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Sheldon Teitelbaum Interview I chat by phone with Sheldon Teitelbaum Monday, June 21, 2004. Sheli: "I began to work (with Tom Waldman, Steve Weinstein) at the Jewish Journal [of Los Angeles] in late 1985, after returning from a decade in Israel. Gene Lichtenstein was the editor. Tom (his mother was not Jewish, I think, his father was) came out of the USC School of Journalism with an MA, not the general route into Jewish journalism. Steve was more of a short-story writer who came to the newspaper with interests in filmmaking, as I recall. Joe Domanick (Catholic) joined us soon after. He later became a well known police reporter and author of a respected book on the LAPD. Nobody came out of the Jewish journalism world. Certainly Gene didn't. He'd been an editor at Esquire. He was a New York Jewish intellectual. He'd never belong to a synagogue or have any pronounced interest in Israel, so far as I knew. He was of that generation that prized people like Phillip Roth, Saul Bellow, Norman Mailer, and Mordecai Richler. [Gene knew all of those writers but Mailer.] He was new to town. He had no sense of the community, not that any of us did. "I volunteered to make my niche covering anything that had to do with Israel. Within my first month, I wrote an article about Dennis Prager, who was the head of a major program at Brandeis Bardin. I remember Gene coming back to me that he had run into Barbie Weinberg (one of the machers at the Federation who helped, I think, start the paper). She'd read my piece and insisted that it was not possible that whoever made whatever quote was made. I explained to Gene that I had learned early in my career never to go anywhere without a tape recorder. I immediately come home after an interview and transcribe it. I never use a notepad. I find that it helps with accuracy. Also, when you interview someone, you're not always listening. Your mind is racing. You're dealing with noise. You're thinking of your next question. I found it is helpful to listen a second time. "I told Gene that I had the tape. I have the transcript. As a journalist, I'd learned that was all you needed. His response was that it was not the truth or accuracy that he was interested in, it was the impression ostensibly made of somebody who is hostile. I said I was not hostile. You can hear it on the tape. I was just having a nice chat. He would not check it. His line from then on, 'I'm more interested in the impression you make in the community than in your craft and your veracity.'" "He didn't want you to rock the boat." "Depends who's boat. He wouldn't mind rocking boats he didn't have a foot in. With impunity, he could've run pieces against Marvin Hier and the Wiesenthal Center. He could've written critically of Chabad. Nobody [at the Federation] would've said a word. But there were things that were the bailiwicks of the machers. The paper's independence was nonsense. It was never independent. The Federation put up the money and agreed to buy a set number of issues. "There was a time that I couldn't bear to read the paper because I thought it was a crock of s---. It's not the case under the stewardship of Rob Eshman [present editor]. "I had a visceral response to Gene's refusal to back us. I had just come out of the Israeli army, where your commander says follow me. He doesn't send you ahead of him. He sets the tone and pulls you forward. He's responsible for you if you cut your finger. And nobody's left behind. That was the credo I internalized during my five years in the army and afterwards in the reserves. It shocked me to see an editor, in the first month, not only fold in front of the community, but offer up his own people as sacrificial lambs. I was gone within eight months. I got an offer from USC that paid better. "Tom and I did a piece in 1991 for the LA Times Sunday Magazine on Rabbi Marvin Hier. One of the people that Tom interviewed was Stanley Hirsh, who at the time was the president of the Federation. There was a story about Yitzhak Shamir coming to town. Stanley said, and I salute his political impulses, 'I don't want to meet that f---ing dwarf.' Tom quoted it in the piece. "The LAT's fact checker called Hirsh and he denied it. Even though we had it on tape, The Times didn't want to hear the tape. They didn't want the aggravation. "Stanley later boasted, 'Of course I said it. What do you think? I'm going to admit it to The Times?' This is the kind of thing that went on all the time and it drove me crazy. "The second thing that drove me crazy about Gene was that he had no feeling for Israel. He admitted it. He even said to me, 'Our readers have little interest in reading about Israel.' He'd never even been to Israel before he took the job, as far as I recall. After a few freebie trips, he became the Sunday morning pundit. He didn't have a clue what he was talking about. "I used to write for Present Tense magazine, which was funded by the American Jewish Committee. It made Moment look like the rag that it is. "People were very closed-mouth in our sense of the Jewish community. Maybe because we showed up as outsiders. Today you just have to go to a Shabbat dinner and walk out with 15 different stories. "Jewish journalists [for Jewish publications] have low status in the Jewish world. Much like Jewish teachers. They are not taken seriously, even when they sting. If you publish something in the Jewish Journal, no matter how odious, it is still considered washing your dirty linen in public and not going up to The New York Times, even though all the big papers read the Jewish papers