American Bible Society goes on alert

From Gary Stern at Blogging Religiously:

I got this ominous-sounding press release today from the American Bible Society, a NYC-based group, nearly 200 years old, that tries to make the Bible available to everyone:

New York – May 20, 2008 – The American Bible Society Board Chairman, Dr. Dennis C. Dickerson, announced today that two American Bible Society executives, Dr. Paul Irwin, President, and Richard Stewart, Chief Financial Officer, have been placed on leave at the request of the Board of Trustees.

The Board has committed to a full and independent review of the financial stewardship of the American Bible Society.

The American Bible Society’s Executive Vice Presidents, Dr. R. L. Vest and The Reverend Simon Barnes, will assume responsibility for day-to-day operations, reporting to the American Bible Society Board of Trustees Chairman, Dr. Dennis C. Dickerson.

Sounds like a bit of cleaning house. The New York Times had reported Sunday that the American Bible Society paid $5 million to an "electronic commerce" mogul whose clients included pornographers. Irwin denied knowing of Richard J. Gordon's business with adult entertainers.

Inside the wacky world of Christian pop culture

At my high school graduation party, a friend who was not a Christian walked up and commented on the music playing over the outdoor speakers at my parents' house.

"Why is it," he asked, "that Christian bands always have the best musicians?"

I was a bit perplexed: The tunes he was hearing belonged to Midtown, a pop-punk quartet whose members, as far as I knew, were not Christian.

I also disagreed with my friend's assessment. I mean, I was a big fan of MxPx and Slick Shoes ... but the best musicians? Hardly. (For evidence, listen to"Rappin for Jesus" by Stephen Wiley.)

Until a few years ago, Christian bands occasionally would have a radio hit or two -- dc Talk and Jars of Clay had their moment, as did Sixpence None the Richer -- and then disappear back into oblivion.

Switchfoot, whose CD a friend of mine picked up in a South Dakota pawn shop during our 2001 road trip around the country (that's a different, longer story), seems to have bucked that trend. Being heard on TV promos and Star 98.7, or whatever the pop rock station is in your town, for years to follow, Switchfoot has been one of the lucky few who have broken through without significantly changing their message, though I would argue they too have watered it down and published one really bad album.

This music is part of the bigger, "parallel universe of Christian pop culture," as Daniel Radosh dubs the industry in his new book "Rapture Ready!" (Radosh's list of the top 10 Christian songs begins with Larry Norman's "Why Don't You Look Into Jesus?")

"Rapture Ready!" details the exploits of a secular New York Jew on a quest to the center of evangelical culture. Radosh visits the International Christian Retail Show, the Holy Land Experience and Stephen Baldwin World; serves as part of the mob calling for Christ's crucifixion in Arkansas' Great Passion Play; and goes backstage with Bibleman, AKA "Batman for Jesus." I'll forgive Radosh for avoiding VeggieTales night at a minor league baseball stadium and the giants who break burning stacks of bricks in Jesus' name.

Radosh intersperses Christian camp with more sober accounts of economics and theology. Chapter 4 focuses on the Bible-publishing business and originally appeared in The New Yorker, and Chapter 5, which, believe it or not, appeared in Playboy, is about pre-millenialism and the "Left Behind" phenomenon.

"In the end," Brian McLaren, author of "A New Kind of Christian," proclaims on the book jacket, "he offers evaluations and insights that might be considered downright prophetic, and compassionate too. No evangelical insider could have done as good a job as Daniel Radosh."

He's definitely more sensitive to things he finds strange than Matt Taibbi. The book has been well-reviewed by Relevant magazine and The Forward, among others. I read through a chunk of it last night and, for some reason, found the style quite similar to A.J. Jacobs' in "The Year of Living Biblically." (Jacobs, possibly not by coincidence, also wrote a review for the book jacket.)

In the intro, Radosh explains that Christian culture is no laughing matter, at least not from a business perspective: It is a $7 billion a year industry.

