Art and Soul

...But when we are together, we never have to be afraid...

...She proposes a revival of the workshops that were held in the Center's first two years of existence and which now meet only sporadically...

...No one's taking any risks...

...That's why we need Derech Olam...

...And who is more qualified to convey that message than Jewish artists...

...Can you imagine: the great artists coming together and creating a new Jewish culture...

...Jeff leans over to Alan and smiles...

...I've been too easy on you, Alan," says Jeff...

...There's a ferment that happens when artists share each other's work," she says...

...Jeff grew up in a socialist home...

...The guests wave tambourines and finger Arabic drums as they weave through the metal maze of the room...

...An empty space spreads between the two strips of color, as if the sky has contracted within itself to make room for the sun...

...Where's the new music, Jeff...

...It is premature to say that the renewed interest in Jewish arts will produce a renaissance...

...What do you think of calling it 'Ahad Ha'am Village...

...The details of Jeff's daily life are often a pretext for seeking out young Jews in restaurants, in bookstores, on Greenwich Village street corners...

...Neither does he own a three-piece suit...

...Who are these young people...

...In 18 years I've never seen such spirit here," a hospital volunteer tells a nurse...

...I felt cut loose among a lot of lonely people...

...Above, the sky has sorted into two layers, the bottom black and green, the top an amber fading into yellow...

...I was very strong," he says in Hebrew...

...A friend intrudes on his thoughts, and Jeff tells him: "What we're doing here is the real message of Judaism in these crazy times...

...So I ask my shrink, 'You think my being Jewish has something to do with these dreams?' Blanks...

...If not for Jeff," he says, "the whole thing would have died for me...

...Below, Manhattan shows no light...

...We have come to you today to learn how to be Jewish," he tells the patients...

...I lost it in the '60s," he says, laughing...

...And whatever we can't fix anymore, have a little pity on us and fix it Yourself...

...I must admit that when I first came to Congress, I didn't attach great importance to the Center...

...Across the river, New Jersey's lights still burn, and through the mist of the water, a million tiny bulbs explode...

...People had no idea what we were about...

...How did you get here?' I ask him...

...We need a new music that draws on the old energy...

...The results have included the founding of a band that fuses Hebrew music with bluegrass and a film on the biblical roots of ecology, as well as the creation of bands and dance groups preserving East European and Sephardi art forms...

...At the age of 35, Jeff Oboler doesn't own a watch...

...For information on joining the Center or booking its artists, write to: Martin Steinberg Center, American Jewish Congress, 15 East 84th Street, New York, NY 10028...

...Alan Kaufman stares at the floor...

...But this much is certain: there is more Jewish cultural activity in this country than at any time since the decline of the immigrant Yiddish society in the 1920s...

...on a snowy January night, but Jeff is in no rush to leave the Steinberg Center...

...I still don't understand what possessed me," he says...

...Our generation isn't ready yet to become fully Jewish...

...The quest for personal transformation that dominated the '70s and was often condemned as narcissism led many people, artists especially, to confront their Jewish selves...

...It helps with practical matters, like getting work...

...So I need someone to open up to, right...

...Being Jewish didn't mean all that much to me...

...But the Center is involved in so many areas that I suppose it's impossible to keep on top of everything...

...Yossi Klein is a free-lance writer living in New York...

...So Jeff helped form a community of lonely Jews...

...They ate it up...

...If I had a tenth of your confidence in me, I'd be playing every night...

...Nothing...

...In his life Jeff has embodied the diverse experiences he envisions existing harmoniously within a holistic Jewish community...

...Its receptivity to diverse, even apparently contradictory, traditions is the core of the Steinberg Center's vision for a renaissance not only in the arts but in the very nature of Jewish community...

...Some day we'll get back together," Alan says after a while...

...The Center doesn't just care about the Jewish identity of its artists," says Alan Kaufman...

...I see them 15 years from now...

...Doesn't the artist—just like Judaism—enter the commonplace and transcend it...

...When he moved to the Steinberg Center, he took the style and the people of Bet Kafe with him...