for possible stories. The religious community hated it from day one because it wasn't religious. Gene didn't have any feeling for Orthodox or Conservative Judaism. The only one who used to write about it was Yehuda Lev who was to the left of Tommy Lapid [an opponent of Orthodox sway in politics]. "If you have enough confidence as an editor to hire people, you should back them. If you can't back them, you should fire them. Gene did neither, but he was livid when I ran screaming into the night. I left after he told me hwas promoting me. "The Orthodox were never favorably disposed towards the Federation. So the thinking [at the Jewish Journal under Gene Lichtenstein] may have been, why cover them if their people do not donate on Super Sunday? The Federation's main interest in funding this paper and anything else it does was to get people to donate funds to cover its overhead, and to do good works. In which order of priority I can't say." "Rob Eshman has bent over backwards to reach out to the Orthodox." "Rob Eshman has bent over backwards in any way he could think of to reach out to people estranged from the paper. He turned an editor's paper into a writer's paper. He cares about the quality of the writing he runs. That's rare in the Jewish journalism world. I don't think he has any axes to grind. I don't think he has a mean-spirited bone in his body. I think he delights in the pluralism of this community. I don't think he's the least interested in shutting people out of the paper. "I was asked to do a profile of Michael Lerner for Moment magazine. I talked to many people. I wrote a long piece balanced between his detractors, who were vituperative, and his defenders, who were passionate. I got a phone call from Hershel Shanks at Moment. He really liked the piece. Then I got a call a week later from Hershel. He didn't like the piece. He felt I had been too kind to Michael Lerner. He sent back a version of the piece in which every single statement that might have mitigated a negative profile had been removed. It was a hatchet job. I said to him, if you're going to do that, you're going to have to take my name off. He said fine. The next thing I knew, he sent a check. He put his name on the piece and ran a hatchet job. Michael Lerner was furious with me. He felt I should've know that was what was going to happen ultimately. It was my worst nightmare. I couldn't believe that anyone would do such a thing. On the other hand, I cashed the check. Shame on me!" "Jewish journalism does not attract our best and brightest." "Do you think there is a writer for any of these papers who wouldn't rather be writing for The LA Times or a major magazine? Present company included. The best and the brightest may use it as a stepping stone. For my purposes, it worked nicely. I wrote hundreds of articles for The LA Times, The NY Times, Premiere, Entertainment Weekly, The Jerusalem Post, The Montreal Gazette, Toronto Star, Review of Books, The LA Reader, Hadassa, many of them about Jewish topics." Sheldon Teitelbaum is a Los Angeles-based senior writer for the Jerusalem Report and was a frequent contributor to the Los Angeles Times, Wired, Time-Digital, the New York Times, the LA Daily News, the Jewish Journal and the Montreal Gazette winner of Canada’s First Northern Lights Award for Travel Writing, he is now on the market for an editorial position that provides a minimum of two week’s annual holiday, if only for the sake of continued “shalom bayit” (household harmony). All other matters, with the exception of involuntary influxes of lesbian pornography, are negotiable. Tales from the Darkside: By Sheldon Teitelbaum (Hebrew version) As my final “Teitelbaum’s Take” column in Virtual Jerusalem (which as resident wit and raconteur I was going to call “Teitelbaum’s Final Take”) I planned to take members of the purportedly largest online Jewish community in the world to task for invariably being dead wrong in virtually every opinion I have seen them voice on the in-house opinion poll. Wrong not in any ideological sense – though there was no shortage of that – but in a manner defiant of chance and logic alike. Typical was the instance, well after the CIA’s so-called Iraqi Weapons of Mass Destruction vanished into a puff of Jules Verne-era gun-cotton, that they defied the Mossad, the Shabbak, the Jaffe Institute of Strategic Studies, the Dayan Center, the NSA and the entire staff of my neighborhood Supercuts by insisting that Iraq remained, hands down, the greater strategic danger to Israel than Iran. The idea was so ludicrous; I suspected that one of VJ’s in-house drones had spent the night clicking himself into terminal carpal tunnel syndrome to engineer a 98-to-2 percent vote favoring the dangers of the defunct remains of the Osiraq reactor, which now purportedly ply the Iraqi highways in rusty ’83 Winnebagos. This on their way (conceivably since during the First Persian Gulf War, the Iraqis handed over their entire air force to their former arch-enemies in Teheran) to the multi-billion-dollar underground facility where the pugnacious Persians now allegedly burn up the midnight strontium 90 in a bid to turn your Jewish state and mine into an obsidian skating rink. One where your intrepid bul-bul (Hebrew for hummingbird, children’s slang for penis) and mine will glow in the dark entirely unaided by battery-powered thrill-and-chill accoutrements. Ludicrous, that is, until it dawned on me, shortly after being fired on the Fourth of July without stated cause that indeed, as goes the VJ Poll, so goes the VJ CEO, Jess Dolgin. It was reported to me only last week