(Photo: Wikipedia)
SAN DIEGO−Kirk Douglas (1916-2020) died Wednesday, Feb. 5, at the age of 103. He emerged as a Hollywood star for his role as the boxer Midge Kelly in the movie Champion which garnered him in 1950 his first of three Oscar nominations for Best Actor. Like many Jews of his generation, he had changed his name to avoid revealing that he was born Issur Danielovitch, the son of poor Jewish immigrants who lived in Amsterdam, New York. Even before that, he adopted the Americanized surname of his uncle Avram Demsky and preferred Isadore over Issur.
Douglas always was acutely aware that he was Jewish. His childhood temple offered to subsidize his education at a Yeshiva so he could become a rabbi, but he had fallen in love with acting and declined the offer. Though he had a bar mitzvah and celebrated Jewish holidays in his home, he did not share the piety of his parents. The anti-Semitism he encountered in his hometown, however, never let him forget his Jewish origins. As he recalled in his autobiography The Ragman’s Son:
It’s tough to be a Jew, but it was very tough in Amsterdam. There were constant reminders. No Jews worked in the carpet mills. No Jews worked on the local newspaper. No Jewish boys delivered the newspaper. Kids on every street corner beat you up. Why? Who taught them that? Their parents! After school each day, I’d have to walk about twelve blocks to Hebrew school. I had to run the gauntlet, because every other street had a gang, and they would always be waiting to catch the Jew boy.”
He could not escape this prejudice when he attended St. Lawrence University, a Liberal Arts college located in an isolated rural area of northern New York on the Canadian border. He hitchhiked 200 miles to get to the school and gained admission and a college loan after a hastily arranged interview with the dean. Though athletic, handsome, and intelligent, he was not rushed by the fraternities whose national charters banned pledging Jews. Instead, Douglas left his imprint on the campus as an actor, champion wrestler, and the first independent (non-fraternity), let alone Jewish, president of the student government in 1938. The alumni protested over a “Jew boy president of the student body” and threatened to stop donating to the school. In 1939 he unexpectedly resigned from his office as regional chairman of the National Student Federation of America for undermining his proposal for St. Lawrence to host its annual Northeast meeting. Angry criticism was leveled at his presidency and his abandonment of the NSFA conference. When I was invited to deliver a lecture on the history of Jews at St. Lawrence for its sesquicentennial, I conducted research on this incident. In retrospect it is difficult to discern whether the criticism leveled at Douglas stemmed from latent anti-Semitism or personal grievances. In the student newspaper, letter writers engaged in ad hominem attacks targeting Douglas’ romantic flings, not his religion.
Douglas served in the Navy during World War Two. He married his first of two Gentile wives in 1943 [the second converted when they renewed their vows in 2004] in a ceremony conducted by a Navy chaplain. A rabbi agreed to officiate at a subsequent wedding in return for the couple promising to raise their children as Jews. Douglas admitted that he never intended to honor this pledge: “Our feeling was that if we had children, we wouldn’t raise them one way or another.” After being wounded at sea and convalescing in San Diego in 1944, he pursued his acting career, landing the male lead opposite Barbara Stanwyck in The Strange Love of Martha Ivers in 1946. For his first seven years of his movie career, he was not cast in a Jewish role. Privately, his attachment to Judaism expressed itself by fasting on Yom Kippur out of a sense of solidarity towards the Jews of the past and the present. “On that day, I know deep down in my guts that I’m related to slaves who escaped the bondage in Egypt, and, that the people who are now trying to turn Israel into a land flowing with milk and honey are my brethren.”
