Can Jew believe it?
An exhibit reveals the secret lives of Elizabeth Taylor and Marilyn Monroe — converts to Judaism
IF you’ve never seen Marilyn Monroe’s menorah — or heard Elizabeth Taylor softly recite the Jewish prayer, the Shema, in Hebrew — what are you waiting for?
Just unveiled at the Jewish Museum is a small but absorbing show, “Becoming Jewish.” Subtitled “Warhol’s Liz and Marilyn,” it might as well be called “Who knew?” As in, “Who knew two of Hollywood’s greatest goddesses quietly converted to Judaism?”
Apparently, even those affiliated with the museum were surprised. After the rousing success of 2008’s “Warhol’s Jews” show, says curator Joanna Montoya Robotham, the museum was eager to dig deeper into Warhol-ia, struck by the private lives of his favorite muses.
Ofthe two, Taylor’s leap of faith was more widely known, if only because she lived long enough to support the causes close to her heart.
She converted to Judaism at 27, after her husband, director Mike Todd, was killed in a plane crash. Todd was Jewish — a rabbi’s son, in fact — and though he hadn’t urged her to join him at Hollywood’s Temple Israel, she reached out to its rabbi, Max Nussbaum, for guidance in the devastating days after Todd’s death.
For months she studied the Hebrew Bible, history and philosophy, taking the Hebrew name Elisheba Rachel, which, come to think of it, would have looked nifty on a marquee for her 1963 epic, “Cleopatra.” In 1959 — on the eve of her marriage to Eddie Fisher, who also happened to be Jewish — she committed herself to her new faith.
“I feel as if I have been a Jew all my life,” declared the violet-eyed star, who celebrated by buying $100,000 worth of Israel bonds. Photos from the exhibit show her with various husbands, including Richard Burton, who joined her on a jaunt to Jerusalem.
Monroe’s conversion was far quieter Though Warhol’s prints show a heavily made-up movie star — all violently colored lips and eyelids — in these images she seems girlish, and positively giddy with love for Arthur Miller.
It wasn’t the “Death of a Salesman” playwright who encouraged her to convert before they married, curator Robotham says, but the 30-year-old Monroe’s yearning for closeness. “I think Marilyn had great affection for Miller’s family . . . and she wanted to be part of that family,” curator Robotham says.
On display here is the battered-looking brass menorah found among Monroe’s possessions when she died in 1962, at 36. (We’re told there’s a music box at its base that plays the Israeli national anthem, “Hatikvah.”) There’s also a snippet of video from her 1956 wedding to Miller in Katonah, NY, where she lowers and raises a veil over her beaming face.
The man who married them and converted her was Rabbi Robert Goldberg, of Connecticut’s Congregation Mishkan Israel. Several years after Monroe’s death, he wrote to a colleague about her — letters Robotham tracked down and displays here.
They confirm just about everything you suspected about a woman of whom much was written, but little known.
“Most of what has been written about her is at best half-truths,” Goldberg wrote a colleague six years after Monroe’s death, which he believed was an accident, not a suicide. “She often identified with the ‘underdog,’ and at the same time had an enormous respect and admiration for intellectuals.”
No wonder she embraced a tradition that remains, against all odds and obstacles, as hopeful as she was.
“Becoming Jewish: Warhol’s Liz and Marilyn” runs from Sept. 25 to Feb. 7 at the Jewish Museum, 1109 Fifth Ave., at 92nd St.; thejewishmuseum.org