Stars of David (19 page)

Sarah Jessica Parker

© PETER LINDBERGH

SARAH JESSICA PARKER, whose father was Jewish, is eight months pregnant when I meet her, dressed in denim overalls and a black leotard, sitting in a Greenwich Village café near her brownstone. She says that she and her husband, actor Matthew Broderick—whose mother was Jewish—are still not quite sure how they're going to raise their impending baby. “We happen to live next to a temple and I think it's really nice, and I wonder, ‘What should we do?'” says Parker. “‘Should this child of ours have more religious education than
we
had?' Sometimes I think there's something attractive about Unitarianism. It's a little bit more progressive and philosophical. If I could apply that kind of approach—what I understand it to be—to being a Jew, that might feel right. I would like our child to have choices and know more than I've ever known about his or her religion. But Matthew doesn't know what he wants for this child and it's important to me that he feels comfortable.”

It also gives Parker pause to realize how little she knows about Judaism. “I said to Matthew, ‘If we went to this temple next door, where would we begin? We're so behind.' In temple, it seems like you have to know what you're doing. And it intimidates people; it certainly intimidates me. And I keep saying, ‘I'm not a religious person,' but I know that's not true; I know that I believe that there's somebody who watches over us and he or she takes care or not, or teaches us. I really do—strangely enough—kind of cling to that. And I think that Matthew is as deeply religious as I am, but he's cynical about it because he's seen that it can be so harmful and hurtful and destructive.”

She says Broderick's ambivalence was evident when they were preparing the baby's room. “A dear friend of mine named Bettianne, who is Jewish, gave me a beautiful mezuzah; she got it at West Side Judaica. It has three little children on it and they're playing, sledding. I said, ‘When we move into the new house, we'll put it up.' And I thought I'd told Matthew—I'm almost sure that I told him at one point—but when he heard me saying on the phone to Bettianne, ‘When Matthew's home next week, we'll put the mezuzah up,' he said, ‘What? We're not practicing Jews—we can't have a mezuzah in our home.' It seemed wrong to him. I said, ‘It's not wrong. It's a really nice thought. It's just a gift to say, ‘Safekeeping to you.'

“So Bettianne and I put it up ourselves on the door to the baby's bedroom. And I love it. I walk up the steps every day and I see it in our new house on the door to the baby's bedroom and I feel like it's yet one more person keeping an eye on the baby. It doesn't bother me; doesn't seem to bother Matthew.” She said it feels like the mezuzah is in the right place. “It's not on the door to our home because that's too big—too much,” she says. “Frankly, if someone had given me a tiny cross that meant something—” She cuts herself off. “There's this man that I see in the neighborhood all the time. He gave me this card for the saint of fertility and the saint of babies and this tiny little medal. And I was very touched by it and I've kept it next to me for my whole pregnancy because I thought, ‘For him that means something and it's a nice thought.' It doesn't mean I'm converting to the Catholic Church. This is a nice man; he wishes me well, he wishes my child well. I wouldn't hang it, but it's nice to have.”

The baby will have a Christmas tree. “Matthew and I get one every year, but it has no religious content. Growing up, it wasn't religious at all. My Mom and Dad loved the smell in the house—I mean my stepfather, who raised me. We love the tradition of it—we've had the same ornaments from the time before my oldest brother was born. It's about family and ritual—the same things that I respond to in being a Jew.”

Parker, born in Cincinnati, says her biological father's parents were “from that part of Eastern Europe that would go back and forth between being Russian and Polish.” According to family lore, the name “Parker” was created by a series of miscommunications. “My great-grandfather on my father's side came over to Ellis Island. His name was Bar-Kahn, which means ‘son of Kohen,' and the immigration officer thought he said ‘Parken.' He wrote his N's like R's, so ‘Parken' became ‘Parker' and he was so happy to be in America and to have a business that was fairly thriving, that he never corrected his customers and he became Parker. So there's also great pride attached to this idea that we're Kohens,” she says with a smile, referring to the fact that Kohens—or Kohanim—were the ancient line of high priests. “You know, the great tribe of Israel.”

Parker believes her mother has Jewish blood as well, but that lineage is hard to trace. “According to Matthew, Hitler would have been perfectly happy to call me a Jew because there was enough Jewish blood in me that I was not a desirable. And I have, frankly, always just considered myself a Jew. Maybe I feel Jewish because my mother is very skeptical of organized religion in general and being a Jew felt more cultural to me. I was always responding to things that were Jewish.

“I think also because New York was this great jewel to us and it was such a Jewish city that I was so thrilled to identify with anybody from there, to be part of it.”

Parker's Jewishness, she says, is rooted in large part in nostalgia. “My father was raised on Ocean Avenue in Brooklyn—he was on the Brighton Beach line. It's a very Jewish community. And every year on our summer visits, the people we spent time with were Jews. Whenever we came to New York on Sundays we always went to Chinatown. To us that was a very Jewish thing.

“A lot of the literature that my mother read, including
The New Yorker
, had a lot of Jewish writers. I was always very aware of that. My mother always said that when she met my father, he reminded her of Philip Roth. They were both Jewish writers from blue-collar families. So from an early age, I had some idea about Jews being cultured intellectuals, Jews being on the correct side politically. I learned later on that Jews can be very right wing and very different from what I understood a Jew to be, and that being Jewish wasn't just about food and culture and art.”

