I’ve been thinking a lot recently about French philosopher, journalist and filmmaker Bernard-Henri Levy (only in France can philosopher hyphenate with filmmaker).

We had lunch about six months ago. At the time, Levy’s English-language edition of “Who Killed Daniel Pearl?”(Melville House), had just been published. The book had received a mixed response for its controversial thesis that Daniel Pearl was murdered because he was on the trail of a larger story, of connections between Pakistani security forces, Pakistan’s nuclear establishment and Al Qaeda.

Levy felt that Pearl’s murder was “a hinge” moment in modern history. He had spent a year retracing Pearl’s steps, reliving and re-imagining his last moments. It was, he said, “the strangest adventure that has ever happened to me.”

Levy’s book served an important agenda: to make the death of Pearl a subject of discussion and scrutiny, of international importance both as a murder demanding justice and as an international incident with nefarious implications worth investigating.

Today, more than two years since Pearl’s murder, the four men convicted in Pakistan of the death await their appeal, and four others who were detained in connection with the crime have yet to be charged.

Nonetheless, since Levy’s book, Pakistani nuclear scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan has confessed to 15 years of sharing Pakistan’s nuclear secrets with Iran, North Korea and Libya, vindicating Levy’s claims. However, Pakistan President Pervez Musharaf, after a private interview, the substance of which has never been made public, pardoned Khan.

Recently, another book of Levy’s, “War, Evil and the End of History” (Melville House), was published in English. From May 30 to June 4, 2001, at the behest of the French newspaper, Le Monde, Levy traveled to five of the world’s unheralded hot spots: Sri Lanka, Burundi, Colombia, Sudan and Angola. His first-person accounts of “forgotten wars” are chilling.

Levy’s goal is simple: to wake us up to human suffering and injustice at a time when Israel and Iraq seem to occupy all the intellectual, emotional and journalistic real estate. We need this now more than ever.

There is a great line in “Control Room,” the documentary about the Al Jazeera network, when Hassan Ibrahim, one of their reporters, remarks, “See, the problem with the Middle East is that everything is an Israeli conspiracy — everything. If a water pipe breaks in the center of Damascus, it will be blamed on the Israelis, instead of blaming it on our incompetence.”

Levy asks us not to forget that globalization means that we are charged with bringing the entire world to account, not just those we wish to politicize, demonize or sentimentalize. We must not, Levy writes “be seduced into finding meaning where none exists.” In terms of philosophy, he pits Walter Benjamin against Hegel or “dry indignant anger against the consolation of dialetics.”

In Sri Lanka, Levy interviews a woman trained to be a suicide bomber — or as Levy calls them, kamikazes. In Colombia, he meets with government officials, revolutionary leaders (so-called) and coca farmers. In the Sudan, where over the last several years a genocide of Christians has been occurring, he explores the role of oil in the Sudan’s vale of destruction.

Perhaps it’s a coincidence that Secretary of State Colin Powell has in the last few weeks traveled to a refugee camp in the Sudan and the United Nations has started to threaten sanctions. Consider Levy’s call to arms part of the tipping point that made it such that the world could no longer look the other way.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn once opined that writers should be like “a second government.” Back when this country was young, Tom Paine wrote that “my country is the world, and my religion is to do good.” In the 1960s, Norman Mailer, Gore Vidal, Kurt Vonnegut and William F. Buckley were all part of the national debate. But in truth, it’s been a while since we’ve had men of letters rising to the level of conscience of the nation.

Today, we’ve passed into an age of punditry. Our opinion makers are for the most part entertainers — Rush Limbaugh, the Fox crew, Al Franken, Howard Stern. Add multimillionaire populist Michael Moore to the list.

No one can argue with the phenomenal success of “Fahrenheit 9/11.” By now, even the most serious of columnists, Tom Freidman, William Safire and Andrew Sullivan, are humming MC Hammer’s refrain, “Can’t touch this.”

This makes a certain amount of sense, given that, as noted in an NEA study released this month, people are reading less. Even our president has admitted that he doesn’t read the news.

Conversely, this makes writers like Levy all the more important. Despite our 24/7 TV news channels, the always-on Internet, as well as daily local and national newspapers, the biggest news stories of recent months have appeared in books — Paul O’Neal’s, Richard Clarke’s, Bob Woodward’s. Talk about old school. At the same time, some of the best reporting about the war in Iraq, including the Abu Gharib prisoner abuse scandal, have been reported by veteran journalist Seymour Hersh in The New Yorker magazine — yes, The New Yorker — leaving the newspapers and major networks to spin the information — commenting rather than breaking the news.

History will repeat itself, if we choose to ignore it. Let me leave the last word to Levy who writes: “We’ll have to do what the American soldiers did in 1944 after the liberation of the camps, when they forced the German city dwellers to file past the corpses. Innocent, the ordinary German citizens? Never, ever lent a hand to the crematoriums of Bergen-Belsen? Maybe. If you like. But that’s not the question now. The gesture, all the same, of the Americans forcing them just to file by, to look, to keep their eyes open, above all not to go back to sleep. A good metaphor, in short, for the role of intellectuals.”