"At some point," Hanna Rosin wrote for Slate.com, "Radosh asks the obvious question":

Didn't Jesus chase the money changers out of the temple? In other words, isn't there something wrong with so thoroughly commercializing all aspects of faith? For this, the Christian pop-culture industry has a ready answer. Evangelizing and commercializing have much in common. In the "spiritual marketplace" (as it's called), Christianity is a brand that seeks to dominate. Like Coke, it wants to hold onto its followers and also win over new converts. As with advertisers, the most important audience is young people and teenagers, who are generally brand loyalists. Hence, Bibleman and Christian rock are the spiritual equivalent of New Coke. Christian trinkets—a WWJD bracelet, a "God is my DJ" T-shirt—function more like Coca-Cola T-shirts or those cute stuffed polar bears. They telegraph to the community that the wearer is a proud Christian and that this is a cool thing to be—which should, in theory, invite eager curiosity.

This is significant because, according to research by The Barna Group, 61 percent of twentysomethings were "spiritually active" teens but have since lost their religion. Christians leaders see culture as the new channel through which to reach the lost and distracted. Radosh writes:

A less reliable statistic -- but one that has galvanized pastors who believe it reflects what they see in the pews -- is that if current trends continue, only 4 percent of today's Christian teens will be "Bible-believing Christians" as adults.

"Less reliable" is far too generous. That factoid is pure fiction. But, nonetheless, Christian culture can increase the fervency of the faithful, something I saw countless times as a teen at P.O.D. and Dogwood concerts (the latter for which I actually skipped my senior prom). They may not be the best musicians, but their message often carries more weight than typical Christian influencers.

As Radosh relays in the first few words of the book when describing a concert on a rural Kansas airfield:

A lanky teenager made his way out of the crow and ran to where his friends were waiting on the periphery, sweat smearing his thick black eyeliner. "Awesome performance." He grinned broadly. "They prayed like three times in a twenty-minute set."

Bowing down for business

From the new issue of Portfolio:

Every week, the jumuah, or Friday prayer, is held in a large tent at the University of Tehran, with thousands of the faithful spilling out onto the surrounding campus. At each of these prayer meetings, the cleric on the platform clutches an AK-47 as he leads a chant of "Death to America! Death to Israel!"

Many of the chanters are not religious zealots. They're here because this weekly morning ritual is, in effect, a Washington cocktail party, a board meeting, and an audience with the pope all rolled into one.

For Tehran's leading politicians and businessmen, staying in favor with the ruling powers demands attendance, because in Iran, it's not just government that is fiercely theocratic; big business is too.

It's not about ethics, it's business

Everyone's favorite Jewish ice cream entrepreneurs, Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield -- yes, that Ben and Jerry -- are currently locked up in a bitter battle with soured franchisees.

No religion angle here, except the shirt shopowner Alan Sherman is wearing in Newsweek's photo (right). But this reminds me of a story I wrote last year about accusations that Thomas Kinkade, the self-styled "Painter of Light," had used his Christian faith to defraud investors.

Controversy has surrounded Kinkade for the past four years, after stock of the company he took public (Media Arts Group) plummeted from a high of $23 a share to less than $3. In 2004, he bought the company back at about $4 a share. Kinkade is now the sole owner.

His paintings are known for their vibrant colors and idyllic settings, their country cottages, chilly creeks, and glowing clouds. "The critics may not endorse me," the artist told CT in 2000. "But I own the hearts of the people."

Individual investors run some 500 Kinkade galleries worldwide, with the overwhelming majority in the United States. Signature Galleries, which sell only Kinkade art, cost upwards of $50,000 to open. Media Arts Group required that new owners attend a training conference called "Thomas Kinkade University." Yatooma said this is where his clients drank "the Kinkade Kool-Aid."

"Thomas Kinkade University had a revival-like atmosphere. They would close in prayer and join together in worship. Everybody would leave with their head spinning—now sign the dotted line," Yatooma said. "They thought they were going to make money by sharing the light."

Other investors told me that was nonsense, "comical" even, because they opened Kinkade galleries to make money, not spread the gospel. Which reminds me of that Mafioso axiom: It's not personal, it's business.

Two side notes:

According to my friends at Reel Intelligence, Kinkade's inspirations may soon be, ehem, gracing, the big screen. Or, because the movie is "Thomas Kinkade's Home for Christmas" and a release date has yet to be set, maybe they won't.

Anyway, my favorite flavor is far and away Half Baked.

JJ editor: 'Writers Strike is a Jewish issue'

My editor at The Jewish Journal, Rob Eshman, disagrees with the premise of my Wandering Jew column last week, in which I argued that the writer's strike is not a Jewish story. Here's the nut:

Indeed, "Hollywood writer" is among the most Jewish job descriptions anywhere, which is why, as this long-anticipated strike approached, my editors asked me to report the news through a Jewish lens. The difficulty, however, is that this really isn't a Jewish story. It's a business story that just happens to deal with an industry built largely by Jewish immigrants and sustained by their successors.