Adding to the religious amalgam is Matthew's sister, who is an Episcopal priest, and Parker's older sister, who is an observant Jew. “My sister is Modern Orthodox. She didn't shave her head—you don't have to. She's one of my best friends. And I've learned more from her about the actual practice and ritual of being a Jew than I've ever known before.” Parker says her other teacher has been her husband. “Matthew not
only
identifies as a Jew. I mean, he
really
is. He knows more about the Bible and the Jewish story. He really sees things through the eyes of a Jew and it's fascinating to me. His perspective in life has very much to do with Hitler and the persecution of Jews. He identifies as a Jew, but it's much more political for him. He's not curious about any other religions. It's not like he's thinking, ‘Let's explore Unitarianism, let's explore Buddhism, and let's also explore Judaism as a choice for our child.' He would only think about being a practicing Jew. We're always looking for a seder. This year we drove four and a half hours to go to a Rosh Hashanah dinner. Matthew likes a lot of the rituals—when he sees them, it's very moving to him. But I don't know that he wants to be an active, religious Jew because I think he finds fault, as we all do, with a lot of religion. For instance, the separation of men and women in services, and some archaic ways of living your life.

“And frankly, for us—traveling gypsies that we are—nothing that requires that kind of commitment is appealing. Or sometimes it is and sometimes it isn't. But you can't dabble in it. It's not like being into sushi or something. It's a real thing; you can't belittle it. It's too meaningful to people.”

She says the crisis in Israel makes them both feel more Jewish. “It makes you identify. I feel much more strongly about the situation there and I feel foolish about it too because I don't know the history. But I do know that I feel defensive when people say, ‘How can Israel go in with tanks?' What are they supposed to do? Children are being killed by people willing to strap bombs to their bodies and walk into the public market. So Israel's response to this is to protect its people. I am not an Ariel Sharon fan, but what are the Israelis supposed to do? Just be decent? When you think of Rabin and all these remarkable people who have died, it makes you really much more of a Jew.”

She says she has trouble hearing people question Israel's conduct. “To me it's like trying to have a logical argument with a pro-lifer. I can't have the conversation because there's no logic that applies. If you don't understand why Israel has to defend itself . . . The extremists want the Jews gone. So why should the Jews feel safe?”

I ask for her reaction to writer Nat Hentoff's comment, made a few months after 9/11, that he can imagine one day hearing over a loudspeaker, “All Jews gather in Times Square.” “I live with someone who can imagine that, I think,” Parker says. “So I'm inclined to be able to imagine it myself. You often become the person you're married to or you live with; you just do. And I'm pretty influenced by his thinking often anyway. It wasn't so long ago that the Holocaust happened. It really did happen very recently. And so many denied it and couldn't bear the thought of it or were'nt interested in the plight. So, yes; it's not beyond imagining.”

I ask her if she notices which of her friends are Jewish. “If Matthew and I are with friends who are Jewish, you just feel something you can't describe—like trying to describe a color; you can't. It's just commonality— like, ‘Oh yeah, we're with our people.' But I have a lot of non-Jewish friends. Many of them seem to think of being Jewish as slightly exotic.”

I ask Parker if she cared about marrying a Jew. “No, but when I met Matthew, I was like, ‘Well this is that guy!'” She exhibits a kind of
aha
! “‘This is the type of guy my mother always liked: the cultured, well-read Jew from Greenwich Village in New York City!'”

Parker says she and Matthew share similar reference points, despite the fact that they grew up so differently. “There's a lot about the aesthetics of our childhood that were extremely similar. And I honestly feel it's because when my mother was raising us in Cincinnati, she was thinking: ‘How do cultured Jews in New York City raise their children?'” Parker says her mother emulated an ideal she had implanted in her mind. “The goal was a combination of how cultured Jews in New York City raise their children and how Rose Kennedy raised her children. She was sort of hoping to get the best of both.”

I ask her if she's been asked to talk publicly about her Jewish half. “A couple of times newspapers have called—the
Forward
, for example—and I've said, ‘I can't do this because I would do a disservice to your faith; I don't know enough about it. I'm a Jew because my father is, and that's what we feel we are. But I think sometimes people would like anybody who has a public face at all to be part of it. I wouldn't call myself a famous Jew, but my experience over the years has been that if someone wants me to talk at length about being Jewish in a Jewish paper or publication, I feel I couldn't be further from an authority and I don't want to say things that are uneducated. There are people who are more of note who know more about being a Jew than I do. So I've never done it.”

Though ethnic publications may look to her as a role model, I wonder if, in the early days of her career, she was viewed as an ethnic type? Parker nods. “I was offered a movie and it was rescinded because they decided I was too Jewish.” She won't say who rejected her. “I shouldn't because they probably wouldn't want—” She chuckles. “Because they're Jews! That's what I thought was so ironic. It's like, ‘Oh, you're a Jew calling me
too Jewish
!' I think they said I was just ‘too Jewish looking.' I think for a long time, people who had curly hair and features that weren't traditionally accepted as pretty were just considered ethnic and still are. I think there's a place for those types more now, but it's not as if we've come so far that it's the new standard. It's not gone the way of the hula hoop.”