Stars of David (7 page)

Sills says she was persuaded that Muffy should participate in the full menu of Catholic rites. “The sister called me in and said, ‘Do you want her to be the only kid sitting out in the hall? What is going to hurt her? This will teach her that religion exists, it will teach her that
God
exists.' I said, ‘It will teach her that
Jesus
exists! I'm not sure that this is what I want.' But then I talked to my mother about it and she said, ‘Look, let's get the child educated first. And then we can always introduce her to other choices.' So we all agreed.”

But the reality of a Christian daughter was jarring in the beginning. “On the first Christmas that I gave, with the grandparents and all, we hung up the stockings, we did the whole thing for all the kids. And when I went to pick Muffy up from school, Sister Dionyses—six feet tall—said, ‘Be sure you ask Mama who is coming to see you on Christmas Eve.' I thought, ‘Good, they taught her about Santa Claus.' So after the celebration, we were all just about ready to put the kids down to bed—there's champagne and my old father-in-law is there—the Bostonian. And I thought, ‘Oh, this is the perfect time.' I said, ‘Muffy,' and we had to lip-read, ‘tell Grandma and Grandpa who's coming to see you tonight on Christmas Eve!'” Sills is already laughing so hard she can barely tell the story. “And Muffy gets down on her knees, crosses herself, and she says, ‘Mother, Mary, Joseph, and
Baby God
!' Well, my father-in-law's champagne went halfway across the room. My mother sat there and suddenly these two gloppy tears came down her face; and there's this little fat child with these little blond ringlets—I mean, Muffy couldn't have been more WASPy!—with these big blue eyes, with her hands put together, so pleased with herself that she's speaking! She expected a totally different reaction—applause or something. But there's Grandma crying, Grandpa spitting the champagne across the room, Mama too stunned to speak, and Peter laughing so hard. She was bewildered.”

As Muffy grew up, she began to be more curious about her mother's heritage and started asking questions. Sills says it was difficult to answer them. “You know,” Sills sighs, “Peter's ancestors came here on the
Mayflower
: it can't be worse in terms of trying to explain to her what being Jewish is.”

Sills comforts herself with the thought that some faith was better than none. “I was grateful to the nuns for at least explaining to her that there was a religion. This might not be the one for her, but there was a God, and whatever his or her name is, she's got to know it exists.

“Then the boy was born with worse problems than Muffy's, and so there isn't any question about whether he's Jewish. I mean, he can't speak, he doesn't hear; there's no need to talk about religion.”

Though she let her Jewish traditions fall away, nevertheless, a core identity remains unshakable. “Like it or not, who I am is because of my Jewish parents and grandparents,” she states. “There is an innate culture that has come to me because of them. And I will tell you this: Peter and I and our children are going to be buried in a Jewish cemetery in Martha's Vineyard next to my mother and father.” She says this with great solemnity. “I offered Peter the choice—I said, ‘We can go someplace that is non-sectarian and I don't want you to feel obliged to be buried in the Jewish cemetery.' He said, ‘I don't feel obliged; I loved your mother, and she and I can continue our discussions.' So he's going to be buried in a Jewish cemetery.” (Some do permit burial of non-Jewish spouses.)

I ask why this mattered so much. “It was important to me as his wife that he be with me. And I'm not quite sure that, had it been the other way around, if he'd asked me to be buried in his family plot, that I would have agreed. I'm just not sure I could have done that. And I think he understood that. I don't think I could have gone into a non-Jewish cemetery. I can't explain it.”

James P. Rubin

I DIDN'T REALLY EXPECT James Rubin to confide in me—to describe in intimate detail the religious dynamics at play in his marriage to CNN correspondent Christiane Amanpour. Once described as “a Jewish John-John,” this former State Department spokesman for the Clinton Administration, who is as press savvy—or should I say “wary”—as they come, isn't leaping to reveal the hurdles that arise when a Jewish boy from Larchmont, whose parents want him to marry in the faith, marries an Iranian Catholic girl who happens to be one of the world's most accomplished war correspondents. So I start slowly: “Did your parents want you to date Jewish girls?”

“Yes,” he replies, without elaboration.

Another attempt: “How did that play out?”

“I didn't assign a lot of value to my parents' preferences,” Rubin says with a smile, then adds my editorial comment for me: “‘he said, diplomatically.'” He continues: “My parents preferred that I marry someone Jewish, they made a point of preferring it. But I very rarely dated Jewish women, it so happened. Of my three long-term relationships, the two before my wife were not with Jews. I don't have any explanation for that. I'm sure all sorts of people could imagine an explanation, but it's just the way it is.”