...Alan, the Jewish people needs your vision...

...He crashed pads in the East Village and found that the yeshiva wasn't portable...

...One of his favorite finds has dropped in to talk, and when business and pleasure coincide, Jeff is just where he wants to be...

...That doesn't sound like Jewish music...

...Says dancer Roberta Caplan: "There are organizations concerned with 'Jewish art.' But only the Center goes out of its way for the Jewish artist...

...The patients clap, often missing the beat, even their own palms, and then laugh, as though their infirmities were part of the gaiety...

...Alan, I'm surprised at you...

...It was the most painful time of my life...

...One is Abraham Isaac Kook, the former chief rabbi of Palestine whose mystical system embraced all Jewish movements and ideologies, even the most apparently secular, as emanations of the Divine soul...

...Three years ago he formed Derech Olam, an experimental band that attempted to create a truly American Jewish music by extracting what Alan calls "the Jewish sparks" from traditional American songs and fusing the melodies with Hebrew liturgy...

...Then he begins singing the Hebrew song, Hinei ma tov uma naim, shevet achim gam yachad...

...You've got to get the band started again...

...Manhattan, oblivious to the sun, is still asleep...

...For a moment the sun lingers directly across from the worshippers, and it is possible to stare into it, as though it were wearing a veil...

...The Steinberg Center is going to set up an international Jewish artists' village near Jerusalem...

...Jeff is as close to—well, we don't have saints in Judaism, do we...

...And then the sun appears,"a crimson semi-circle rising from the dark green depths...

...Our way is to sanctify the material world, not to abuse it like the West does, or to escape it as they do in the East...

...The arts are the most non-threatening way to prepare our way out of the desert...

...And those artists are now creating entry points into Judaism for others who have not yet made the commitment...

...Reb Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, who has been invited by the Center to preside, offers a prayer: "Lord of the Universe, we pray for forgiveness for what we have done to the earth...

...I met artists there who were hungry for the real thing, anything that wasn't Borscht Belt...

...Jeff Oboler is quietly swaying in a corner, prayer shawl wrapped around his head like a bedouin, its green and yellow and blue strands retaining the pigments of dawn...

...Alan smiles for the first time...

...Then came the '60s...

...Hey Jeff," he says, "does the village need a band...

...Whatever we can fix, show us how...

...If Rav Kook represents the philosophy of the Steinberg Center, Aryeh Levin is its soul...

...In one, I'm in a concentration camp in Idaho, and next to me is Buddy Hackett...

...Below, the grey and brown buildings seem immune to life, as though a neutron bomb has left only their structures intact...

...ART AND SOUL Introducing the Martin Steinberg Center, where artists inspire celebration and more YOSSI KLEIN There are no pews in the synagogue of the Goldwater Memorial Hospital for the Chronically 111...

...Nevertheless, its sense of community needs to be reinforced, says Lilian Steinberg, who with her late husband Martin founded the Center...

...Jeff coaxed me out of the closet," says Joe...

...You can be the musical neshama (soul) of our generation...

...He assumed his role to be little more than an archivist of a vanishing culture, and hoped the value of his obsession might some day be noticed by a historian...

...The patients wheel themselves in and park their humming electronic chairs like truncated cars in any vacant spot...

...His article, "A Legacy," appeared in moment in September 1981...

...It is 10 p.m...

...Then he adds: "There's no one here I can talk to...

...It helps keep the artist alive...

...When the dancers take a break, a young man gets up to speak...

...And though the Center finds itself in the middle of perhaps the most competitive and success-oriented artistic environment in the world, its credo can best be summed as "art for mitzvah's sake...

...Most of the Jewish musicians I meet are just preserving the old forms...

...The National Foundation for Jewish Culture has sponsored conferences on Jewish theater and music: Jewish film festivals have become a new communal rite...

...But tonight is Chanukah, even in Goldwater, and the patients have put on their holiday finest—a vest, a clean shawl, a shoe on the foot that is not amputated—to properly greet the 20 young people who have come from across the water to remind them how a holiday is celebrated...

