Stars of David (37 page)

He said he'd hoped the criticism would be good for box office. “I tried to fan the flames so more people would be aware of the controversy and more people would go to see the movie.” Did that happen? “Not enough. The movie is a classic now because of cable, but it wasn't successful.”

The film that Dreyfuss says caused him for the first time to adopt his father's Jewish paranoia was a flop called
Inserts
. Dreyfuss experienced disturbing flashbacks to World War II, which he says were not connected to the movie, but to his visit to Germany to promote it. The German accents alone made him physically sick. “Sometime around 1975 I went to Munich to do a publicity junket,” he recounts. “I was being interviewed one day in a Munich hotel by this German lady and I said, ‘Excuse me,' and I puked in a potted plant in the lobby.”

Dreyfuss describes another experience walking into a pub in Munich with a fellow actor. “Veronica Cartwright and I are in the
Verdenhassen
[his made-up German word], and we order a
Hostebrotten
[more faux German] and a beer, and we're looking for a place to sit. It's this place with huge doors, and I admit I'm feeling paranoid: There's a German everywhere. There are seventeen Germans over there and there are sixteen Germans over here and there are German children and they're
all Germans!
” Dreyfuss shouts. “And the doors open and there in that room were a thousand men sitting with beer steins and sauerbraten”—German accent now—“und it vas suddenly the Munich beer hall of the 1923 putsch! It was it. I was
in
the fucking room
and I was terrified and hate-filled and disgusted—words I can't even describe. Because it hit me at that moment:
These
people did
this
unspeakable thing to my family
.

“I was in a press conference the next day and there were about thirty to fifty reporters and paparazzi types. [The accent returns] Und they were asking the qvestions, und this one voman stands up and she says, ‘Mr. Dreyfuss, as a Jew, has it helped you in Hollyvood?'” He clears his throat. “I said, ‘Well, it doesn't mean very much in Hollywood, but it means a
fuck
of a great deal here in Germany!
' And she says, ‘That was my next question: How do you feel here?' And I said, ‘Hostile. I would like to
kill
everyone I see over forty-five years old.' Which made headlines all over Europe. I honestly divided it by age: If you were over forty-five,
where the fuck were
you when Jews were being slaughtered?
I was serious. I would walk down the street in Munich from one hotel to another and I would think,
Where the
fuck were you
?”

This emotionalism has been the engine, at least in part, behind his decades-long activism on behalf of peace in Israel, working primarily with Americans for Peace Now. “I've been involved in Jewish politics since the first intifada,” he says. “If I hadn't done it, I would have felt that I was betraying my grandmother. We were raised with a belief that you were connected to the world and you worked at it;
tikkun olam
[“heal the world”]. You were always going to be involved. It's just a question of how.”

He says he understands people writing him off as just another leftie movie star exploiting his celebrity. “You're always ready to dismiss somebody because they're an actor,” he says with a smile. “I believe there are certain rooms where I have to earn my stripes every time I walk in. I am perfectly willing to have my credentials questioned in any Jewish discussion, because I know what I'm talking about.”

He describes Israel's moral underpinnings as especially precarious these days. “It's a question now of whether the existence of Israel will be at the cost of the Jewish ethic. Put aside democracy: Will we accept the demographic nightmare which says there will be more Palestinians than Jews? There are two options: Either you share the state or you occupy a people. That's the conundrum here. I don't advocate for the end of Israel. But those are the issues that must be faced. And we've all been in denial about this for sixty to seventy years. Can Israel be a Jewish state without it being an imperial power in the region? And can Israel give up being a Jewish state without being overrun and slaughtered? There really is a slender thread coming through the hole of this needle. It's a very difficult thing. I think that the chance of mankind losing its soul, corrupting its soul, is very possible if not probable. And that can certainly happen to the Jews. We can lose our soul here.”

For a moment he's quiet, and I'm aware that his air conditioner is on in November. “Mankind loses and gains its soul every day,” he continues. “We are part of this story. The Jews are meant to be better. Or else my life as a believer in the Jewish tale has no meaning. If the Jews are not better, if the Jews do not act and think more clearly, more courageously, more intellectually finely than others, then my love for Judaism is reduced to the love that someone has for a baseball team. Are the Jews better? Well, that's kind of elitist. But they better be. They better be.”

