solomon: “Lean not unto thine own understanding.” Many of our leaders today lean on little else.
The most pro-Israel thing an American president can do today is exactly what Ford did: Get some good advice and then administer tough love.
The post Ford was the most pro-Israel president in US history, and we need his playbook now appeared first on The Forward.
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She left Russia as a Jewish refugee — she returned to tell the stories of a new group of undesirables
Julia Loktev left the Soviet Union with her family in 1979, when she was 9, during a brief window when Jews were allowed to emigrate.
The pretext, in this time of refuseniks, was to go to Israel and practice their religion: only her family had no intention of going to Israel, and the last person in her family who went to temple was her great-grandmother.
“My mom sort of did it on a whim,” Loktev, 56, the film director, recalled in a Zoom interview from her home in New York. “She said ‘We have friends who applied for many, many years and were being rejected,’ and they said, ‘Oh, why don’t you try applying?’” When she did, the answer came back almost immediately: “Get out.”
“We left not knowing what country we were going to,” Loktev said. They were, effectively, refugees.
They spent time in Vienna, then a suburb of Rome before ultimately arriving, with sponsorship from HIAS, in Loveland, Colorado. Loktev’s experience of immigration, and of her own Jewishness, was bound up with state-sanctioned antisemitism.
“It was in my passport, it was in my school papers, it was on my face,” she said. “My parents couldn’t go to certain universities. They couldn’t get certain jobs, like literally, it was a state policy.”
Decades later, in 2021, she flew to Moscow to document a new policy for undesirables. The Russian government declared a number of journalists “foreign agents,” and they were forced by law to disclose themselves as such. She filmed the fallout, not knowing it was just the start of a larger story of displacement.
“When you were named a foreign agent, you had to put a paragraph-long disclaimer that had to be in a type larger than anything else, like larger than the headline, saying in very legalistic terms, ‘This was brought to you by a foreign agent,’” Loktev said. “This had to go on everything: on all your articles, on your podcast, your TV shows. It had to go on your Instagram puppy pictures. It had to go on your comments on a friend’s baby on Facebook — anywhere you were in public, even if you walked into a court of law, if you were in a parents’ chat, you had to present yourself as a foreign agent.”
The plight of these foreign agents, documented in her 2024 film My Undesirable Friends: Part I — Last Air in Moscow, had glaring historical parallels of past regimes that made citizens identify themselves as “other.” In early 2022, the situation of her characters began to mirror her own journey as a refugee.
One week into Russia’s war in Ukraine, the young reporters at TV Rain, one of the last bastions of the free press under Russian president Vladimir Putin, were tipped off that their studio was about to be raided. Loktev filmed the moment. From there they left the country within a few hours, booking tickets on whichever plane had seats to whichever countries didn’t require visas.
My Undesirable Friends: Part II — Exile starts with this mass exodus and ends a few months before the film debuted at Venice in September. To follow her characters, Loktev travelled light and racked up passport stamps, filming on her iPhone in Istanbul, Amsterdam, Tel Aviv, Riga and New York. Situated in new countries, the journalists regrouped in ad hoc offices to continue reporting on the motherland from a distance. Their work became even more vital, providing their fellow Russians an alternative to state media that only ever referred to a war of aggression as a “special military operation.”
The film grew even more personal for Loktev in part two, but she’s quick to distinguish her subjects’ experience of exile from her immigration.
“When I was 9, I was told ‘Say goodbye to your grandparents, say goodbye to your aunts,’” said Loktev. “But that was part of the deal. I grew up in a closed world of the Iron Curtain where going to America was going to Mars. There was no return flight.”
Loktev’s characters, the youngest of whom are in their early 20s at the start of the film, had grown up with the internet and Zara and H&M down the street. They were unaccustomed to the scale of repression with the outbreak of Putin’s war: tellingly, they liken their predicaments not to life under Stalin or his successors, but to the totalitarian campaigns of villains from Harry Potter.
“None of these people chose to leave,” Loktev said. “They literally had to be put in a situation where they were like, ‘I can go to jail, where I won’t be very useful. I can shut up, or I have to leave the country.’ And at that moment, they chose leaving the country.”
Many — a number have prison sentences waiting for them — don’t anticipate returning anytime soon. If there’s a part three, she and her subjects have pledged, it will likely arrive only after the death of Putin.