In his column this week, Rob writes:

The Writers Strike is a Jewish issue.

How do I know that? Because everyone is saying it's not. The writers who are demanding a larger share of DVD rights and residuals for their work and the producers who refuse to give it to them both say, repeatedly, that despite the fact that so many of them happen to be Jewish, the strike is not -- as Jewish writers and producers told our senior reporter Brad Greenberg last week -- a Jewish issue.

To paraphrase a Clinton-era favorite, you can be sure that when everyone is saying it's not about being Jewish, it's about being Jewish.

Strip away the brand-name products and gossipy inside Hollywood milieu of this strike, and what you have is a question of fair compensation and just treatment of labor.

It is a question our sages wrestled with, beginning with a law laid down in Leviticus 25:14: "And when you sell something to your fellow, or buy from the hand of your fellow, don't oppress each other."

How shallow has our Jewish life become and how silent have our pulpits fallen when we blithely accept the idea that a 4,000-year-old ethical tradition has nothing to say about how we do business?

Certainly, Jewish ethics should not be dismissed in how the Jewish writers and producers treat each other in this labor dispute. But I don't think that makes it a Jewish issue -- that makes it an issue influenced by Jewish values. The same could be said for most of the things that happen in certain pockets of Los Angeles where Jews abound.

Sometimes, as in the ongoing case for and against expansion of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, a controversy becomes a Jewish issue because it deals with more than just morals and ethics but actual Jewish interests and institutions. I just don't think the plight of TV and film writers -- even if it was once an almost entirely Yiddish operation -- fits into this category.

But, then again, Rebecca Spence at The Forward spoke with the same union leader I did, David N. Weiss, and got the exact opposite angle from very similar responses.

On the picket line with Jewish screenwriters

"Are you Jewish?"

With some discomfort, I asked that question repeatedly of the 300-plus picketers in front of CBS Studio Center in Studio City on Monday, the first day of the strike by the Writers Guild of America.

It was an awkward query not because I feared dismissal -- after accounting for noses and facial hair and eyeglasses, I was able to reduce uncertainty to about 20 percent -- but because I knew these TV and film writers did not see a connection between Yiddishkayt and the failed contract negotiations that spurred some 12,000 members of the WGA to go on strike at 9:01 p.m. Sunday.

"What's the Jewish angle?" Andrew Jacobson, a co-writer of "Not Another Teen Movie," asked me. "I don't see one except in the most stereotypical sense. This is an issue that affects people regardless of religion or race or gender. It's writers united."

Indeed, "Hollywood writer" is among the most Jewish job descriptions anywhere, which is why, as this long-anticipated strike approached, my editors asked me to report the news through a Jewish lens. The difficulty, however, is that this really isn't a Jewish story. It's a business story that just happens to deal with an industry built largely by Jewish immigrants and sustained by their successors.

This was probably the most challenging story I've reported since joining The Jewish Journal six months ago. I could not, for the life of me, find my angle, and then I labored long and hard over the wording of this 700-word story. I know, it doesn't show.

It just seemed like such an awkward topic, a story with characters so obviously Jewish but a theme and plot that has nothing to do with Judaism. And asking film and TV writers if they are Jewish is like asking someone in Vatican City if they are Catholic. When I asked Marc Alan Levy, who wrote the TV movie "Searching for David's Heart," he deadpanned, "Yeah. I'm the only one in line."

The 'Jewish hustler' gets some real green

Dov Charney is a self-described "Jewish hustler," and today he hustled some real dough out of the deal that is buying out his clothing company, American Apparel. Mark Lacter, whose LA Biz Observed is my main source of financial news, has the info and reports that AA employees now sign a document stating:

“American Apparel is in the business of designing and manufacturing sexually charged T-shirts and intimate apparel, and uses sexually charged visual and oral communications in its marketing and sales activity.”

Lacter also linked to this New York Times article about Charney:

Mr. Charney has gained a reputation as the Hugh Hefner of retailing, decorating his stores with covers of Penthouse magazine and admitting in interviews to sleeping with employees. In lawsuits filed in 2005, several employees charged him with creating a work environment in which women did not feel safe. They claimed in the lawsuits, for example, that Mr. Charney conducted job interviews in his underwear and gave a vibrator to at least one female worker. Mr. Charney has denied the charges, and judges have dismissed some of the lawsuits against him. In the interview, Mr. Charney said that the media had “exploited American Apparel on certain issues,” adding, “I would never do an interview in my underwear.”