at the Beverly Hilton by as recent a casualty of his callousness and calumny as the current president of the American Jewish Press Association, for instance, that the diminutive and rotund Mr. Dolgin almost never comports himself in a manner one would deem de rigueur for the scion of Simon A. Dolgin. A brilliant local rabbi, as rabbi of the Beth Jacob Congregation of Beverly Hills from 1939 to 1971 and as founder of the Hillel Hebrew Academy in 1949, the Chicago-born Simon Dolgin, a graduate of the Hebrew Theological College, reputedly stood among the greatest and most erudite Orthodox rabbis ever to grace Southern California – that is, before taking his wife Shirley and his children off to live in Jerusalem in 1971. Reading the combined works of the late Chaim Potok, you will probably discover that not every great rabbi’s son can be expected to fill his father’s shoes…nor even his dog-bitten slippers. And so we must temper justice here with kindness, and even empathy. It cannot have been easy not being the sharpest tool in the shed of a Gaon (a Jewish genius), although admittedly I can find no documentary evidence for Jess’s repeated contention that his father was in fact a Knesset member (he was, however, director general of the Ministry of Religious Affairs in Jerusalem from 1971 to 1976, and in 1978 became chairman of the World Mizrachi –Hapoel Hamizrachi Movement). Still, it takes a rare talent -- or at least a perverse nature – to emerge from the court of a revered Jerusalem rabbi to develop an unstinting ability to outsmart yourself in virtually every and any key personal and professional decision you will ever be called upon to make. Certainly in the year I spent working closely with the esteemed Mr. Dolgin to try to turn VJ (or so I mistakenly believed my mandate – his was to milk it dry) into a site worth visiting, Reb Dolgin Jr., to use the words of Abba Eban, rarely missed an opportunity to miss an opportunity. And the reason for that was that despite growing up with decidedly meager inner resources in any number of crucial cognitive areas, his own sense is that there was no bullshitting a bullshitter. And it that area alone, Jess deluded himself into thinking that he was “sans pareils.” There was nothing, he used to boast to me -- no connection, no deal, no one in within the “Frum,” or Orthodox community -- that he couldn’t gain access to simply by dropping his father’s good name. And no special reason, having gained that which he had set out to secure, to do other than use, abuse and ultimately discard those whose good will he had exploited and expended. His father, Jess told me, used to say it didn’t matter what other people might have to say about him -- this, apparently, because he scandalized some Orthodox Jerusalemites by being seen playing basketball when he should obviously have been studying Gomorrah -- only what he himself could say for himself. His mother Shirley, who apparently had his number cold, used to make jokes about the BMW he used to “shvitz” with whenever she came to town. “How many Jews,” she quipped, “were sewn into the upholstery?” Jess told me this wasn’t merely a reference to the Jews who had succumbed to the Holocaust. For his mother, that was hardly a matter for humor, although jokes of such unrelenting blackness are not unheard of, even among Holocaust survivors. Humor, after all, was a weapon in the war to preserve sanity. I thought, though, that she must be referring to the hapless souls Jess himself had figuratively driven over in pursuit of whatever hare-brained scheme motivated him at the time. In the Jewish business world, I proclaimed, he was the Halle Berry of hit and run. God forgive me, but I remember both of us laughing so hard at this we could barely walk off an elevator. I took the job with VJ at the behest of Rob Eshman, the gifted, brilliant and always empathetic editor of the Los Angeles Jewish Journal who, I am told, may be persuaded to become the very next President of the American Jewish Press Association. The job, alas, meant some $25 K less in annual salary than my last position of eight years as a science writer with Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC), and fewer perks than those afforded Hispanic sharecroppers during the Steinbeck era. Although sustained by a number of prominent Orthodox Jewish wine-makers and purveyors of kosher condiments, VJ’s job of Editor-in-Chief offered no pension or 401 K, no medical or dental insurance, no sick days of any length or kind, and no respite from the demands of a workweek during which 40 hours ostensibly represented a starting point for acknowledging you might have shown up, and light years from comprising an appropriate work schedule. To say that I had a bad feeling about signing on is to sound like a poor imitation of Harrison Ford in one of the “Star Wars” movies. But I had a sophomore in college and a freshman soon to join him, so my options, like those of so many of us, were limited. I did, however, take careful notes during the interview. And one of sticking points for me was yearly holiday. Having worked my way up to four weeks off per year after 15 or so years toiling on the local labor market, I insisted I had no intention of returning to a dismaying two weeks off. Jess explained that Virtual Jerusalem, which he had purchased in a moribund state, was not yet making money. Therefore, I would not be able to anticipate longer than two weeks of regular vacation time until such time as the business unit had slowed its burn rate to a tolerable state. I would be gratified to learn, however, that the employees (including a gaggle of Philipino techies), were all required to abide by Jewish holidays, no matter how obscure or whatever anyone’s personal predilections. The fact that most of these holidays seemed to take place on weekends during the early months of my sojourn merely added insult to injury. Indeed, while everyone else headed for home by one p.m each Friday to prepare to greet the Sabbath bride, my own responsibility in getting the voluminous Shabbat issue up and running often put me in serious arrears of company policy. Working on the Sabbath or any other Jewish holiday was a firing offense at VJ. But as long as I wasn’t blatant about it, informed Jess, he wouldn’t make any more of a Federal case of it than his and his employees’ constant pilfering of such badly needed software suites as Dreamweaver or Photoshop. Or of absconding with the intellectual property of various commercial content providers, which he obtained through pirated databases like Nexis-Lexis. Indeed, it wasn’t until he had been read the riot act apropos proper attribution that Jess was given permission, reluctantly, to reprint materiel from the Los Angeles Jewish Journal. Bad feelings burgeoned, alas, when I took an unpaid day of leave in early September to take my four-year-old to Disneyland. This was on a Friday. I had made sure on Thursday that my weekly newsletter went out, including the latest “Teitelbaum’s Take.” This one warned against the problematic alliance growing between American Jews, Israeli Hebrews and Fundamentalist American Christians who saw Jews as actors in a bloody-minded End-of-Days scenario that would result (with no small gusto in the florid descriptions they tendered) in the slaughter of two thirds of World Jewry and the conversion, forced or otherwise, of a third. Jess read the piece (or at least he said he did – more often than not, he said he couldn’t ready anything more demanding than the newspaper funnies, and frequently asked me if I would be affronting any of his maybe 15,000 readers weekly with my column, to which I replied that I certainly hoped so) and said nothing. The next day, however, complaints from two irate Christian readers came in to my mail, which it turned out, this being the modern American work place, he was actually reading, dyslexia or no. Unknown to me, that is, until Tuesday, when I rummaged through my own e-mail. Thence did I discovered that Jess had written an apology for the column, signed it as Sheldon Teitelbaum, VJ Editor-in-Chief, and sent it out to thousands of newsletter subscribers. To say that I was incensed is to say that Grieber Wormtongue was mildly annoyed by the sudden appearance of Aragorn and Gandalf at the Court of the King of Rohan in Tolkien’s “Twin Towers.” This creature, as I now began to think of him, this Gollum (the Tolkienesque one, not the Rebbe of Prague’s clay protector, despite their common lumpishness, inherent stupidity and soullessness) had absconded with a name I had spent 30 years imbuing with some modicum of value, integrity and meaning. Using that name without my knowledge or permission, he wrote a political apology-cum-rationalization entirely athwart of my own stated position and in nauseatingly servile deference to vociferous anti-Semites. In this fashion Dolgin made me a part and parcel of their anti-Semitism, hoping in the process to preserve the three or four readers who might otherwise be induced to remove themselves from that list. The idea that ANYTHING I wrote would eventually offend someone he refused to understand. And the idea that challenging someone’s preconceived notion might be doing the community a service, not a “shonda,” was something that gave him the willies. “Our readers are idiots,” he told me. “They want to read something that will make them feel good, not something, God forbid (about our running wars on the nonsense of hyphenating the word GOD in English, don’t get me started, save to say it drew more mail and argument than any other issue I broached for a full year) that may make them think.” Oy. Still, when I confronted Jess with his perfidious act, which I learned about going through my computer – the “yotz” had sent me an apology in my name too -- he denied the actions outright. That was followed by a partial admission, insofar, he said, that he had written out an apology in the name of the company, but had accidentally affixed my own name and title to the e-mail, and then clicked the wrong button. When I explained that this was not possible given he claimed a degree in computer science as well as law from Bar Ilan University in Tel Aviv, he came clean. He said that as CEO of Virtual Jerusalem, a subsidiary of E-Shops Enterprises, he had every right to do anything he wished for the good of the company, including impersonating me online. When I told him that I believed there were some possible criminal ramifications to his actions, and that I was inclined to pursue them in the appropriate forums, he apologized and, near-weeping, claimed he would never do anything like this again. With a child in college, I did not feel I had much recourse but to keep my eye on him henceforth with the eye of a Ringwraith. But the power of a web site – even one attracting a paltry 2000-or-so visitor a day -- was invidious and corrupting. Dolgin subsequently retracted his apology, returning to the contention that as CEO he could do anything he damned well saw fit. And if I didn’t like it, I could walk, forfeiting a week of severance and anything in the realm of a decent work reference. Meanwhile, he continued to blanket his employees with sheaves of Lesbian