Feeling the Effects of Internal Conflict

Everybody likes to watch a good scuffle, but never more so than when it falls into the Cain-and-Abel category.

To a Lakers fan like me, the team’s playoff run has been thrilling. Yet it was the Shaq versus Kobe soap opera of a few seasons ago that proved particularly, and perversely, captivating. When former Walt Disney Co. CEO Michael Eisner sparred with Pixar’s Steve Jobs, it was compelling theater. But it wasn’t nearly as entertaining as when Eisner turned on his own--Jeffrey Katzenberg and Michael Ovitz.

Such was my mind-set before I read Peter Savodnik’s account of growing tensions between Latinos and Jews in California’s Democratic Party (“A Party Divided?” page 20). But rather than be amused by this story, I was left saddened.

Some suggest that “ethnicity defines the parameters of our politics,” Savodnik writes. “According to this view, the Democrats who live in Brentwood and Pacific Palisades and give lavishly to the Democratic National Committee cannot grasp what it means to think like a Latino--not one of their gardeners or housekeepers but a family man who fears God, struggles to feed his children and loves his adopted homeland.”

In many ways, strains are inevitable between the old, liberal Jewish wing of the party and newer immigrants, who tend to be relatively conservative “on social issues like gender roles, divorce, abortion and homosexuality,” as Peter Schrag notes in his just-published book “California: America’s High-Stakes Experiment.”

Nonetheless, there are those of us who, like Judge Harry Pregerson in Savodnik’s story, are “looking for harmony.” The 82-year-old wistfully recalls when different groups in East L.A. mingled easily, with “Jews marrying Latinos and Latinos discovering their Sephardic roots.”

And so I set out in search of the ultimate expression of Jewish-Latino amity. My first impulse was to visit the Breed Street Shul, the Boyle Heights synagogue that is being refurbished in a bid to preserve its Jewish past as well as to provide its Latino neighbors with a new multipurpose center. “It’s definitely viewed as a touchstone for both communities,” says Steve Sass, president of the Jewish Historical Society of Southern California, which is spearheading the renovation.

Then I got another idea: I’d down a pastrami burrito.

My destination was Oki-Dog, a ramshackle joint on Fairfax Avenue where this gastronomic symbol of unity goes for $6. A pastrami burrito virgin, I was a little nervous. One restaurant review, after all, had described this melange as “a foil-wrapped grease bomb the size and weight of a building brick.” Still, I dug right in to the giant tortilla that held the meat, mustard, pickles, cabbage, onions and peppers.

Half an hour later, I began to understand the real meaning of internal conflict; it was roaring in the pit of my stomach.