Sure, every know and then an AA ad is innocuous, even cute like that unauthorized billboard of Woody Allen as "der heyliker rebe." But Charney really has a knack for provocativeness. “I could pull my penis out right now," he told The Jewish Journal a few years ago, "and I guarantee you no one would be offended.”

Zell: 'Being Jewish means that you're vulnerable forever'

"I think that being Jewish means that you’re vulnerable forever. Was there a stronger Jewish community anywhere in the world—more intellectual, more successful—than Germany in the late twenties and early thirties, before Hitler? And seven years later they’re building concentration camps! So, do I expect something like that to happen in the United States? Of course not. Do I think it could? Absolutely."

Those are the words of billionaire investor Sam Zell. Last spring, when Zell bought the Tribune Company, which owns the Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times and Chicago Cubs baseball team, The Forward and The Jewish Journal ran articles about the "tough Jew" who was about to take over two former bastions of WASP society.

Stanley Gold: 'I don't get ulcers - I give ulcers'

The Jewish Federation of LA is set to have a new swashbuckling sheriff, and he's wasting no words describing the umbrella organization for Jewish charities.

"It is largely irrelevant," Stanley P. Gold said last week. "I'm gonna make it relevant. Gonna make it relevant to the donor community. Gonna make it relevant to the Los Angeles community. And gonna make it relevant to most of the Jewish community. The alternative is a slow dissipation. I'm not going to let that happen."

I was amazed when Gold, the chairman of the board of trustees at USC and a former director of Disney who saved the company from corporate raiders and canned Michael Eisner, made this statement. Not because many LA Jews disagree with it, but because it came from inside The Federation walls.

I profiled Gold and The Federation in this week's Jewish Journal. Here's the end of the 4,000-word piece:

Cynical or realistic, a few veterans of The Federation's inner workings were skeptical about the likelihood of Gold -- or anyone -- reshaping the organization.

"Stanley Gold is not a pushover, but how much hands-on will he have at The Federation?" asked one board member. "John Fishel tends to put people in places where they are yes-men. Is John going to be telling Stanley what they're going to do, and he is just going to be a rubber stamp?"

Fishel said that is not his plan.

"Change is never easy, but sometimes change is absolutely necessary to change your future viability," The Federation's president said. "There, Stanley is going to play a vital role because he is going to force us to ask some hard questions."

Regardless of what obstructions or challenges arise, Gold seems unwilling to be stifled. A visit to 1984 helps demonstrate why.

The Magic Kingdom was under attack. Corporate raiders were attempting a hostile takeover of the Walt Disney Co., lusting for control of the company so they could strip mine its studio and real estate holdings and hang onto the profitable theme parks. Stock prices plummeting, it was the end of innocence for Disney -- some would say an allegory for the United States -- and somehow the man who had long been known around the office as "Walt's idiot nephew" got a chance to be the hero.

At Roy Disney's behest, Gold began buying hundreds of thousands of Disney shares to add to the 1.1 million his boss already owned. Then he and the brain trust, a roundtable of Roy Disney and his advisers, began working to ward off the raiders and quell Wall Street's anxiety.

It was obvious the current CEO had to go; Disney had just made it's first profitable live-action film, "Splash," since "The Love Bug" was released in 1968 -- 16 long years before. But Disney's board of directors, which included Gold and Roy Disney, couldn't agree on who should replace him.

Gold's selection to run the company -- a combination of Paramount No. 2 Michael Eisner and former Warner Bros. chief Frank Wells -- was opposed by 10 of the board's 13 members. As autumn approached, Gold had a week to convince four directors to support his candidates. He was told it couldn't be done; even members of the brain trust were beginning to worry.

"We're going to run it my way," Gold told Mark Siegel, a partner at Gang, Tyre and member of the brain trust, according to John Taylor's book, "Storming the Magic Kingdom," the definitive account of the affair. "We're going to run it right down the middle of the street, where they're uncomfortable and where I'm comfortable. We're going to put on a political campaign right out there where everybody can see us. I'm tired of being told to be quiet because somebody's feelings are going to be hurt."