pornography created, he said, by his former graphics artist, who produced this stuff on the side to support a drug habit – that is, before she was arrested for stealing his fax machine. I asked him to spare me the deluge, as my 17-year-old daughter could well have been (well, no, she couldn’t, because quite apart from her beauty, she is brilliant, accomplished and both her parents would kill her) one of the poor depleted souls depicted in this depravity. Because Jess was determined to spend as little money on editorial content as possible – VJ was about filling holes and boxes, not winning writing awards (which has doubtless come as news to reporters since the early Hearst papers) -- he regularly resorted to questionable, if not illegal, practices to fill the ever voracious mandibles of his insatiable web site. Mostly this involved trolling for commercial copy and handing it over for me to emplace. Moreover, despite VJ’s oft-stated leaning to the Jewish and Israeli Far Right (and the endless lectures that it could never be my place to criticize government policy in Israel unless the government decided to turn territory, and especially settlements, over to a Palestinian entity, in which case there would be a civil war… and a reassessment of my own editorial line, should left wing reprobates like me survive it). How had we ascertained I was a left-wing reprobate? Because when I first asked for a raise, he showed me an e-mail from one of his partners saying that since I did not share their values, “and did not even hyphenate G-D,” I should in fact be sent packing. When I threatened suit in Rabbinic and Civil court for religious discrimination, mind you, I received, after my first three months, a full 20 percent raise. Within a week of starting the job, I decided to punch up the site with a humor section that would be anchored by the collected works of one of my best friends and former roomie while we both worked at the Jerusalem Post, Sam Orbaum. Sam had graciously handed over the reprint rights gratis, in return for which VJ agreed to build him his own web site. Week by week and month by month I pushed Jess to get his designers moving on the humor section (never mind Sam’s own site). And week by week and month by month Jess procrastinated, meanwhile lecturing me daily on the pressing need to beef up content. It was my job, he said, to “scavenge” and grab what I could, legally or otherwise, which I repeatedly refused to do. “The Hebrews will make no bricks without the appropriate straw,” I decreed in one of my frequent e-mails, designed to torture him because of his near-inability to read. “Why don’t you stop trolling your chat rooms for young kids and just finish the Orbaum site?” One Monday morning in January, I get an e-mail from Tom Tugend, the Post’s longtime L.A. correspondent and my first-ever friend in L.A. “Terrible news. Sam died.” I had known that Sam’s lymphoma had gone out of remission, and that he was awaiting a marrow transplant at Hadassah. What I didn’t know, and what his former wife Wendy Elliman later told me, was that he had contracted an infection after the chemo designed to kill off his existing marrow, and after several God-awful days, he died. I let out a wail. Jess ran into my office asking what was wrong. “Sam Orbaum died over the weekend,” I replied. Dolgin broke out into a beaming grin, and then began to giggle and cavort around the office like a demented monkey on a stick. “A Jew just died and you’re laughing?” I said. “Don’t you understand – now we’re off the hook?” “What you don’t understand, you loathsome toad-eating piece of shit,” I replied, “was that he was my best friend. Now get the fuck out of my office before I throw you out!” Jess blanched, and left. Later, he came back to apologize. “I never realized he was your best friend,” he pleaded. “No excuse Dolgin – you have the “menschlichtkeit” of a hydrocephalic troll. From now on you want to talk to me, talk business. None of this huggy-bear kissy face shit of yours. We are not friends. We will never be friends. Schnell!” “You can’t say that to me,” he replied. “If we’re not friends you can’t work here.” “Show me where it says that in the labor code. Meanwhile, stop being a little girl and let me do my work. Nebbish.” Subsequently, I paid Jess’s minor tantrums and fits of giddy goose-stepping scant regard, since he regularly deflated like a puffed up toad whenever confronted, and since it was usually easier to run rings around him with a concept he had never heard of, notably irony. It helped as well, alas, that Mr. Dolgin, whose entrance to Bar Ilan Law, if it ever happened (the Law School refuses to confirm or deny his attendance or graduation), could not have been a mean feat given, by his own admission, an abysmal performance in high school and almost endemic inability to read and comprehend English (and perhaps even Modern Hebrew). I suspected his father’s the so-called Knesset Member had administered a dose of Vitamin P – Proteksia -- which given the lack of berths in all Israeli law schools, the Great Dershowitz himself probably couldn’t have gotten into without friends in high places. Maybe being a prominent Jerusalem Rabbi was enough in an Orthodox redoubt like Bar Ilan, whose law school included the assassin of Yitzhak Rabin, Yigal Amir. Ironically, Jess claims to be fluent in Aramaic. This makes him Mel Gibson’s loss, as he would have made one heck of a Pharisee in the “Passion,” never mind seeming to embody nearly every anti-Jewish calumny and canard contained in the lexicon of Mel’s spiritual sources, the Spanish nun Mary of Agreda and the