Stars of David by Abigail Pogrebin Page B

world.”
    I ask her to elaborate. “The people I grew up with on Long Island are wonderful people. But I have friends who grew up in five-million-dollar homes, they all drive BMWs, and the only places they’ve been to outside the United States are the islands in the Caribbean. Which is fine, it’s a choice, and I don’t want to be critical of that. But I am. I think it can definitely be a problem, especially since American Jews are the ones who are in a position—politically and financially—to help other Jews around the world who are facing problems that we can’t conceive of.”
    Folding her bobbed hair behind her ears, Portman explains why she never felt a pull to be a part of Jewish life in her Syosset neighborhood. “I never liked going to temple on Long Island because it just had that aura of someone’s fake party to me, which always made me uncomfortable. So I never went to temple at home, I never got bat mitzvahed, I just sort of rejected that whole thing; it seemed so tied up with values that I hated. But on the other hand, when I go to Israel, I always want to go to temple on the High Holy Days even if no one in my family is going with me. I’ll fast. One year in Israel, my family went to Jaffa to get pizza on Pesach and I would not do that. [No flour is to be eaten during Passover week.] You know, I get much more Jewish in Israel because I
like
the way that religion is done there. Not all the time; I would never step foot in Orthodox temples. But in Israel, it’s about what it’s about.”
    She says it wasn’t a big deal in her family when she decided to forgo a bat mitzvah. “All my friends were doing it,” she recalls. “But people were having hundred-thousand-dollar parties that totally took the meaning out of it.”
    As she describes some of her Long Island girlfriends, the slur “JAP” pops into my head and I ask how she feels when someone uses the word. “Because it’s one of those stereotypes that seems to derive from something that does exist, I don’t get offended by it as many people do,” she says, sipping her tea. “I mean, I grew up in a Long Island public school that was sixty to seventy percent Jewish and I know what a JAP is. But obviously the word shouldn’t be misused. I wouldn’t want to have stereotypes used in derogatory ways by people outside the Jewish community, but I think it is something from within the community that we need to examine and be self-critical about, because it’s how we’re raising our young people. Do they know or care about the outside world? Do they know or care about things other than having a nice car or a nice purse? It’s something that we have to be careful of because we are a successful community that doesn’t have day-to-day confrontations with poverty, violence, or danger that some of our counterparts in other parts of the world are facing.”
    She says she was also disappointed by the fact that the American Jewish community, as she watched it growing up, was not focused on giving back. “You see church groups doing community service, but you don’t see that as much among Jewish kids in America. Maybe I’m talking about my specific experience, but I also see this among kids from Chicago, L.A. suburbia. Of course there are exceptions, I can’t make any sweeping statements. But I don’t think it’s a value that’s instilled early on. The values that you do see instilled are, for example, everyone getting nice cars for their sixteenth birthdays.
    â€œI had a fashion designer tell me that when I wear a dress of his, it sells out across the country because Jewish girls ‘look to me,’ and Jewish girls are the ones that buy expensive dresses. It made me sort of sad, because I want to be an influence in ways other than by a pretty dress.”
    Portman is careful to point out that she sees virtues, too,