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August 15, 2003/Av 17 5763, Vol. 55, No. 51
L.A. Jews don't back Schwarzenegger
TOM TUGEND
Jewish Telegraphic Agency
LOS ANGELES - "The recall election is a circus and Arnold Schwarzenegger is expected to hold up the tent," says Saul Turteltaub, a veteran television sitcom writer and producer.
Turteltaub knows Schwar-zenegger socially and thinks he is a nice guy and sincere person, but that doesn't mean he'll vote for the movie action hero for governor of California.
Like the TV writer, most Los Angeles Jews to offer public comment on the issue seem tepid about both the election and Schwarzenegger's bid as a Republican candidate.
That's partially because "Ahnold," as he is universally addressed, hasn't laid out any political agenda for tackling the state's horrendous fiscal problems, and because the vast majority of California Jews are Democrats.
Two aspects of Schwar-zenegger's past may give Jews pause. One is the fact that the father of the Austrian-born actor was a member of the Nazi Party and served in the German army during World War II.
The second is the somewhat murky relationship of "The Terminator" with Kurt Waldheim, the former U.N. secretary-general.
Rabbi Marvin Hier, founder and dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, recalls that in the mid-1980s, Schwarzenegger became an active member and patron of the center, and later its Museum of Tolerance.
"In 1990, Arnold came to see me and said he was troubled because he really knew so little about his father," Hier says. "He asked us to use our researchers and resources to track down his father's past."
The search showed that Gustav Schwarzenegger, a small-town Austrian police official, tried to join the Nazi Party in 1938, immediately after the Anschluss, but was not formally inducted into the party until 1941.
The actor's relationship with Waldheim, who was barred from entering the United States because of his World War II record as a Nazi intelligence officer in the occupied Balkans, has been controversial.
It seems clear that Schwarzenegger toasted the then-Austrian president, in absentia, when the actor married Maria Shriver in 1986, and he was later apparently photographed with Waldheim. But Hier puts this down more to political naivete than to ideological leanings.
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