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Show Joel Shapiro 5/ 26 / 82 tp 1 pg 14 L Now, if you were a painter, for a moment put yourself back there, and paint me a picture of a typical Montefiore pers on from a B' Kaie Israe l point of view. What would I be looking at? vfhat kind ••• JS Well, it would be a terribly bias picture . It would be a picture of a person who believes that he's come a long way, and is an integrated person, or on the way to being. And that he lives well in a contemporary scene , and his :t.'nglish is .•• accent free as possible , and he pictures this other person as being someone whose hands wave when he talks, whose inflections of speech quickly identify him as a foreigner, whose religious practices are not only not understood, but seem out of touch with the times. It would be with (a) disrespectful view, as we would think of it today. It would show lack of respect for a person as a person. It would show lack of respect for cultural and religious heritage, which, no doubt, accounts for, in the end, the return to interests as you've seen it happen in the 50's and 60's. I thinks as kids grew up, they, as those children and people matured, from that period they began to understand that the views they had, from which ever side they came ••• because from the other direction they were just as the .•• END SIDE ONE JS ••• this other person as being high and mighty, as being aloof, as someone trying to separate himself from the Jewish tradition, as people 'kowtowing' to the gentile . I'm sure it had those elements, kinds of elements. L In terms of B'Naie Israel, would it be fair to say that they were modelling themselves after what the Mormons appeared to be? JS Well, I think I've suggested whether they've modelled themselves after Mormons, or modelled themselves after what they deemed to be the successful characteristics of a mobile, well accepted American citizen. Obviously . the Mormon impact had something to do with it. 1 I mean the image of the time. JS Yeah, of course. The clearest difference to point it out would be the attitude of parents toward their children in school. We still have, at this time ••• it's still possible for a kid, a grade school |
