Stars of David (23 page)

Ephron has neglected her beverage. “They don't have good coffee here,” she states. I'd brought chocolates. “Just one,” she allows. Ephron's not one of those celebrities who makes her slim figure seem effortless—“I diet constantly,” she says.

The topic of Israel brings on the same bluntness. “When I visited for the first time, I did not think, ‘These people are me.'” She was there during the 1973 Yom Kippur War. “I was actually shocked by the number of people who were violently anti-Arab in the way I associated with how Southerners once talked about blacks. It was racist at its core and I had grown up believing that Jews were on the front lines against racism, so to hear that so explicitly . . .” She drifts off.

On a lighter note, she compares Jewish humor in Israel and New York: “When I went to Israel, one of the things that seemed very clear to me was that this thing that you call Jewish humor, whatever it is, partly comes from being in a minority. In my stereotype of Jews, one thing I love is how funny they are—how funny
at their own expense
they are. You don't see a whole lot of that in Israel. So I began to wonder whether being in a majority was bad for their sense of humor.”

Ephron drew on her ethnicity for the punch line in a May 2003
New
York Times
op-ed piece about President Kennedy's newly uncovered tryst with an intern: “Now that I have read the articles about Mimi Fahnestock, it has become horribly clear to me that I am probably the only young woman who ever worked in the Kennedy White House whom the president did not make a pass at,” Ephron wrote. “Perhaps it was my permanent wave, which was a truly unfortunate mistake. Perhaps it was my wardrobe, which mostly consisted of multicolored Dynel dresses that looked like distilled Velveeta cheese. Perhaps it's because I'm Jewish—don't laugh, think about it, think about that long, long list of women JFK slept with. Were any Jewish? I don't think so.”

Aaron Brown

© CNN

“THIS WILL COME OUT WRONG, but I'll say it anyway,” says anchor Aaron Brown, wearing pancake TV makeup, sitting in his office at CNN. “It never occurred to me that I wouldn't be successful. I never thought about that. Ever. I thought it might take me a little longer than it should, but I knew in the end that I'd sit in this chair, I'd have this job, I'd do this work. I think there was a peculiar sense that we—we Jews—would be successful. Now, did I think that ‘we' were smarter? No; I didn't actually think that. I just think that God, for whatever reason, I guess, was going to make us successful and funny—and short. And that being short was okay if you were funny and successful.”

It's clear that his conviction that things would turn out auspiciously— however haughty it may sound on first hearing—buoyed him along when people doubted him or told him he couldn't cut it. “I've just hung in there,” says Brown, fifty-seven. “I hung in there and hung in there and never stopped believing and never gave up, even when people at ABC News were saying, ‘This will never happen.' I said, ‘Okay, thank you for your opinion.' It never occurred to me that it wouldn't. And I don't know why I think of that as Jewish. As I say it, it sounds incredibly stupid and I hate sounding incredibly stupid, but for some reason I just believed, from a very young age, that I come from a history of very successful people. But, I mean, my father was a junk dealer; we're not talking about Einstein here, he was a scrap metal dealer. It's just that somewhere in me, that lives.”

I ask if Brown has thought much about the fact that he's the first Jewish network anchor. He shrugs. “Of course, sure. But honestly, I mean, there's a lot of other things that make me unlikely in this job, too. I'm the first one that's not classically handsome, I'm the first one that doesn't have a really deep voice, I'm the first one—well, I'm not the first one that doesn't have a college education.” (Peter Jennings does not.)

“I don't think being Jewish was especially
helpful
along the way. But it wouldn't be fair or correct to say that the reason I didn't get this job earlier, at age forty-four or thirty-four, is because I'm Jewish. But you know, being Jewish certainly didn't help.” I'm trying to get at whether it actually got in the way. “Well, I don't know: You'd have to ask all those people who didn't hire me. That's the point. It's an unknowable in some respects. They look at you as a sort of package and they say, ‘Okay, what's the package here?' And I don't know that they went, ‘Well the package is five-foot-nine, Jewish, midwestern, nasal voice, kind of smart, a little quirky, funny sense of humor'—I don't know that they ever broke it down that way. I just assume it was one of those things that was out there and wasn't determinative, but was part of the equation. My sense is that being Jewish wasn't helpful, but in the end, my sense is also that for 99.9 percent of viewers, it's completely irrelevant. Whether those people like me or not depended on a lot of other things before we get to that one.”

For those who
are
paying attention to his religion, does he take some pride in being a role model for other Jews? “I'm just a little anchor on a cable network; let's not go nuts here. Maybe someday it will mean a little more when CBS, NBC, or ABC has a Jewish anchor; I don't know. To the extent that I want to be seen as a role model, I want it to be for the way I've lived my life, and the way I've done my work. I've worked really hard, and I worked against incredible odds and I believed in me and what I do and the way I do it. And the lesson there is ‘Don't give up.' There are a million obstacles. And maybe one of them is you're fat and maybe one of them is you're Jewish and it doesn't matter: Deal with it. And the way you deal with it is you outlast them. That's certainly, professionally, the way I've dealt with it.”

His obstinacy was bred in a small town outside of Minneapolis, where he grew up as one of just a handful of non-Christians. “There weren't Jews there,” Brown says matter-of-factly. “I mean this is the fifties and early sixties, so there was certainly an institutional—I don't know if I'd call it anti-Semitism—but I would call it
aggressive Christianity
.

“In the second grade, I had an issue with the teacher who insisted I sing ‘Silent Night, Holy Night,' which I would not do. I said, ‘This is not my song.' It really had to do with my maternal grandparents: I just didn't want to do anything that would dishonor them. It became a big deal, but it shouldn't have been. And then there were blatant anti-Semitic moments, and you just deal with them.” Do any particular episodes stand out? “You know, they all stand out and they all mean nothing in a way,” Brown replies.

