DAVID COHEN

IRA BERKOW

MOSHE LESHEM

Author of "The New Crowd:
The Changing of the Jewish Guard
on Wall Street"

Editor/pUblisher of "The Jews In
America"

Editor of "Hank Greenberg: The Story
of My Life"

Author of "Balaam's Curse"

I van Boesky redefined the
arbitrage game.
The former Detroiter, often
referred to by his late father-in-
law, the real estate tycoon Ben
Silberstein, as "Ivan the bum," went
from being a two-time law school
drop out to Wall Street's foremost
arbitrageur.
In a two-year span, he became one
of the wealthiest men on Wall
Street, amassing what Forbes
magazine calculated to be a $150
million fortune. And he was
generous. He donated money to
build the Jewish Theological Semi-
nary library and became a Jewish
community leader, contributing
enormous gifts to the United
Jewish Appeal.
Now Boesky sits in federal prison,
where he has served two years of
his three-year sentence for profiting
from inside information on
takeovers. Boesky netted millions
from risk arbitrage, in which he
bought stock in a target company
following a takeover announcement
before a deal was closed. When the
deals go through, the arb
presumably prospers.
"In a short, two-year burst of
playing the high-risk, high-returns
arbitrage game, the unpromising
Wall Street outsider went from be-
ing Ivan Who? to Ivan Somebody.
Not only was he redefining the ar-
bitrage game, his name would
become synonymous with criminal
self-aggrandizement and greed,"
Judith Ramsey Ehrlich and Barry
Rehfeld write in The New Crowd:
The Changing of the Jewish Guard
on Wall Street.
Author Ehrlich describes Boesky
as one of most difficult of 300 inter-
views for the book, yet she says his
commitment to Jewish charity
seems genuine. It was not unusual,
Ehrlich says, for Boesky and his
wife, Seema, to be seen at the UJA
offices at night counting pledges.
Boesky gets one chapter in the
book, a detailed social history of
Wall Street in the 1980s. He is por-
trayed as an arrogant man who had
Continued on Page 29 ,

tanding in front of a lighted
menorah, Rabbi Daniel
Polish of Temple Beth El ex-
plains the meaning of
Chanukah to four school children
seated next to him.
The group, including
kindergarten students Sam Karp,
Sara Mandelbaum, Erin Wolson
and Dara Haenel, will represent
Detroit in David Cohen's
photographic book about the
American Jewish community, The
Jews ofAmerica.
The picture of Rabbi Polish and
the children, taken by William
DeKay of Birmingham, is the only
Detroit-based photograph of 175
color and black-and-white portraits.
"I grew up in a small town in
Pennsylvania where there were
very few Jews and a lot of
misconceptions about the religion
and its adherents," Cohen says.
"One of my purposes in creating
this book was to address some of
those misconceptions. We have
made a diverse contribution to
American life and culture; that we
are poor as well as rich, cowboys
and artists as well as bankers,
criminals as well as lawyers, simple
shopkeepers as well as Nobel
Laureates."
During the fall of 1988, 60 pho-
tographers throughout the nation
went to work to try to capture the
essence of contemporary Jewish
life. Among their findings were a
Yom Kippur break-fast at the
Crown Hotel in Miami, a Jewish
singles hiking club in San Fran-
cisco, a black Jewish police chief of
Charleston, S.C., a Jewish cowboy
in Petaluma, Calif., a day in the life
of a Soviet immigrant family and a
chicken soup cook-off.
Jews In America is one of Cohen's
eight day-in-the-life projects.
Others are Hawaii, Japan, Canada,
America, the Soviet Union, Spain,
California and China.
"The Jews of America is probably
the most ambitious photographic
project about the American Jewish
community ever attempted," Cohen
says. ❑

JUDITH RAMSEY EHRLICH

S

I

t's 1934. Detroit smothers in

the thick night air that comes
at the end of the summer. The
grit of the street sticks to the bot-
toms of your shoes.
You put your hands in the pockets
of your lousy coat. Holes. This
Depression. It hangs around here
like an unwanted guest. No jobs. No
money. No future. Afternoons filled
with cups of bitter coffee at the
diner and hey, pal, have you got a
Lucky Strike?
You strike a match for your un-
filtered cigarette. The light breaks
the darkness beside you, illuminat-
ing Tiger Stadium. Say, that's
something that's all right in this
mess of a world. Baseball. And
who's the greatest player in the
world? Hank Greenberg. Good old
Hank.
And he was just that — good old
Hank: modest, a good sense of
humor and genuinely interested in
others, says Ira Berkow, editor of
Hank Greenberg: The Story of My
Life.
Berkow, today a sports columnist
for The New York Times, met
Greenberg in 1961 at a celebrity
tennis tour in which the former
Tiger star was playing.
"We sat around for three hours
just chatting," Berkow says. He
wrote an article about Greenberg
going for Babe Ruth's record in
1938 and how he felt about being
the Jewish baseball great.
The two met again over the years
and established "a nice, easy and
what I like to think respectful rela-
tionship," Berkow says. When
Greenberg decided to write his
autobiography, he turned to
Berkow.
Berkow, who by then had several
books published, at first turned
down the author. Then he re-
membered his Uncle Julius, a
devoted Tiger fan who thought
Greenberg was the greatest thing
since gefilte fish and who learned
through baseball "how the in-
dividual must perform sometimes
nearly in isolation yet remain part
Continued on Page 30

I

n the Bible, the prophet Baalam
declared that Israel would
"dwell alone among the
nations?'
Today, author Moshe Leshem
believes that unless Israel can
decide whether it is a Jewish state
or a state of Jews, it will indeed
fulfill that prophecy.
Leshem, a senior member of
Israel's permanent mission to the
United Nations, former Israeli am-
bassador and the author of
Balaam's Curse: How Israel Lost Its
Way, And How It Can Find It
Again, says that Israel is being
guided by an unhealthy mix of
religion with politics.
"The essence of politics is totally
different from the ethics of
religion," he says. "A state ruled by
Halachah (Jewish law) cannot at
the same time be democratic
because it is not a nation defined by
the will of free people expressed in
free elections, but of unelected
rabbis."
For the first 20 years of its exis-
tence, Israel was busy trying to
survive and so sidestepped the
question of whether it was a
religious or secular state, Leshem
writes.
Israel's victory in the Six-Day
War brought a resurgence of
biblical philosophy and religious
revival, he says. This was followed
by a growing mistrust of non-Jews.
After the Yom Kippur War, the
religious parties made their move,
Leshem says.
Through clever political maneu-
vering and because it is fashionable
to appear observant, Israel's
religious parties have now gained
power in the Knesset and made a
number of influential policy deci-
sions, Leshem says. For example,
religious courts handle all aspects
of marriage and divorce and the
state helps support religious edu-
cation in schools. Conservative and
Reform rabbis are not recognized in
Israel, he adds.
"The result is a body of religious
law imposed upon a people who do
not want to live by religious law,"
Continued on Page 31

THE DETROIT JEWISH NEWS

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