Jewish Post, Indianapolis, Marion County, 22 May 2002 — Page 8

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NAT 4 Mav 22. 2002

Obituaries

Dr. Paul Friedman, 87, of AJCommittee

PHILADELPHIA — Dr. Paul Friedman, who retired only last year after a lengthy career in radiology, died at the age of 87. He was a past president of the Philadelphia Chapter of the Ameri-

can Jewish Committee and had been a member of its national executive committee. He served on the boards of the Jewish Community Relations Council and Dropsie College.

Dr. Harry Karpeles, 83, of Temple University

PHILADELPHIA — Dr. Harry Karpeles, long time member of the faculty of Temple University who had served previously on the staffs of the Jewish Commu-

nity Centers in Boston and Toledo, died at age 83. From 1963 to 1966 he was a member of the Planning Department of the Jewish Federation of Greater Philadelphia.

Rose Ellis Matzkin, headed Hadassah

WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. — Rose Ellis Matzkin, national president of Hadassah from 1972 to 1976, died at the age of 88. The daughter of Louis and Jennie Cohen, she attended New Haven State Teachers College and taught school for a time and went on to hold a number of posts in Hadassah and in other Zionist organizations.

Rose Matzkin

Sharon L. Monsky battled scleroderma

SANTA BARBARA, Ca. — Sharon L. Monsky, who founded the Scleroderma Research Foundation in 1987 after suffering from the disease, died at the age of 48. She was its chairman and chief executive until she died.

She was a leading figure skater as a teenager and had a master's degree in business administration and had become a highly regarded management consultant with McKinsey & Co.

Miriam O. Smith aided young moms

CINCINNATTI — Miriam O. Smith, who served on the professional staff of the Jewish Family Service, died at age 86 of complications after being struck by a vehicle. She was a founding member of SUMA, Services for Unmarried Mothers and Adolescents, serving as president and receiving its Distin-

guished Volunteer Service Award. Other awards include Outstanding Service in Promoting Human Relations by the Greater Cincinnati Region of the National Conference of Christians and Jews as also in 1999 the Great Rivers Girl Scout Council as Woman of Distinction.

Joseph L. Steiner, 95, headed toy company CINCINNATI — Joseph L. age of 95. One of the firm's Steiner, co-founder of a com- products, the Bubble Rocket, pany that made toys, died at the sold over a million units.

Media Watch ‘The education of Max Bickford’

By RABBI ELLIOT B. GERTEL The producers and writing staff of CBS's The Education of Max Bickford chose as this

season's concluding episode (and perhaps the last episode of the series) a telling scenario: Professor Bickford (Richard Dreyfuss) and his sister face the announcement by their father (Eli Wallach) that the latter intends to marry a "shiksa." When Bickford is guessing as to the nature of Dad's pending announcement, he points out that Dad is 84 years old and has terminal cancer. He therefore wonders aloud how earthshaking Dad's declaration can be. Sensing that he has indeed shocked the family. Dad admonishes them, "She's a shiksa. She doesn't know from arguing." But the lady, Pat (Anne Jackson), has a mind.— and mouth — of her own: "O, the Irish can get pretty loud." "Yea, after a few snorts," jokes Dad, playing with more than one stereotype. Max's psychologist sister, Sharon (Tovah Feldshuh), who flew in from the West Coast, can only say of her father, "He's meshugah." Max gets the

standard TV line regarding interfaith marriage, "He looks happy." Yet even Max is upset when, having asked of the wedding, "Where will it be, Temple Emanu-El?," he is told: "St. Bartholomew's." The Irish bride-to-be explains that her first husband was Lutheran and insisted on a minister, and that she attributes the childless marriage to her failure to secure the good offices of a priest. (If, by the way, the reference is to Temple Emanu-El in Manhattan, the writers should note that New York's St. Bartholomew is an Episcopalian church.) Max obviously does not feel he can argue too much with Dad because he, too, married a Catholic woman, though his wife later converted. So the banter comes down to two issues. The first is the psychologist sister's resentment that her father treats Pat "better" than he treated her mother. She and Max soon agree, however, that the sister has been "thoughtless, stupid, narrowminded." In the end, the sister is totally humbled when Pat tells her that she and Dad met at a support group for cancer patients and that it is likely that Pat may die first. Writer Joe Cacaci tells us that the couple met tango dancing. In a burst of oedipal rivalry. Max tries to master tango dancing from his yoga teacher. This breaks the ice

sufficiently so Max and Dad can playfully join in meditation exercises at the end, using both Buddhist and Yiddish ("oy yoy yoy") mantras. The sad thing is that all this trite dialogue has a paradigm or two in literature and film. What we have here is Abie's Irish Rose meets Tuesdays with Morrie. The only hope is that even the writer and actors don't seem to take this tripe seriously. Morrie's pious (and selfrighteous) replacement of Yiddish piety with New Age jargon is replaced here by an "oy" and a wink. Even the cancer theme is presented as already tired. Here is another TV exercise in depicting Jewish elders as having no loyalties or sanctities in the face of aging and illness. There just seem to be more precedents in film and literature to justify the theme and the characterizations. But 1 would suggest that the writer and all the staff consider for next season (if there is a next season) that in the same episode in which the Jewish grandfather abandoned the commitments of youth, a visiting Harvard professor with a British accent (Peter O'Toole), also a venerable elder, chose to return to his early bearings. Go explain it. Rabbi Elliot Certel is the author of "What Jews Know about Salvation," Eakin Press, Austin (www.eakinpress.com, 1-800-880-8642).

A new era is here!