My Undesirable Friends is a sprawling portrait of reporters weathering the whims of foreign governments and the aggression of their own abroad. (One writer, Elena Kostyuchenko, known for her longform work, was poisoned over the course of filming.)
Loktev’s film had its U.S. premiere at New York Film Festival last month. Among her festivalmates were Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, whose documentary NAZA, alleging war crimes by the Israeli Defense Force, has led Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to threaten to revoke Abraham and Szor’s citizenships.
“I’ve been thinking a lot about Rachel and Yuval, whom I don’t know personally, but who are now very much in a similar position as my characters, where they have been targeted by the government, targeted by hateful, angry mobs and are now facing the possibility of being in exile,” said Loktev, who recalled an interview where Abraham said he had “nothing to do abroad.”
She thinks Abraham, himself a journalist, must find it difficult to be “cut off” from his home, in no small part due to his desire to report on the ground. But she still distinguishes between the “flavors of the threats” in Israel and Russia.
“With Russia most of the threats are somehow government-related,” Loktev said. “You are able to print some things in Israel without going directly to jail. Haaretz still operates. Like in Russia that would be shut down in a hot second.
“What Russia doesn’t have, I suppose, which is what I fear most, I think, in the case of Rachel and Yuval, is the messianic mobs.”
Loktev sees events in Russia, Israel and America all trending toward a reality where those in power won’t countenance any story critical of their country. While Trump tries to ban news outlets from the White House briefing room and Putin cracks down on demonstrations, the war in Ukraine no longer makes headlines.
Within Russia, she describes a climate of fear and paranoia. She mentions a friend who used to go back to film events like Navalny’s funeral on the street but says it’s no longer possible. “She said ‘everyone is so suspicious. People are just terrified.’” At the same time, the war in Ukraine shows no sign of stopping. Much of the media has its eyes elsewhere, though she believes Russia will intensify its offensive this winter.
Apathy and numbness are not feelings Loktev’s characters can afford, though they naturally have their share of fear.
Dispersed among countries with no extradition agreement with Russia — a surprisingly limited club — they continue to try and speak the truth to their viewers in Russia relying on workarounds like VPNs. The fatigue of an unchanging story is real, but Loktev says the reality must not be normalized.
Lately, Loktev’s heard that potential audiences are tired of stories about freedom of the press and authoritarianism. To this, she has a ready response: “It’s not tired of you.”
The post She left Russia as a Jewish refugee — she returned to tell the stories of a new group of undesirables appeared first on The Forward.
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Eva Marie Saint was born Quaker, but found her ‘Exodus’ in Jewish stories
Oscar-winning actress Eva Marie Saint, who has died at age 102, preferred mishpocheh to political posturing.
Her stance was akin to that of author Albert Camus, who during a press conference in 1957 after winning the Nobel Prize in Literature, commented on strife in his native Algeria by opining of the terrorism used to liberate the nation from French colonialism, endangering his family still in his homeland: “If that is justice, I prefer my mother.”
Born to a Quaker family in Newark, Saint likely followed that religion’s wartime and immediate postwar concern for the fate of Europe’s Jews. Yet by 1951, when she married the American Jewish television director and producer Jeffrey Hayden (born Raphael Levine), to whom she would remain wed for 65 years, Saint apparently diverged from the official Quaker line.
By that year, previous collaborations between Quakers (officially the Religious Society of Friends) and Jewish communities during the Holocaust were halted by conflicts ensuing from the 1948 Arab-Israeli War. Traditional Quaker pacifism and historical Christian theology which downplayed Jewish presence in the Middle East opposed Israeli nationalist aims.
Instead, a policy purporting to favor balanced partiality claimed Quaker neutrality between Israeli authorities and Arab populations. Later, intense Quaker advocacy would make observers such as the historian Nancy Gallagher consider that the historic alliance with Jewish organizations was compromised.
Not so with Eva Marie Saint, who won acclaim in such early career explorations of Yiddishkeit as Paddy Chayefsky’s 1954 television production, Middle of the Night, which centered on a romance between Jerry Kingsley, a 53-year-old widowed Jewish garment manufacturer, who falls in love with Betty Prieser, his 24-year-old receptionist.
Nominated for an Emmy for her turn as Betty, Saint played opposite E.G. Marshall, but when the play transferred to Broadway two years later, the veteran of the shmatta trade was played by Edward G. Robinson (born Emanuel Goldenberg) with such heart-wrenching emotion that some theater mavens considered his work to be the single finest performance seen on the modern New York stage.