Rubin doesn't leave it at that. “But I want to say this, because this is important to me about this subject: My wife and I shared a moral passion and intensity for the Balkans and the oppression and murder of Muslims, primarily in Bosnia. And that to me is the ultimate reflection of the Jewish intellectual and cultural experience that I grew up with. And my wife's passion for that—and her important role in that—is far more important to me than whether she happens to have been born a Catholic or a Muslim. That is, to me, living up to the ideals and values that I understood, coming from Jewish teachings.”

It's not that he was seeking a non-Jew; he just fell in love with one. “I once said something to a Jewish newspaper that my wife has never forgiven me for, but I thought it was very accurate and nice—but she didn't. And what I said was that, ‘All else being equal, I would prefer to be married to a Jewish woman; but all else
wasn't
equal and I met someone who was not Jewish whom I wanted to be with.' So end of story. And all else is rarely equal in this world.”

They had two marriage ceremonies on the same day in a town near Rome in August 1998. The Catholic ceremony took place in the chapel of a fifteenth-century castle; the Jewish ceremony was held at the Odescalchi palace nearby. Guests included Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, Ambassador Richard Holbrooke, and the late John Kennedy Jr., who shared a house with Amanpour when he was at Brown and she was attending the University of Rhode Island. “We had a rabbi whom, I must confess, it wasn't easy to find because my wife's not Jewish,” Rubin says.

“I will tell you something personal that's sort of interesting: When we decided to do the separate ceremonies and we had to find a rabbi who would do this, I knew it would be someone who didn't know me.” So he asked someone who did know him to give a homily. “One of my close friends is Leon Wieseltier,” he says, referring to the literary editor of
The
New Republic
, “who I think qualifies as a super-Jew. And he gave the sermon at our wedding. His way of reflecting Jewish ideals and values in our lives was something very meaningful to me; I remember thinking, ‘That's what Judaism means to me.' Not the breaking of the glass and whether it's under a
chuppah
or not, but the things he said about us and reflecting back through the history of Jews.”

Rubin later sends me the speech, in which Wieseltier doesn't emphasize the bride and groom's differing faiths, but what binds them, instead:
“Jamie, my old friend, you are marrying a woman of nobility: I mean the kind of
nobility that lives in interior castles, and displays the unflappable, unbought grace of
a natural pursuer of truth . . . She is an angel of the actual; lucid and fearless and
with a heart that does not tire. Long before I met her, I learned from Christiane
that objectivity is not the enemy of passion, it is the condition of passion. I think of
it as Christiane's Principle: If you are going to feel strongly, you had better get it
right. And it turns out that she feels sweetly as she feels strongly; that the magnitude of your bride's sweetness is like the magnitude of your bride's strength
.

“Christiane, when you chose to feel strongly about this man, you got it right.
He is a cunning man, and he is a worldly man, but his cunning and his worldliness
spring from a great tenderness. That is his secret. He, too, has a heart that does not
tire. Jamie is a conscience in a sharp suit. His friends and his colleagues have known
this for a long time. Outwardly he is as cool as inwardly he is hot with conviction
and with devotion. He is a prince of restlessness, a prince of wakefulness; in those
qualities, too, and in the quick disabused quality of his mind, you are marrying your
match.”

Rubin and Amanpour now have a son, Darius John Rubin. When I inquire how they're planning to raise him religiously, the personal conversation comes to a halt. “No comment,” Rubin says with a smile. “He's three years old. In government we call that ‘TBD.'”

To be determined?

“There you go.”

We're sitting in Manhattan's Mark Hotel, where Rubin has only recently checked in after landing from London, where he resides with his family. A partner at Brunswick Group, a London-based financial public relations company, Rubin is in New York to tape two segments of his PBS series,
Wide Angle,
a program that covers international affairs.

He answers the door in freshly showered hair, a red long-sleeve button-down shirt, jeans, and bare feet. Jim Lehrer is on mute and Rubin has ordered coffee from room service. He takes a Marlboro Light. “I never liked matzo ball soup,” he says, as we veer back to childhood. “Still don't. Never liked gefilte fish; still don't. The Passover wine was awful. I liked my grandmother's potato pancakes.” He has fond memories of singing “Echad Mi Yodaya?” [“Who Knows One?”] at seders. “The one where you would sing up from one to thirteen and everybody would take a different part, and the fun was in how fast you could do it and who would make a mistake.