So he never wished he were “one of them”? “No. I wished that I didn't have confrontations at eight or nine years old with teachers singing ‘Silent Night.' But it never occurred to me to sing it to get along. But I wasn't exactly out there with
payess
either. We were 1950s American Jews. My parents neither tried to assimilate nor avoided assimilation. They were Diaspora Jews and they lived their lives. They had more things to worry about than what people thought of them.”

At the same time that he plays down the impact of childhood ridicule, he concedes that the experience informs him to this day. “I understand better than most people what it means to be the outsider. One of the things that I wondered about as a kid is how different our history would be if, in all of the generations—all the hundreds of years—when we didn't have a voice, people had heard us. And in the application of my work, I keep that in mind: that there are truly voiceless people out there. And sometimes those voiceless people are Palestinians. And it seems to me that it is in the great and important tradition of my upbringing, religion, and history that we not make the mistake of denying voice to people who have no voice.

“It's in that same tradition, by the way, that American Jews were hugely important in the American civil rights movement of the sixties. It's one of the great tragedies of modern history that that relationship has been lost—it's a great sorrow, I think, for which both sides share some blame. But it came out of that Jewish tradition—an exquisite understanding of what it meant to be denied.”

The young Jewish activists who went down to Mississippi and Alabama had a keen impact on Brown. “I was twelve, thirteen years old, and the fact that there were guys named Goodman and Schwerner who were involved in that struggle made me pay some considerable attention to it. I was proud that people down there had my background. I thought they were doing important and courageous work.”

The capture of Adolf Eichmann, mastermind of Hitler's “Final Solution,” was the other news event which proved indelible. “I remember vividly the day,” he says. “And how that became the defining question of whether you support or oppose capital punishment.” For Brown, Eichmann's capture brought home the Holocaust more than any history lesson had. “Here was a real player in all of it—someone who was alive who was
responsible
.”

When it comes to observance, Brown says unequivocally, “I don't do organized religion.” Ironically, his wife, Charlotte, does. She converted from being Presbyterian and is now more strictly Jewish than her husband ever was. Why did she decide to convert? “Honestly, you should ask her,” he says. “I just remember that she came home one day and said this was something she wanted to do. I don't believe we ever talked about it. I didn't care at all. I
did
care how we raised our kid;
that
I did care about. But not for theological reasons. I found that if Gabby, our daughter, was going to experience any of the prejudices of being Jewish, she also ought to be aware of a proud and joyful history. But I just think Charlotte was looking for something she hadn't found as a Presbyterian. And she found that, and she's happy with that. It works for me.”

I try to get at why his wife made the considerable commitment to adopt his religion and all its rites—including an adult bat mitzvah—when he is unmoved by its rituals. “That was a major undertaking for her,” I submit. “Yes,” says Brown. “She worked at the conversion, and Friday night dinner is a big deal for her—that it's done a certain way. And it makes her feel good and that's terrific.” It's not awkward that his wife does so much more than he does? “If she said to me, ‘You must go to temple,' I would say, ‘We have an issue.' But she doesn't. She says, ‘This is what I want to do.' It's important to her. I mean, she's not walking three steps behind me in a wig, either,” he adds. “It works fine. For one thing, we've loved each other a long time, through different incarnations, I suppose. I mean, I loved her when she was Presbyterian and put up a Christmas tree. She loved me when she was a Presbyterian and put up a Christmas tree.”

But Brown makes it clear that his wife's passion for observance hasn't rubbed off on him. “I look at Judaism in two parts,” Brown explains. “There's a theological component, which I don't spend a lot of time with. And then I think there is a cultural, historical part which I clearly embrace, which is an important part of my life, my child's life, my family's life, my upbringing; all of that. I would argue one can be an atheist and a Jew; they're not mutually exclusive. I don't actually see myself that way, but one could be that. So I see it as an act in two parts and I choose the second, not the first.”

His daughter seems somewhat caught in between. Gabby, a teenager, was bat mitzvahed, but there were days where she questioned why she had to go to temple if her dad didn't. “We told her, ‘You don't have to go; you made a choice to go,'” Brown recounts. “‘And having made the choice, there is a family rule: Once you commit, then you commit. Browns don't quit. But after that point, you can do what you want.' And she's chosen— again for reasons that are hers—to continue on and be confirmed.”

I ask him what he thinks constitutes being Jewish if Jews drop the rituals. “What matters to me is that I live my life in a way consistent with an extraordinary history of my people. And part of that history—not an unimportant part—is theological. But only a fool would say that it's the
only
part of our history, and I think I could make a persuasive argument that it is not the most important part. I think what ought to matter is not whether we light a candle, because the biggest hypocrite on the planet can light a candle. I'm more interested in how they live their lives the other six days and how they treat people and what they care about.

“That's my issue with organized religion: I don't think it tells us anything, honestly. It doesn't tell me anything about the people who are there [in temple or church], other than they are there.
They showed up
. But it doesn't tell me the size of their heart, it doesn't tell me their spirit or generosity, how they see their place in the world, it doesn't tell me anything that I actually think is important. Now maybe that's my excuse. But it is the way I view the world. I give you no points for showing up. I give you points for how you live your life, how you treat people.”

Does Brown take the anchor seat on Yom Kippur? “I don't, actually. I worked this year on Rosh Hashanah, but I won't next year because I don't want to answer the mail. There are people who got very upset by that. It's not worth it. I'll take the day off. There was a reason why I felt I had to work on Rosh Hashanah. But Yom Kippur, no, I wouldn't do it, because it would almost be an aggressive action—trying to make a statement—and that's not how I feel. I'm just trying to live my life by a set of rules that make sense to me and one of them is don't be a hypocrite if you can avoid it.”