Stars of David by Abigail Pogrebin Page A

And ultimately we did—far too late—but we did. So that’s how the Holocaust has affected me.”
    He does not, however, live with the feeling that “it could happen again,” and is disdainful of those who say it could. “I’ve never felt ever that the world which we inhabit—meaning social and material world—is one in which I feel threatened. I’ve never felt that way. Do I believe that anti-Semitism still exists? Yes. In a variety of forms, it exists. But look: I climbed fairly high in government, and I had no sponsors, no family connections, I had nothing. I made it on merit, I hope. And my last name is about as Jewish a last name as you can have. So I don’t feel that my religion interfered with my ability to climb very high—relatively speaking— on the ladder of government and power in America.”
    It’s getting late, and I know Rubin has dinner plans at Centolire, an Italian restaurant in the neighborhood, but I can’t let him go without hearing his take on the brouhaha over his former boss and close friend, Madeleine Albright. In 2001, it was revealed that her father was Jewish and her grandparents perished in the Holocaust; many Jews accused her of lying about the fact that she was learning this for the first time. “I have very strong views on that,” Rubin says, leaning forward on the couch, “because I was a participant; I observed her become aware of it. I’m continually amazed at the cruelty with which people who don’t know anything about the story, who’ve never looked into it, assumed that she knew and was lying. That lack of thoughtfulness I find offensive. Because anyone who looks into it will immediately realize it’s a very complex story that involves her father changing the religion, her growing up with her father having told her she was not Jewish her whole life.
    â€œI know her very, very well; she’s never been a secretive, manipulative person. But I remember the reaction of many Jews—particularly Jews who fancied themselves as somehow connected to those terrible moments in twentieth-century Europe when great decisions were made by individuals who had real crises in their lives, whose lives were threatened. And most of those people who had the temerity to comment were living comfortable lives, and weren’t in Czechoslovakia when the Nazis took over, or other places like that.
    â€œI think she has said this: Knowing what she now knows, are there things she could have done differently, found out earlier, known at all? Yes. But I think that people who judge her without knowing the facts are not doing the facts or their religion any favors.”

Natalie Portman

    COURTESY OF NATALIE PORTMAN
    ON A COOL OCTOBER MORNING, actress Natalie Portman is wearing a jean jacket and dangling beaded earrings, sipping Earl Grey tea in Schiller’s Liquor Bar, a favorite café of hers tucked into Manhattan’s Lower East Side.
    Leaning on a white marble table that sits on a black and white checkered floor, ceiling fans overhead, Portman talks about the difference between Jews in Israel and Jews in Long Island. “I definitely know what being Jewish in Israel means and what being Jewish in America means,” says this twenty-four-year-old, who was born in Israel to an Israeli father, fertility specialist Dr. Avner Hershlag, and an American mother, artist Shelley Hershlag.
    They moved to the United States when she was three, and they return to Israel every year to visit family. Portman, who uses her grandmother’s maiden name professionally, attended Jewish day schools until eighth grade—mostly, she says, because her parents wanted her to keep up her Hebrew. But the Hershlags were not a religious family, nor involved in the local synagogue. “I grew up in the classic American Jewish suburbia, which has a whole different sense of what it means to be Jewish than anywhere else in the