Mike Wallace

CONSIDERING THE NUMBER OF TIMES that Mike Wallace, the correspondent emeritus of CBS News'
60 Minutes
, has been accused of being a self-hating Jew, it's surprising to hear him describe this sacred ritual: “To this day, when I go to bed at night, I say ‘
Shema Yisrael, Adonai Elo
henu. Adonai echad' [‘Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is One'].” It is Judaism's most fundamental affirmation of fidelity to God. “I can't go to sleep at night unless I say it,” Wallace says, sitting at his kitchen table casually dressed in denim shirt and khaki pants. I ask him what he thinks that's about. “It's a mantra.” He shrugs. “I
feel
Jewish; but it's an ethnic Jewishness.”

Does that mean he feels Jewish when, for instance, he hears Jewish music or eats Jewish food?

“What's Jewish food?” Wallace replies.

Myron Leon Wallace, the son of Friedl and Zina Wolek, grew up in Brookline, Massachusetts. Now eighty-seven, he can still recite the names of both neighborhood temples, his rabbi, and the rabbi who later replaced his rabbi. “Brookline was an O'Connor and Goldberg town,” says Wallace. “You were either Irish or Jewish. So the Kennedys lived doors away from the Wallaces and anti-Semitism, as far as I was concerned, didn't exist.”

He went to Hebrew school reluctantly, was confirmed at sixteen, and always pined after Christmas. “I would cut out Santa Clauses from the newspaper—the advertisements,” he says wistfully.

Wallace says he dropped any observance at the University of Michigan— “There was a Hillel foundation and I didn't want to get involved”—and joined a non-Jewish fraternity.

Once married, he celebrated the Christmases he'd always longed for, and still does to this day. “We have Christmas dinner here on Christmas Eve with all our friends—Jews and Christians and whatever. It's a wonderful place to have it.”

At
60 Minutes
, while I worked there as his producer, Wallace could be depended upon to show up for work on Yom Kippur and to give plenty of grief to those of us who didn't. “People take advantage of Yom Kippur,” he says, half-joking. “I haven't the slightest clue whether they actually go to synagogue. Morley's Jewish and takes it seriously, cares deeply. But for a lot of people however, who are Jewish, it's just a day off from work.”

Wallace became a gossip item in the
Washington Post
in 2001, when then–“Reliable Source” columnist Lloyd Grove found him eating on Yom Kippur in the D.C. restaurant Bullfeathers. Wallace was munching a kosher-flouting ham and cheese sandwich, which he was happy to specify, “was
cheddar
and ham.”

Wallace says the first time he felt prejudice was from other Jews. “The only time I was troubled by prejudice was when I was called a ‘self-hating Jew' during the Syrian thing, and later by Larry Tisch.” He's referring to the
60 Minutes
story he did in 1975 on Syrian Jewry; Wallace reported they were not as oppressed as was previously thought.

Tisch actually called him a “self-hating Jew”? “Sure,” Wallace replies. “He didn't say it to my face, but he told other people that Hewitt's name was Horowitz, and Wallace's name was Wallach or something else. Somebody complained about our apparent pro-Palestinian, anti-Israel stance, and gave Tisch the idea that we were self-hating Jews.”

I ask whether Wallace ever confronted Tisch. “You bet we did.”

And Tisch's response? “‘No, no, no,'” he imitates him, “‘I didn't mean it.'”

According to Wallace's memoir,
Close Encounters: Mike Wallace's Own
Story
(1984), his Syria report unleashed a torrent of calls, telegrams, and bundles of postcards to CBS, many asking, “Is Mike Wallace trying to deny he's Jewish?”

The brouhaha culminated in a confrontational meeting held at the Seagram Building in the office of Seagram's chair, Edgar Bronfman Sr.—then head of the World Jewish Congress. Wallace says, “Every damned Jewish leader in the city—and around the country—was there to get an explanation from me as to what I had done and how I came to the conclusion that Jews in Syria weren't suffering.”

After much discussion, Wallace says he made his case. “I satisfied them that I was doing my job. But I was still labeled a ‘self-hating Jew.'”

Eventually Wallace's take on the Syrian situation was vindicated by a subsequent
60 Minutes
piece with new interviews that substantiated the claims of the first report. But I wonder if being called an anti-Semitic Jew by other Jews bothered him at all? “At first it did, to some degree,” Wallace admits. “But it comes with the territory. I am not a self-hating Jew. If I were a self-hating Jew, I would not be saying the Shema every night; I'm a Jew, and proud of it.”

There were many more Middle East stories and many more firestorms. During the middle and late seventies, according to Wallace's book, he “was flayed with the charge of betraying his Jewish heritage.” I ask Wallace if, through it all, he always felt he was a reporter first and a Jew second. “Always,” he replies. “I've always found that doing a story about an underdog is more interesting than the other way around, and as far as I was concerned, during that period of time, the Palestinians had become the underdog. Of course I tried to make my reporting as dispassionate as I could, but I was taken aback by some of the callousness with which Israelis handled Palestinians.”