By then, Saint, replaced on Broadway by Gena Rowlands, had already conquered cinemagoers in Budd Schulberg’s 1954 film On the Waterfront, widely seen as an onscreen argument for betraying fellow Jews by naming names to political authorities. Screenwriter Budd Schulberg and director Elia Kazan had given friendly testimony to the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) during the McCarthy era, decimating the lives and careers of many creative Jews in Hollywood. Among those cited in 1951 by Schulberg as dangerous Communist Party associates were the writer-director Herbert Biberman and screenwriter Albert Maltz. Meanwhile, in speaking to HUAC in 1952, Kazan singled out the writer Clifford Odets; actors Morris Carnovsky and J. Edward Bromberg; and actress Paula Strasberg.
In On the Waterfront, the protagonist played by Marlon Brando was shown breaking a code of silence to testify against mob-controlled union bosses. The result incensed Arthur Miller, who had originally written an unproduced screenplay about corruption on the Brooklyn docks, which Kazan had agreed to direct. At this point, Columbia Pictures head Harry Cohn demanded that the villains be altered from corrupt union bosses to Communists. Miller demurred, left the project, and was replaced by Schulberg. In 1955, Miller’s play A View from the Bridge was considered a response to Schulberg, in which informing was shown to be a destructive betrayal driven by jealousy, rather than noble whistleblowing.
Saint transcended this tzimmes pitting Jew against Jew by delivering an Oscar- winning performance in her first screen role. As the younger sister of a murdered dockworker, Saint demanded justice for her brother’s death and challenged the conscience of the character played by Brando.
Saint was later cast in Otto Preminger’s Exodus, whose overblown and boring nature is best summarized by a legendary historical burn: At a preview of the film in 1960, the Canadian Jewish comedian Mort Sahl rose from his seat and supposedly pleaded, “Otto, let my people go!”
The film was based on Leon Uris’ melodramatic novel about the founding of the State of Israel, which historians Matthew Silver and Deborah Dash Moore diagnosed as more redolent of shoot-em-up cowboy films than Jewish history. Nevertheless, once again Saint surpassed the limitations of a script given her, as a widowed American nurse toiling in Cyprus with Jewish refugees who becomes enamored of a Palestine-born Haganah leader, Ari Ben Canaan (played by Paul Newman).
Newman’s character tells Saint’s nurse, “I just wanted you to know that I’m a Jew. This is my country,” as Brandeis professor Stephen J. Whitfield notes in American Space, Jewish Time. Shortly afterward, she is seen wearing a khaki uniform and holding a gun, joining her betrothed and other Jews to resist an Arab attack. Film maven Tony Shaw asserted that, during the movie’s production, Saint made it a personal mission to recount to the international press “stories of Israel’s steadfastness” and “democratic spirit.” She also lauded the Jewish State’s “stoicism in the face of constant Arab invasion threats” and, further, spoke of the “opportunities Israeli women had” compared to “their Arab counterparts.”
In less fraught contexts, Saint continually proved that she was a mensch, as recalled by Brooklyn-born actor Bernie Kopell, a mainstay as Dr. Adam Bricker on TV’s The Love Boat. When the cast of one 1983 episode was temporarily outside the Parthenon in Athens, Kopell stated, Saint saw him studying his lines for a forthcoming stage role and offered her partnership to help him memorize the words. This solidarity from an Oscar-winning actress to a humble Love Boat actor impressed Kopell, but Saint told him with egalitarian zest that she did the same for all her friends.
On a more somber note, Saint’s personal steadfastness and Camus-like preference of family to debates on current events extended to portraying Marilyn Klinghoffer, the widow of Leon Klinghoffer who was murdered by Palestinian terrorists during the sea-jacking of the Italian cruise ship in a 1990 two-part miniseries, Voyage of Terror: The Achille Lauro Affair.
Saint incarnated the resolve of Marilyn Klinghoffer, who although fatally ill, had the fortitude to travel to Italy to testify against the four terrorists after her wheelchair-bound husband was separated from other passengers as a Jew during the 1985 Achille Lauro hijacking, murdered, and thrown overboard. It was a noble and compelling performance, like all of her work during a long acting career inspired by Yiddishkeit.
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