My Los Angeles in Black and (Almost) White

10. The ’Hood, via Sherman Oaks

143 The ’Hood, via Sherman Oaks there are any number of jokes about Jews and money, several of which are funny. My favorite in this veritable subgenre is the one about the three Jews who chance upon a poster in front of a church as they walk down the road together. $1,000 to any jew who converts, the sign reads, offer good until sunday. Two of the Jews, Shlomo and Moishe, dismiss the enticement, but Chaim cannot. His business has been failing, he confesses to his friends. There are six hungry mouths to feed at home. What is he to do? Chaim’s friends listen, sympathetically. The three men part ways for a couple of weeks and then meet each other by chance walking down the same street. “Well, did you convert?” Shlomo asks Chaim. “Yep, I sure did,” Chaim responds. “I’m a Christian now.” “And did they give you the money?” Moishe inquires. And here’s Chaim’s rim-shot: “Is that all you Jews think about is the money?” The joke is funny on a number of levels, of course (e.g., the very invocation of three Jews walking down the road, bearing decidedly ethnic names, priming us for the shtetl humor to follow; the absurdity of the proposition, which pokes fun at the proselytizing earnestness of Christianity ; the mockery of facile Christian stereotypes about Jews and money, deployed through Chaim’s instantaneous and utter enlistment). But what I find most interesting about the joke is the way in which it implicitly answers Chaim’s question. The answer, at least to a certain extent, is yes: we Jews do think about money quite a bit (witness this in-joke and the many others created by Jews and shared among Jews about the subject). Yet we don’t think about money in the way that Chaim implies, the way that anti-Semites—both casual anti-Semites and the ones who take their 144 • My Los Angeles in Black and (Almost) White bigotry more seriously—presume that Jews think about money. Jews, at least those in my sphere, worry far less about accumulating money than they do about their ethical relationship with money and, more specifically , how this relationship might be perceived by non-Jews. Subject of and to the pernicious imaginings of non-Jews on the issue, how could thoughtful Jews not contemplate each and every move that touches upon the pecuniary? I offer this digression on the subject of Jews and money as a somewhat clumsy way of broaching my Thanksgiving day in Los Angeles, which at once seems altogether extraneous to the story at hand and inescapably pertinent. I had hoped to spend a quiet Thanksgiving at my brother’s home, a day of relief from my busy agenda. Perhaps I would help prepare the stuffing, or usefully distract my niece and nephew with a game of catch in the backyard. But my brother has other plans for me. Instead of a simple family affair at home, we have all been invited to enjoy a Thanksgiving meal at a rather lavish Sherman Oaks estate, the home of longtime friends of my brother’s in-laws. The man of the house, I’m informed ahead of time, is a successful Hollywood producer, the executive producer, most notably, of a rather famous television series that had been set in outer space. One of the semifamous stars from the show, in fact, will be in attendance , along with an accomplished Hollywood screenwriter or two. Jewish wealth has always made me uncomfortable. (Other groups, of course, must reckon with their own stereotypes; one thinks, for example, of the anxiety that descends upon Ralph Ellison’s eponymous invisible man when he finds himself hankering for a yam on a bustling city street.) Even though, by any reasonable standard, I’ve enjoyed my own share of material success, and even though there’s something admittedly self-hating and dysfunctional about depriving myself and other members of the tribe any hard-fought gains in this regard, material plenty has always seemed to me the proper province of the Gentiles and a dangerous, corruptible influence upon Jews in America. Call it nostalgia based on stereotype, but Jewish to me is braininess, bookishness, nagging disenfranchisement, progressive politics, tragedy-sopped humor, and cholesterol-laden comfort food. I’ll cede the nouvelle cuisine and the summer cottage at the Cape to the Gentiles. The...