That connection was reinforced in 1953 when Douglas played a Holocaust survivor in Edward Dmytryk’s The Juggler, the first Hollywood motion picture to be filmed in Israel. At the registration center for new immigrants, the former juggler and clown Hans Mueller played by Douglas hallucinates that his deceased wife and children are peering at him from a window. Chafing from confinement, he escapes from the facility and beats up an Israeli police officer whose check of his identification papers stirs up memories of Nazi interrogations. Roaming the countryside, Hans is befriended by a boy and woman who belong to a kibbutz and invite him to stay there. Hans blames himself for the deaths of his wife and children because he relied on his fame as a juggler and German citizenship to shield them from persecution. When the police track him down, Hans barricades himself in a room. Assured by Ya’El that they won’t harm him, Hans surrenders and acknowledges he is sick and needs help. Hans repeatedly remarks, that “home is a place you lose,” but slowly discerns that Israel is a homeland for Jews fleeing oppression. Douglas admired Israel for fighting for Jewish statehood in the shadow of the systematic slaughter of European Jewry: “That Israel won the War of Independence was a miracle. People like to think of Jews as meek and humble, walking docilely to the gas chambers.”
Whereas Hans was a Jewish refugee who benefitted from Israel’s commitment to rehabilitate Holocaust survivors, Douglas’s next Jewish character Mickey Marcus in Melville Shavelson’s Cast a Giant Shadow (1966) was based on an American Jewish soldier who had been recruited by the Haganah to serve as a military advisor to IDF troops during the War of Independence. Until he tours Dachau after its liberation, Marcus feels little sympathy for Zionism. Catapulted into the fray, he embraces the Jewish cause and dinstiguishes himself as a trainer of soldiers and organizer of the clandestine route to smuggle arms, food, and medical supplies into besieged Jerusalem. An Israeli sentry who did not understand English kills Marcus because Marcus did not speak Hebrew and could not respond to his orders. Douglas identified with Marcus who “in helping the Israelis, discovered his Jewishness, came to grips with it, and acknowledged that he was a Jew. …It has also been a theme of my own life. Years back, I tried to forget that I was a Jew. I remember saying, ‘Oh no, I’m half Jewish,’ to minimize the stigma of being a Jew, one hundred percent.”
Douglas returned to the topics of the Holocaust and Israel in films like Victory at Entebbe (1976) and Remembrance of Love (1982). As the Holocaust survivor Joe Rabin in the latter, he travels to a gathering of survivors in Israel searching for his long lost lover and the baby she was carrying before they were separated and deported to concentration camps. Douglas’ indignation over the Shoah and pride in Israel as a Jewish state are evident in many of the books he authored.
In 1991 Douglas nearly died in a collision between his helicopter and a stunt plane. Confined to a hospital bed with spinal injuries, he reevaluated his relationship to Judaism: “I came to believe that I was spared because I had never come to grips with what it means to be Jewish.” This quest spurred him to study Torah and have his second bar mitzvah at the age of 83. He valued the morality promoted by religions in general: “I studied Judaism a lot. I studied religion in general, and I have never imposed my Judaism on my kids. They are what they want to be. I think… you must care for others. That’s the correct religion.”
In 1996 Douglas suffered a severe stroke. Intensive speech therapy enabled him to regain his ability to talk. Rather than letting his halting speech deter him from acting again, he appeared in three more feature films and one television movie. One of these was It Runs in the Family (2003) about a dysfunctional Jewish family coping with the stroke of its patriarch played by Kirk Douglas. True to the title, he cast it with his former wife Diana, son Michael, and grandson Cameron. His final theatre performance was in the one-man autobiographical play Before I Forget in 2009. Douglas quipped, “No matter how bad things are, they can always be worse. So what if my stroke left me with a speech impediment? Moses had one, and he did all right.”
Anne and Kirk donated over $100 million to American and Israeli charities. They have funded hundreds of playgrounds built in poor sections of Los Angeles and Jerusalem, an Alzheimer’s hospital unit, and a theater near the Western Wall for screening films about Judaism and Jerusalem. Over the course of his impressive career, Douglas evolved from an actor who minimized his Jewish roots with a pseudonym and a half-truth about his ancestry into a proud Jew who recovered his ethnic and religious identities by dramatizing both and immersing himself in Judaism and Jewish history.
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Baron is professor emeritus of history at San Diego State University. He may be contacted via lawrence.baron@sdjewishworld.com
Thanks, Laurie. A very informative piece.