German sister Anne Emmerich. It did not render him fit for a job in a dotcom killing fields. To my endless amusement, Mr. Dolgin relied almost exclusively upon the Left Wing Haaretz Israeli newspaper for VJ’s daily news supply. These items initially cost him a pittance, if anything at all, in their English translation. This and the Jewish Journal, which despite endless Brandeis University press awards for excellence (three of them awarded to this writer, one as recently as last year, I hesitate to mention except I need a job now), has traditionally and profoundly been reviled by elements within the Orthodox Jewish community of Los Angeles. That community, alas, considers the roughly 600,000 majority Conservative, Reform and unaffiliated Jewish presence in Los Angeles as quite beyond the Pale. Moreover, it often resents any genuine journalistic scrutiny of its own community organizations and institutions. This did not stop the young Reb Dolgin, however, then as now, from filling his Friday issue with sufficient Jewish Journal freebies to wrap enough virtual gefilte fish to feed the entire Falashmura population en route to Israel for an entire year. That is, if they don’t burn down the dining room after being asked to ingest what my Iraqi mother-in-law disparagingly refers to as “sugar fish.” Unfortunately, there is a Jewish proverb that states that the fish always begins to stink at the head. My own wife recalls having had a rather vociferous argument with me about accepting two weeks in annual vacation like some “friar” (Hebrew for sucker, a term far more egregious to any self-respecting Israeli than anything I can think of using in a ritualized dissing match with an African-American). Some months later, when I announced I would be taking a family visit to Canada on behalf of the LA Times Travel section. Jess informed me that there was actually no California law requiring him to provide me with any paid vacation time of any amount. And even if there were, he had never agreed during our work interview or at any other time to give me even a day’s paid vacation. Demurring at his memory and offering to provide my voluminous job interview notes proving otherwise, I implied that sticking to this line would render Mr. Dolgin, in my book, an outright liar, reprobate and sleazebag who could only bring opprobrium upon his long-suffering father by this behavior. Jess told me to leave his father out of it. I suggested in turn that I couldn’t do that since the lamentable Gaon was badly reflected upon by every lie and perfidy performed in his and the family name. Unknown to me at the time, Mr. Dolgin was calling my wife at home shortly before the entrance of the Sabbath. In warmly conversational Hebrew, he asked her if, as an R.N. at Kaiser, she made more money than I did. My wife is quite naïve. And Israelis are always comfortable asking each other what they make, mainly because in the Israel of yesteryear, so few of them made enough to speak of, so even minor differences were worthy of conversation. Unsuspecting any trickery, Lilith answered him. Had I known he was up to this, I would have hit him with a hockey stick. Jess’s reason for asking? Apparently he now felt empowered to practice psychotherapy without a license, even as he insists in California, where the only bar he’s likely to see will be in a prison cell, that he is a lawyer. My outrage at being financially outstripped by my wife, he told her, was probably the reason I was making such an unseemly issue over vacation pay. My wife informed him that she recalled the discussion of the loathsome two weeks salary offer as if it were yesterday. Dolgin promptly hung up on her (later informing me “she was a nice lady” and “ever so forthcoming.” I promptly informed Mr. Dolgin I would be taking him to the Labor Board for unseemly practices, and that if he spoke again to my wife or children about anything comparably outré, I would use him as a hockey puck. Jess responded to my outrage by throwing in a “free” week of vacation, if for no other reason, he said, than not to be known as a sleaze. I told him it wouldn’t help but I’d take the money anyway. Intending to renegotiate my work agreement due to the worsening of a 25-year battle with Cluster headaches -- a genetically inherited neurological disorder that is to migraine what Beluga Caviar is to fish eggs-- I informed him I would no longer being driving 75 miles from Agoura Hills to Mid-Wilshire every day for no good reason. I would henceforth maintain the site from my state-of-the-art home office, since the drives back and forth were becoming dangerous. There were moments spent at the side of the 101 or along Highland when I was, for all intents and purposes, blind. I had no need to interact with anyone at his office, I told him. I possessed years of successful corporate experience telecommuting. Indeed, I had delivered corporate seminars on the subject nationwide. Jess said that despite the fact that I used software in England to manage a site in LA intended for Israelis using servers in Las Vegas, his partners required a warm body chained to a desk so they might have the sense they were getting their ha’penny’s worth. I retorted that soon they might well find themselves instead with a cold body chained to the table. In any event, my headache specialist -- a researcher of world renown who had treated me for 21 years -- could place me on permanent disability the next morning. This would make Jess’s attempts to refill my job legally difficult for six months, possibly longer. Indeed, my physician and I had already discussed me coming in the