By Manny Frishberg, JTNews Correspondent
Now that it has all been settled, all sides appear ready to call overblown the charges of “snubs” and “censorship” that catapulted the issue of whether Leonard Nimoy would speak at a Jewish Federation of Greater Seattle dinner into the national spotlight.
The issue, which was discussed in newspapers across the country, was fodder for a spot on “Saturday Night Live’s” Weekend Update. But before late-night TV viewers were scratching their heads about the situation in Seattle’s Jewish community, the issue had already been resolved through a partnership between the Jewish Federation, Temple Beth Am and Tree of Life Judaica & Books.
Leonard Nimoy moved his show from downtown to Seattle’s Northend. Instead of being the featured guest at the Jewish Federation’s Community Campaign Dinner on Wednesday, the 72-year-old actor-director-artist-photographer and author (whose poetry collections include I Am Spock and I Am Not Spock) was scheduled for a Thursday night appearance at Temple Beth Am. The appearance, part of his nationwide book tour for Shekhina, was designed to includes a slide-show of images from the book, which Nimoy has described as his “intensely personal photographic inquiry into the feminine manifestation of God” (“shekhina” in Hebrew). The free event was arranged after Nimoy was replaced at the federation event.
In his place, the federation, which voiced concerns that Nimoy’s presentation would not be appropriate for their most important fundraising dinner, scheduled satirist Al Franken, whose political and social observations are almost certain to offend someone.
“I sympathize — it’s like trying to hold the Knesset together,” the now mollified Nimoy told the Jewish Daily Forward. “Of course, that’s their issue. They have to decide for themselves what they are comfortable presenting to their audience.”
Barry Goren, the executive vice president of the Jewish Federation of Seattle, said the origins of the affair date back to the early summer, when they were beginning to plan for their annual fall fundraising dinner. As they usually do, the organizers began looking for a guest speaker who could attract an audience and settled on Leonard Nimoy.
“We invited him to give a speech called ‘My Jewish Journey.’ When you deal with speakers’ bureaus,” Goren explained, “they usually have the person’s bio and they have a list of topics that they speak on. We selected the topic of ‘My Jewish Journey’ because this is a speech that Nimoy has given in Jewish Federation settings over the years quite successfully.” At the time, Shekina was still being readied for press and Goren said they did not know what the book was about or what was being included in it.
“All we knew,” said Goren, “was that he had a book coming out and we agreed to offer the book for sale and to have a signing after the speech.” When the book was released Goren said, “We saw that it clearly was not going to be everybody’s cup of tea.” He said only then did their discussions with Nimoy’s pubicist lead them to understanding that he intended not only to talk about the subject of the book — including the relationship between Jewish spirituality and sexuality, but that he had slides of photographs from the book which he intended to show as part of the presentation.
“It was pretty clear to me that they did not want me showing slides that would make clear what the book was about,” Nimoy was quoted as saying by the Forward. “They refused to allow anything that suggested a feminine position of divinity. They picked slides of vague, ambiguous, clouded, obscured, mostly veiled women — ones that came pretty close to hiding the feminine aspect.” Nimoy was not available to talk directly with The Jewish Transcript and his pubicist responded to a set of written questions by referring to his previously published comments.
While Nimoy has characterized the issue as one of censorship in interviews with a variety of news sources, Goren spoke of it as an unfortunate miscommunication.
“One of the things we learned from this experience is when you’re not dealing directly with the talented person, but with his representative, then you sometimes have misunderstandings and communications breakdowns,” Goren said. In a series of conversations with Nimoy himself, which Goren described as “nice” and “businesslike” the actor and artist made it clear that his focus was the new work.
“That’s what he cares about. It’s perfectly understandable, but that’s not why we invited him here,” Goren said. “We didn’t invite him for our Jewish Book Month, this was our major fundraiser for the year. The photos of nude and semi-nude models draped with sacred Jewish objects, tallises and tefillin, was not appropriate for our fundraising event. We were concerned that some of our donors would be highly offended.”
Michele Yanow, owner of the Tree of Life Judaica bookstore, said she had originally planned to provide the books for sale at the Federation dinner and when the problems erupted, Nimoy’s publicists suggested they arrange for a book signing at the store instead.
“When she checked with Mr. Nimoy, he really wanted to give his whole slide presentation and the talk and we just couldn’t accommodate that in our store facility,” Yanow said.
At the same time, Rabbi Jonathan Singer, having heard what had happened, got in contact with the federation with the idea of offering Temple Beth Am as an alternate location for Nimoy’s talk.
“This only came about because I contacted Barry Goren’s office and offered to do a co-sponsorship of the event. Before I knew it, there was a call from Tree of Life. The federation had put them in touch with us to go ahead and do this,” Singer explained
“We wanted to make sure that Seattle is open to sharing work that’s compelling and interesting and sometimes challenging,” said Singer. “But I understand why the federation could not host it for a dinner that would be inclusive of all groups.”
“So,” said Yanow, “it’s the Tree of Life and Temple Beth Am cosponsoring this.”
Asked about the book and the controvery it has engendered, Yanow referred to TV satirist John Stewart’s comment that “If you’re making art that doesn’t offend anybody, then it’s probably pretty boring art.”
“Certainly there are going to be plenty of people who are going to be offended by the idea that there’s a nude woman wearing a tefillin and wearing a tallis,” she said “and by the way he’s depicting the intersection of sexuality and spirituality.
“This depiction, to me, doesn’t represent God in a visual way any better than Michelangelo’s old guy with the grey beard. But he’s a Jewish artist and this is the way he’s expressing his view of Jewish spirituality and he has a right to do that. Maybe it will speak to somebody else on that subject.
“For me,” she added, “any depiction of the Devine, any aspect of God in pictorial human form, doesn’t quite get my conception of what that’s about. I guess that’s why we have a commandment about that.”
Singer said the free event had already become one of the hottest tickets in town, a week before Nimoy’s arrival.
“We told our synagogue that we would hold 100 tickets for our members — there are already 30 people on line here,” he said. “And they’re all Jews I know.”