By Saturday morning, Gold's men were voted the new heads of Walt Disney Productions. He celebrated by ordering vanity license plates that said "10-3." Two decades later, Gold and Roy Disney proved just as formidable when, fed up with Eisner's management, they resigned as directors of the company and single-handedly led a shareholder revolt that resulted in Eisner's resignation.

"The most important thing to know about me," Gold said when I asked if he was worried about spinning his wheels at The Federation, "is I don't get ulcers. I give ulcers."

Swearing at work

I had an editor once that tried awfully hard to sell me on writing a story about what people thought about cussing at work. I was never clear on why a newspaper reporter would write such a newsworthlessness topic, so I didn't. If only I'd had this news peg from a lawsuit filed against Knicks coach (if you can call him that) Isiah Thomas, I could have turned this piece for New York magazine (warning: f-bombs to follow).

“Revolting profanity doesn’t have any place in the office,” says Peter Post, a director at the Emily Post Institute (and great-grandson of the priestess of politesse herself). “But occasional swearing? That’s no big deal if the culture of the workplace permits it.” The culture of the Garden (none of the bosses seemed troubled when Stephon Marbury had sex with an intern in a truck outside a strip club) would seem to be profanity-friendly. And it’s not the only one. Office cursing is so prevalent that pollsters haven’t even bothered to ask about it since 2002, when Public Agenda found that 44 percent of Americans hear foul language “often” in our daily lives. A 2004 British survey found that 76 percent of Brits swore regularly at work.

Workplace profanity is everywhere, starting with our elected leaders, like Eliot (“I’m a fucking steamroller!”) Spitzer and Dick (“Go fuck yourself!”) Cheney, and continuing to our unelected moral arbiters, like Golden Globe–winning Bono (“fucking brilliant”). In Fresno, California, former deputy mayor Roger Montero resigned in April after admitting that he used “coarse language” on the job but denying that his language constituted sexual harassment. And a Virginia dentist, Steven Afsahi, was fined $9,000 in 2004 by that state’s Board of Dentistry in part for using profanity in front of patients.

Indeed, religious beliefs aside, swearing seems to be workplace sensitive, acceptable at the opposite ends of the white-blue collar spectrum, but less so in the middle. This jogged to memory the story of a 15-year-old Indiana girl who last year e-mailed The Washington Post wondering if all journalists swear.

"Last year our journalism teacher showed us the movie 'All the President's Men.' This teacher states that journalists all speak with lots of profanities as shown in the movie. I would appreciate some insight into this scenario from your point of view. I have wondered if it was a guys-only thing or perhaps a decade in time when people spoke with more abandon and less courtesy. I hope that this is not some sort of a prerequisite for joining the journalism field."

Yes, Tori, many journalists curse. They curse when their computers break down, when people lie to them, when they make mistakes and when they're on deadline. But usually, they're nice to people and sometimes, but not always, to their editors. Please don't think that cursing is a prerequisite to be a journalist.

Tori later told her local paper, in a 22-paragraph story no longer online, that she probably didn't want to be a journalist anymore. Sad as that is, it seems most the reporters I've worked with over the past three years have reached the same conclusion. Only they were cursing a low-paying, under-appreciated job.

No Jews allowed: Judenrein U.S. program

The U.S. State Department and the University of California had this genius program to give Middle Eastern businessmen a leg up. Jordan, Kuwait, Yemen, even Israel. That is, so long as you're not an Israeli Jew. I guess some people think Jewish businessmen already have too much power.

Jerusalem-based marketing specialist and businesswoman Miriam Schwab uncovered the bias last week when she checked into applying to the university's San Diego branch Beyster Institute program for Middle East Entrepreneur Training (MEET). She discovered that the program was open to citizens of "Algeria, Bahrain, Egypt, Iraq, Israel (limited to Israeli Arab citizens), Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Morocco, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Tunisia, the United Arab Emirates, West Bank/Gaza and Yemen."

(skip)

In response to an IsraelNationalNews.com question for confirmation of the restriction in Israel, program manager Mona Yousry verified, "It is only for Arab Israelis." A subsequent question as to why Israeli Jews are not eligible for the program elicited the following reply from the Institute's Director of Entrepreneurial Programs, Rob Fuller: "I’m sorry for the unfortunate misunderstanding about eligibility for the new MEET program. To be clear, for the programs for which we are now recruiting to be held in 2008, ALL Israeli citizens are eligible to participate. Sorry for any confusion we may have inadvertently caused."