next day with the requisite paperwork. At that point, Dolgin asked me to consider working at home for a week and see how things went. I refused. A week would make no difference to my condition or decision one way or another. I was able to juggle my daily duties at home despite levels of pain certified by the AMA as worse than abnormal child birth, and only slightly more tolerable than terminal spinal cancer. I could not continue working 9-5 in an office. He succumbed. Indeed, he asked me to cut a contract changing my status into that of a subcontractor. We went back and forth on that contract for months. He subsequently reneged, announcing that “things were up in the air with the partners.” Whenever Jess had to announce an unpleasant decision, it was always the partners who were responsible. On those few occasions there might be good news in the offing, however, Jess was quick to point out that he alone among the partners possessed two votes on all decisions, and was therefore, as he put it, “da Man”. Yet our relationship subsequently worked better than it ever had for the next three months. Partly this was because I was spared the added stress and nausea of dealing with his physical presence, which had become insufferable. Indeed, I insisted he e-mail me rather than call when possible, since we invariably disagreed on what had been agreed to afterward. Failing that, I said, I would be sending him a memo after every call recapping what had been determined. “Your failure to correct my version of events within six hours will stand as automatic substantiation of what was agreed upon,” I declared.” For his own benefit, moreover, I had responded to yet another budgetary cut for editorial material by staying up late each night translating articles from the Hebrew and Arabic press (I learned Arabic in the Israeli Army, “inal dinak!”) and reporting on their contents as news, a legal though time-consuming endeavor. I figured if I could demonstrate I had brought some new value to the table, I could make a better case for my annual raise, which was coming up at the end of the week. This weekend, alas, when I objected to being called early in the morning on the Fourth of July to be harangued on a purely personal matter he had initially asked to be kept out of the loop on, the sunufabitch apologized…and then fired me. Jess said that he resented the fact that I had taken his friend, the editor of an absolutely first rate web site called Debka, to task for refusing to answer my own emails about a book-indexing job both had asked me to undertake in my free time a month earlier. Book-indexing, I would learn to my great fascination, is a thought-and labor-intensive endeavor requiring close and intimate collaboration between client and contractor. More ironically, it is one that has not become appreciably easier with the advent of computers. Without involving a Yiddisher “kopf,” or any other varient, in the process, it was the quintessential example of garbage in, garbage out. During five weeks researching the subject on my own dime with out-of-print books, discussions and emails with members of the American Society of Indexers, and appropriated mastery of the software I’d need with an available demo called Cindex, I sent in weekly e-mails to my prospective client reporting what I had learned and presenting options for future approaches. The fellow, Giora, refused to acknowledge a single e-mail, though he told Jess he indeed received them. I responded at the end of the five weeks by begging out of the project in an e-mail. I no longer had good feeling about this fellow by then, however admirable his site, and even less about Jess. I don’t know if the friend of my enemy is indeed my enemy, but Giora’s apparent disdain in not sending me the most perfunctory e-mail indicated he might be another in a line of Jess-like jerks). I told him I was doubling my fee and wanted the $750 I would need for the indexing software up front. In essence, of course, we both knew I was simply backing out of the project (not that there was much to back out from since we hadn’t exchanged tete-a-tete discussions on the matter so much as once). As a result of this – and notwithstanding his apology for being out of line on the question of my dealings with Debka -- Jess chose the occasion of one of the few national holidays he had to pay me for to indicate he that he was firing me. Since the Giora business could no longer serve as a causus beli for firing me, he claimed, instead, that “ our relationship has never been ideal.” “What relationship is?” I asked. “Isn’t the issue, especially since we never see each other anyway, supposed to be performance? Doesn’t your head programmer live in Vegas? And your content management system guru in England? Are your relationships ideal? For that matter – and I ask this only because I’ve watched you closely for a year – have you ever had an ideal, or even a satisfactory, relationship with anyone?” “Well, there’s also this headache thing,” he said. “That has only rarely stopped me from fulfilling my duties,” I said, actually having just come off three nights in hospital on I.V. drips, as Jess well knew, in an attempt to abort the latest spate of headaches with some newfangled drug cocktail. Indeed, I had rarely let the clusters get in the way of my completion and updating of the site, although truth to tell they had been coming fast and furious in the previous two weeks, sacking my energy and sometimes, I felt, my will to live. Yet there are aborting agents that can sometimes postpone to worst of some attacks until later in the day, allowing