I'm talking to Wallace during a period when Arab suicide missions are happening almost daily, so I ask how that affects his perspective. “Last March I went to Ramallah to see Yasser Arafat—fascinating guy. [Arafat died after we spoke—in November 2004.] Suddenly I found myself having supper with him. I put every barbed question I could to him and I realized that this man had really lost his way, that in a sense he had become a captive; he didn't have the guts to say to Hamas or Islamic Jihad, ‘Knock it off.' He liked being the leader of the Palestinians, didn't want to give it up. He should never have turned aside the opportunity to make peace at Camp David. And for the first time he lost me; he totally lost me.”

Wallace had built a cordial relationship with Arafat over the years. “When I first met him, back in seventy-seven, I think he didn't know what to make of this Jewish reporter. We became—quote—‘friends' of a sort, and I was drawn to Arab men. When I say, ‘drawn to Arab men,' I mean I found them interesting.”

Wallace became close to a Palestinian named Fayez Sayegh, an erudite Arab scholar whom he met in 1957 when he interviewed him for
Night
Beat
—Wallace's first talk-show program. “He opened my eyes to the plight of the Palestinians, to the life they lived,” Wallace recalls. “I had the opportunity back then to talk to all kinds of people and get myself an education of sorts. I still correspond occasionally with his widow; he's been dead for a long time.”

Wallace says his first trip to Israel was emotional. It was 1960, when the country was just twelve years old. “It was the bar mitzvah year,” Wallace remembers. “So when the El Al plane circled before landing, down below they were dancing horas. We landed late at night and as we were driving on the road from Tel Aviv Airport to Hebron, the sun was just beginning to rise, and people were just out there in their chairs waiting for the parade that was going to take place, and I just broke down. In that moment I was very Jewish, I was very Israeli, very proud. This was a voyage of discovery for me and obviously I identified.”

Despite his unsentimental reporting over the years, Wallace says he has always been “pro-Israel,” and moved by its success as a tiny yet formidable nation. “I remember so well when I went to Israel toward the end of the Six Day War—I think I arrived on the fourth or fifth day.” He felt personal pride in Israel's rout of the Arabs. “Because I'd never thought of Jews as fighting people. I never thought of them as independent, brave, courageous fighters somehow.”

I try to pursue Wallace's feelings about the Middle East tensions today, but he hesitates. “I've got to be careful,” he says. “It's hard for some people to believe that you can be dispassionate in your reporting and yet still have a feeling about any given subject. I believe in a secure and safe Israel. I also believe that if the Palestinians and the Jews would get together, that that part of the world would prosper beyond belief.”

Does he support Israel financially? Wallace nods. “I established a fund at Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Ted Yates was killed there,” he says, referring to a CBS reporter to whom he was close. “He was killed by an Israeli sharpshooter from the Jordanian side of Jerusalem on the first day of the Six Day War.”

Yates's widow, Mary, ended up marrying Wallace in 1986, his fourth and current marriage. His first wife, Norma Kaphan, was the only one of the four who was Jewish. “I've never been attracted to Jewish women, not since the first one,” Wallace confesses. Norma ended up marrying William Leonard, then a highly regarded CBS News executive, and they took the lead in raising Wallace's two children, Peter—who died at nineteen in a tragic accident when he was traveling in Greece in 1962 (he fell off a mountain)—and Chris, who is currently the host of
Fox News Sunday
. “The kids were not raised—” He starts again: “They were under the impression—at least
Chris
is under the impression—that he is not really Jewish,” Wallace says, a little uncomfortably. “I mean his mother and his father are Jewish, and so is his grandmother, grandfather, and so forth. But Bill Leonard brought Chris and Peter up . . .” This is clearly sensitive terrain. “Chris married a Catholic girl and their kids are mainly Catholic. Chris doesn't regard himself—I've said, ‘Chris, you're Jewish! You may not like it, or you may not want to . . .' We've had discussions about it.”

Does it give Wallace pause when he considers that the Jewish Wolek/Wallace line has petered out? “Um,” Wallace pauses for what feels like a long time. “I never thought about it, truly.” Another pause. “I guess it's true. But my brother, Irving, is Jewish and still very involved with it. He lives in Washington and he would prefer that I was more observant than I am. My two sisters, they're both gone.”

My last question is whether he has felt, at any point in his celebrity, an obligation to be “a face of Judaism”—a role model or a spokesman. “I'm not a professional Jew,” Wallace says with a smile. “Everyone knows me for what I am and I'm quite content with that.”