...It is 5 am, the fourth day of the 5741st year of creation, and the completion of the sun's 28-year cycle: this morning it will return to the exact spot in heaven where the Hebrew calendar says it was formed...

...We've got to get involved with prestigious projects...

...Goldwater is located on Roosevelt Island, off Manhattan's east coast, and its patients, transistor radios strapped to their torsos, spend their days watching the seagulls and the cable cars escape the grey waters of the East River, which is dotted with similar islands where the city dumps its garbage, its criminals, its cripples...

...If any part of us is neglected, we are not whole...

...They looked at us like we were Martians...

...Joe now teaches Ladino music and his group, Romencero Judeo Espanol, performs regularly around New York...

...They need to find out where we've been before they can take us to new places...

...That's what drew me to you...

...Jeff jokingly calls himself "the rabbi of an artists' shul," his thick, black rabbinic beard unaccompanied by a yarmulka, an admission that he has known the alienation of the artist as well as the commitment of the Orthodox...

...And the people in the wheelchairs sway as though dancing, and those who don't know the Hebrew words seem to understand their meaning: that it is not painful to sit when you are among your brothers...

...But more exciting than the proliferation of Jewish arts is the spirit of its new creators...

...Says Jeff: "We resemble the generation of the desert, which wasn't ready to accept the To-rah until it had learned to dance from Miriam and sing from Moses...

...Some day' isn't good enough, my friend...

...He urged me to come to the Center and share what I had...

...Ashkenazim...

...A spiritual revolution was happening in the streets, and Jeff felt the same urge that had once led him to Orthodoxy now pushing him in new directions...

...They wear yogic orange, hasidic black, rainbow-colored prayer shawls and ponchos embroidered with red Stars of David emitting rays—as if all the spiritual trips have suddenly converged in the cloudless twilight over New York City...

...You have the money...

...But what I saw compelled me to change my mind...

...That was four years ago...

...Three hundred Jews crowd the northeast coiner of the observatory deck of the Empire State Building, waiting for the sun...

...It's a shame...

...The question of where to place its meager resources is an ongoing debate at the Center, whose community outreach programs and 700 members are serviced by a staff consisting only of Chava and Jeff, working with a total budget of $45,000...

...There are serious problems to worry about...

...One man, swollen hands dangling from straps attached to a metal canopy above his chair, tells one of the dancers he was a chalutz in Palestine...

...Jeff pauses...

...The artists dance with cymbals and tambourines, the desert instruments of the Israelites...

...A crime...

...In its six years of existence, the Steinberg Center has given young artists at the beginning of their careers the space and resources to integrate some form of Jewish identity into their artistic growth, in the hope that they would then help create, for the first time in American history, an indigenous, affirmative Jewish culture...

...I learned that the future strength of American Jewry would be drawn from unlikely places," Jeff says...

...Doesn't know what I'm talking about...

...I thought I would stay in the yeshiva world forever...

...My agent got me this gig,' he says...

...It is not too late for dreaming...

...I'll tell you a little secret, my friend...

...For Chava, the Center is that home she craved while growing up in Williamsburg: a community as warm as that of the Hasi-dim, but composed of individualists...

...When I heard Derech Olam, I'm telling you I felt like I was davening...

...The other is Aryeh Levin, the "street rabbi" of Jerusalem, who devoted his life to transforming Rav Kook's vision into practical aid for prisoners and other marginal Jews...

...Alan, believe me, the Jewish people is going to produce greatness again...

...Like a name...

...Chava, who like Jeff is grounded in tradition but open to experimentation, represents a sort of ideal for artists just beginning to confront their Jewishness...

...When he was eight years old, Jeff visited a synagogue and cajoled his parents into sending him to yeshiva...

...Like the Center's evening on the Jews of India at the Museum of Natural History, which drew over a thousand people and was the largest event ever held at the museum...

...Jews believe everything must be for a higher purpose...

...Unlike the post-immigrant artists who, with rare exceptions, chronicled and perhaps even encouraged the decline of Jewish culture and community, artists are now attempting to restore to life those traditions martyred in Europe and trivialized to death in America...