me to maneuver around them in a sufficiently timely fashion (since the site must be updated by noon Pacific Time each day, doing it the previous night was actually a boon, news-wise). And believe it or not, I can write lucidly on amounts of morphine that would make an elephant want to try on a too-too. Yet there he was on line, this pusillanimous pudknocker, engaging in paroxysms of unutterable abuse over a matter he had asked me to keep private between me and his friend and client. I dispatched an e-mail to Jess lamenting his tantrum and another of explanation to his friend, which I had not yet sent when I received the call. Jess said he forbade me to write or otherwise convey any secrets, information or protected information to this fellow or anyone else at all involved in his companies E-Shops and Virtual Jerusalem because I was contractually bound to keep a lid on privileged information. I demurred, telling him I knew he and his lawyers, such as they might or might not be, were lying through their mangy teeth. Having never signed an agreement of confidentiality nor engaged in any kind of proprietary research or production, I remain a free agent with full First Amendment Rights. Secondly, in the face of wrongdoing or illegality, I was compelled to speak out. And thirdly, as a working journalist, I am bound first by my own sense of decency – my “Derekh Eretz” -- and secondly by the libel laws of this country. But rather than fire me for standing up for my First Amendment Rights or because, as he indicated, I had demanded a year’s end raise for the extra work I was putting in, it might have occurred to Mr. Dolgin that if he no longer wished to work with me for whatever reason, he could have asked me what it would cost to secure a confidentiality and/or non-compete agreement, and hence decide if that was something he wished to pay in lieu or severance. Alas, Mr. Dolgin is, above all things, a miser. He reiterated his ridiculous offer of a month’s severance. As I mentioned earlier, Dolgin’s ability to make the wrong decision in almost every instance involving right, wrong and his own personal wellbeing, is simply uncanny. It is especially pointed, for some reason I cannot fathom, since he has never got away with the slightest fast one in my regard. My own sense while pursuing a permanent state of disability for these cluster headaches, suffered since joining the Israeli paratroopers but abided through six long years of service and three decades of ensuing hell on Earth, is that I am now going to sue Mr. Dolgin for various forms of harassment the courts can consider, including religious discrimination in Rabbinical and Civil court, denial of contractual obligations wrongful termination and, best of all, criminal forgery. Meanwhile, I am taking time from my current book on the history of the Israeli Submarine force, called “Force Leviathan” to return to Israel for some research intended to discern precisely how this withered and diseased apple fell so very far from such an upstanding tree. Because as I have explained to Mr. Dolgin any number of times in a manner he has construed as an outright threat, legal battles are dry, boring and entirely too common in this country. But a Damon Runyanesque story that can be developed and expanded into, God willing, a thing of art – that’s a gem of rare quality and one I intend to cut and polish lawsuit or no lawsuit. Also meanwhile, I am repeating my longstanding offer to Jess that I buy him a copy of the AP Style and Libel Guide. This is because the last time we discussed my memoirs, he said that the laws in this country were such that all he had to do was bring suit for libel and it would be incumbent upon me to prove myself innocent. My retort that while perhaps true in Israel or even my native Quebec, this is baseless blather in the United States, where truth is an absolute defense against libel of a public figure, and where malice, which must be established in the absence of truth, has nothing to do with the fact that my gorge rises every time I look at the malodorous wretch. Indeed, it has to do with whether one makes reasonable efforts to verify facts when one is unsure of them. In this instance, Mr. Dolgin declined to respond to a registered letter offering him an opportunity to go over the article to that he might respond to any contentions he disagreed with or to offer his own version of events. He declined to respond as well to a subsequent email repeating the offer. A copy of the piece sent to his father in Jerusalem via registered mail for the purpose of fact-checking also failed to elicit a response. Under these circumstances, he forfeits any and all possible claims of malice, thus rendering any potential charge of libel insupportable. Meanwhile, in deference to the Napoleonic code I grew up under in Quebec, where one is indeed somehow presumed guilty until innocence can be established, I shall begin practicing La Marseilles. As if one Napoleon weren’t enough to deal with. Dash it all -- Where’s Horatio Hornblower when you need the scurvy swab? The Mote In Ellison's Eye Sheldon Teitelbaum responds to my inquiry on his relationship with Harlan Ellison, the science fiction writer: Apropos Ellison, this letter to Aharon Hauptman, former editor of the Israeli SF magazine Fantazia 2000, now with Tel Aviv University, in response to Ellison's mention of me in his just published I Robot adaptation, and Aharon's query as to what was going on c/o the Israeli SF Association web site. If you run it, say it is reprinted from the Israeli site.
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