“We also had a weird tradition with the grandparents where, instead of the kids having to find the matzo, the kids would hide it and then negotiate with my grandfather the return of it, without which you couldn't continue the dinner. And that would involve a negotiation about money and what charity it would go to. It always went to a charity, but you'd still try to negotiate it up because that was the challenge. I remember the whole charity thing as important; nobody ever thought you were going to get that money.”

I feel a stab of guilt: In our family, the kids eagerly pocketed those silver dollars every year.

He's never fasted on Yom Kippur. “I know this sounds awful, but I can't fast. I have a metabolism that requires me to eat often, and I get extremely weak if I don't eat. But even if that weren't true, I don't think I would have fasted, because for whatever reason, I tended to not take those rituals as seriously as other members of my family.”

It's clear his Jewish identity was forged more in a political atmosphere than a religious one. “My breakfast, lunch, and dinner table tended to be a place where politics were discussed extensively and intensively from the moment I can remember,” says Rubin. “The
New York Times
was the newspaper that was discussed. Israel and the Jews were on the table from the moment I became politically aware. Being me, I tended to take the other side of the issue when I was at home; and when I was with other people who I didn't think appreciated the unique feelings Jews have about the Holocaust, and thus Israel, I tended to be more supportive. So depending on which group I was in, I tended to argue the other side, just because that's my style.”

His parents dragged him to Israel in the heat of August when he was thirteen: not a great introduction to the Holy Land. “I remember it as one of the most awful trips,” he says. “Mostly because my parents wanted to do sightseeing things and I wanted to go swimming at the beach and play sports and do boy things at thirteen, and I was being forced to go to museums and it was hot; we were in hot cars.

“And then I returned again in 1982—a college summer—during the war in Lebanon, and I traveled around more by myself.” He was struck by the fact that everyone—from janitor to surgeon—was Jewish. “Seeing Jewish soldiers, Jewish athletes, people who prided themselves on physical characteristics rather than mental characteristics in Israel was significant to me. Because in America, the Jews I tended to come into contact with were measuring themselves more in science class or whether they were going to be doctors. And it had a real impact on me—at age twenty or so—to see my contemporaries in uniform, who were going to be fighter pilots, I remember that had a real impact on me.”

I wonder, as he talks about the ambitious Jewish kids with whom he grew up, whether he felt the stereotypical Jewish pressure to achieve. “My favorite story about this is when I first got out of graduate school [Columbia University—M.A. in international relations]. I remember I was at my first job at a think tank, and I published my first opinion piece in a national newspaper—the
Christian Science Monitor
. And I was very excited because it was the first thing I published—I was maybe twenty-four or twentyfive—and I called my parents to tell them; and almost instinctively and without any bad intent, my father said, ‘So why wasn't it in the
New York
Times
?'” Rubin lets the question hang in the air a moment. “And I remember it deflating me a little bit, but it also demonstrated the high standards that I grew up with.”

He still makes a point of going home for Passover, and for at least one of the High Holy Days. “Two times a year is what I sort of set as a goal. Given my job, there were years when I didn't do that, but I try most years.” He says there were many times, during his tenure in Washington, when he had to work on Yom Kippur, but managed to squeeze in a temple visit here and there. “I remember going to Yom Kippur services with Sandy Berger, the national security adviser. We've done that a couple of times, once in London this past year.”

I tell him that the majority of the people I've spoken to share his experience: letting go of most of the Jewish practices with which they were raised. Does he worry at all about how Judaism will sustain itself if Jews keep abandoning it? “I have to be honest and say that most of the issues that I struggle with in my life involve Liberia and Bosnia and Afghanistan and terrible, horrible things in the world. And those are the ones that I spend the vast majority of my time contemplating. And I'm aware of— conscious of—the question of the assimilation of Jews and what that all means, but I don't spend a lot of time thinking about it. And when I do think about it, I tend to avoid it. Not because I don't recognize it as a problem, it's just not my highest priority as a human being.

“When I think big thoughts about the meaning of life and the planet, it tends to be about big problems: nuclear proliferation, terrorism, Saddam Hussein, peace in the Middle East—and I see that as separated from its religious context. Now I believe that my passion and intensity for helping the Bosnian people was partially and substantially a reflection of being Jewish and learning about the context of ‘Never Again' and Holocaust and ethnic cleansing and slaughter of a people for who they are and not what they've done.

“Bosnia was a very powerful issue because it didn't affect American national interests directly, and so how people responded to it was very interesting. I found a correlation between Jewish people and caring about Muslims in Bosnia. That's the part of being Jewish that means a lot to me: the values, the significance of helping the underdog, the oppressed, the one who is being discriminated against, more than remembering Rabbi Hillel's sayings.”