...Chava blushes easily, like the shy hasidic teenager she once was, and who one day decided to leave her community because "it couldn't tolerate an independent mind...

...If we're serious about making an impact on American Jewry, we've got to become more than a nice little artists' club," says Chava...

...When I first met Jeff," recalls Ladino singer Joe Elias, "and he told me the Center was interested in my work, I asked myself, 'Okay Joe, what's the gimmick?' Ashkenazim don't give a damn about anything Sephardi...

...the look of a man confident he can make an impression in other ways...

...He has done it: betrayed the secret agenda of the Martin Steinberg Center...

...It's that kind of activity that will put the Steinberg Center on the map—and convince people that a renaissance in Jewish arts is really possible...

...If there's going to be a renaissance—" "What renaissance, Jeff...

...I can't assess their artistic quality, but I'm impressed with the extraordinary Jewish commitment of the artists coming out of the Center," says American Jewish Congress Executive Director Henry Siegman...

...I grew up hearing jokes like, 'You must be a Spic masquerading as a Jew, ha ha ha.' " Joe, whose mustache twists up into points as if from intense emotion, cries when talking about the anti-Nazi partisans of his parents' town in Yugoslavia...

...So a friend tells me, 'You better go see this guy Jeff.' " On the wall of the Center behind Jeff's desk hang two portraits of white-bearded men...

...In this country we have forgotten what a Jewish community really means...

...And strangers also come looking for him...

...He is permanently out of fashion: shirt collars limp, clashing plaids and colors oblivious to one another...

...The Martin Steinberg Center is an anomaly...

...the death of the Rosenbergs was part of his father's repertoire of bedtime stories...

...Why don't you play real Jewish music, like klezmerV And what's klezmerl A Jewish extraction from the native music of Eastern Europe...

...Have you heard the shlock coming out that passes for Jewish music...

...Says Oboler: "Art for art's sake is a Hellenist concept...

...It was called Bet Kafe, a free coffee house that drew hundreds of Jewish Baha'is and Buddhists and Hebrew Christians and people like the Irish sea captain who had converted to Judaism and the college student whose hobby was travelling to prisons and helping Jewish inmates...

...Despite its Upper East Side address, it is decidedly anti-chic: when Jeff Oboler won a million-dollar CETA grant—the largest government sum ever allocated to Jewish culture—he insisted that those artists hired take their projects to schools, nursing homes and hospitals...

...The Center has quietly evolved into a model of a possible American Jewry whose every component is encouraged to interpret the identity of the whole, a network embracing all those peripheries crowded with homeless Jews...

...Artist groups similar to the Steinberg Center are cropping up in Philadelphia, Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., San Francisco...

...Maybe you can come back some time and we can talk Hebrew together...

...It was he who once said: "We must gather up to their center all spiritual trends that have been dispersed, gather all spiritual fugitives of Israel...

...Not merely an artistic renaissance, not even a community renaissance, but nothing less than tikun olam, the messianic healing of the planet...

...Perhaps the Center's success may be attributed to the times...

...The people here have been gathered by the Steinberg Center to bless the Creator of the sun, a rite revived by marginal Jews drawn to neglected holidays...

...But I instantly fell in love with Orthodoxy...

...I walked right through Hebrew school, a cameo role," says Rick Feldman, a one-time actor and nightclub comedian...

...Just as I see you, Alan...

...At an early age, Joe began taping Ladino songs he heard at home, "incredible treasures that are not just major or minor, but complex in the way that most modern music is...

...We wanted to show artists that the Jewish community isn't a cold, sterile place," says Chava Miller, whose official title is Assistant Director of the Center, but who doubles as psychologist and confidante for many of the Center's artists...

...The city shrinks into a soft grey, a scale model of itself...

...He is Jeff Oboler, director of the Martin Steinberg Center, founded by the American Jewish Congress in 1976 as the nation's first center for Jewish artists...

...You hear about the Warsaw Ghetto but never about those Jews, because they were just Sephardim...

...But then I started having these dreams...