Israeli Jews originally were excluded despite the program’s stated advantage as "an important cultural exchange." Fuller did not explain the initial "confusion" in barring Israeli Jews.

The programs are to be held in Jordan, Egypt and Morocco, all of which have relations with Israel.

Following the e-mail complaints to Beyster, the US Embassy of Yemen online document which announces the program was down for more than a day until the words "limited to Israeli Arab citizens" were deleted. [View the document announcing the program by clicking here. (I've disabled this link because it was virus-ridden.) When prompted with "Do you want to open or save this file," click on "Open."]

The US official who made the online edit, however, reposted the story in "track changes" format so that the document displays in the left margin, at the time of this writing, the words: "Deleted: Limited to Israeli Arab citizens." (See pics below).

That story came up in our budget meeting Wednesday, but long before next week's paper will be published it's been making the rounds on Jewish blogs. Big time. Yid with Lid appears to have been the first to follow the INN scoop:

Where was the ACLU? How come Congressman Ellison isn't screaming about profiling. Here we go again with another example of how the PC police only cares when things are convenient for them.

Bringing banking in line with Islamic law

That's the duty of John Weguelin, the managing director of European Islamic Investment Bank. The long-awaited second issue of Portfolio (that's another story) has a short profile on the dapper Londoner. But after reading that Weguelin's bank is in accordance with sharia, my only question was: huh?

(F)or a clear sign of what makes E.I.I.B. different, just turn to the bank’s first annual report, in which briefings from the chairman and company secretary open with “In the Name of Allah, the Most Gracious, the Most Merciful” and calculations of shareholders’ zakah, an annual charitable donation required of all Muslims, are supplied. The cornerstone of the bank’s Islamic nature lies in its transactions and ventures, which are guarded by its Sharia Board—four Islamic scholars who vet funds and deals to make sure they don’t contravene Koranic bans on earning interest and making profit from alcohol, pork, or unethical activities.

That makes sense. But can they employ a Sharia Goy to do the unholy business?

Zell: 'One tough Jew'

Sam Zell got the treatment today from the largest Jewish newspapers in Los Angeles and New York. The Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles and The Forward recycle the stories of Zell's reputation as a open-shirt-wearing, motorcycle-riding, grave-dancing business maverick.

But, more fascinating, is that both papers note the oddity of Zell, whose parents fled Poland the night before Nazi invasion, placing the winning bid for the Tribune Co, which owns the Los Angeles Times.

From The Forward:

The irony of Zell’s latest success is that it will likely make him the owner of a company that has been the very antithesis of the Jewish summer camp culture in which Zell was molded. The Chicago Tribune, the company’s flagship publication, has had a famously antagonistic relationship with the Jewish community in Chicago — historically because of its right-wing, isolationist stance during World War II, and more recently because of its critical coverage of Israel. Newspaper watchers say that Zell and the Tribune will be an interesting mix.

“The paper has a reputation for having a thick glass ceiling for Jews,” said Michael Siegel, who for 25 years has been the rabbi at Chicago’s Anshe Emet Synagogue, where Zell is a member. “For someone like Sam Zell, who is noted as a grave dancer, here is he is more of a grave spinner. There are probably some past owners and executives who are spinning in their graves right now.”

And from The Jewish Journal:

Happily for them, most of the old-time Los Angeles anti-Semites who used to hang out at the downtown California Club are either dead or too old to care that a Jew is on the verge of owning the L.A. Times.

Not just any Jew. Sam Zell looks as though he's one tough Jew, probably even tougher than the old California Clubbers who stole the water from the Owens Valley and got rich in sneaky San Fernando Valley land deals.

(skip)

Another Jew, David Geffen, is waiting in the wings, hoping to be either Zell's joint-venture partner or to buy the Times from him.

However it turns out, we'll probably have a Jew in charge of the Times, which was once one of old Los Angeles' most famous WASP institutions. What a great day for old L.A. Jews with long memories of country clubs and downtown clubs that banned them; restrictive covenants that kept them out of certain fancy neighborhoods; anti-Semitic fraternities and sororities at USC and UCLA and law firms that never seemed able to find a place for a smart Jewish attorney. They also may have memories of the old Times, which, while not anti-Semitic, was a perfect reflection of the conservative Republican WASP culture of Los Angeles' upper classes.