I remember, as a child, trying in vain to stay up to see the ball fall on New Year’s Eve. In later years, high school brought concerts that went past midnight and college introduced all-nighters of the studying and partying kind. In the midnight hour came inspiration and revelation and dreams of new worlds to conquer. Back then, sleep was not an issue.

Then sometime in my 20s, I suffered a bout of insomnia. For several weeks, I could not, did not, sleep. I can’t remember why, but the gnawing numbness of that sleep deprivation — too tired to think, too awake to sleep — did not go away. Before then, sleep didn’t matter; since then, I watch carefully over my sleep.

Turns out I was just a little ahead of the curve. As I passed into my 30s, it seemed everyone was concerned about sleep. In this age of 24/7, it was as if sleep had become a commodity, and there’d been a run on the product. When did sleep become “the new sex” — something everyone talks about, thinks about, but few ever have enough of?

As a married father with a mortgage and an aging prostate, there are still many nights when I wake and can’t seem to fall back asleep. But I no longer lie in bed, eyes wide open, anxious, mind going a million miles an hour — or worry about how little sleep I’m getting, or if I will fall back asleep. Yes, brothers and sisters, I am here to tell you that Herr Doktor Teicholz has a cure and he is going to share it with you.

My secret is simple: If I can’t sleep, I get out of bed. Most researchers agree: The bed is where you sleep, and if your eyes pop open — in the words of the Rolling Stones, “You gotta move” to another room or just another piece of furniture.

Experts also recommend that, like Lot, you avert your eyes — from finding out what time it is. My daughter wonders why we have so few clocks in the house; it’s because I keep them out of my nighttime sight line.

Here’s the important part: Once resettled, don’t turn on the TV, which seems to stimulate the brain, rather than quiet it. I recommend reading. But not just anything.

My criteria is something that will hold your attention, divert you from your problems, but that you can pick up and put down with impunity. Although I most often read fiction for pleasure, my middle-of-the night regimen calls for nonfiction. Reading your Visa bills is a bad idea. Reading history can be a good one.

Over the years, I’ve found several books for midnight ramblers that fit the prescription perfectly. I will always be indebted to “Son of the Morning Star,” Evan Connell’s masterfully written account of Gen. Custer and the battle of Little Bighorn for getting me through many a night, or early morning as the case may be. Connell is most known for his novels “Mr. Bridge” and “Mrs. Bridge,” perhaps the finest chronicle of the interior lives of a marriage in American Literature, but it his nonfiction work, “Son of the Morning Star,” that has magical properties.

It is a fascinating, extremely well-written account of something I would never have imagined would absorb me. Ten minutes of reading, and I was ready to go back to bed. Yet each time I picked up the book again, I did so with pleasure. In fact, I was sad when the book ended — and a little panicked: What would I read next?

For a while, I tried biographies. Teddy Roosevelt, Churchill, whatever was gathering dust on the living room coffee table. Didn’t work for me.

The problem with biographies is that the first half is all good news — there are hardships and travails, but they are inevitably overcome. It was the second half that I had a problem with — disappointment, decline, illness and death — such is the rub in life itself and being reminded of it at 4 a.m. is no plus.

By contrast, I’ve had great success with Joseph Telushkin’s “Jewish Literacy.” Close readers of this column will know that I often reference the work when I want to pass for Torah savvy or Tanakh fabulous.

Mostly, though, I dip into it at night. The book is more than 700 pages long and there are 348 entries, each a few pages long. At that time of night, my powers of retention vary, and so sometimes I read sections I don’t realize I’ve read before; sometimes I read them again because I don’t remember them; and sometimes I have great realizations reading them, which I often forget upon waking. But it never fails to capture my imagination and then lead me back to bed.

Most recently, I’ve started in on Edith Grossman’s new translation of Cervantes’ “Don Quixote.” The knight errant of Galicia quickly transports me away from 21st century concerns.

The book is surprisingly sly, deft and comic — a virtuoso 15th century metanovel. And the chapters are short — always a plus in matters of sleep hygiene.

I’m only 200 pages in and will report at some future date on the full Mancha, but for now, suffice to say, Grossman’s wonderful rendering makes returning to my dreams, possible.

We live in a culture (and a city) where people strive for self-improvement. They work out, they obsess about their appearance (and improve it beyond God’s gifts). They seek to look better and live longer.

At the same time, they neglect sleep, to which we devote one-third of our lives. That, I would argue is a mistake. Instead, they should do a little night reading to improve their lives.

As winter chill gives way to spring sun, it’s not too early to start planning a summer trip to Budapest.

Budapest, Hungary’s capital, straddles the Danube, with historic old Buda on the hill, and Pest with its atmospheric 19th century and Art Nouveau architecture. In recent years, many of the Budapest’s historic sites have been restored, such as the Parliament building and St. Stephen’s Church, and their interiors are breathtaking.

Part of Budapest’s appeal is that it is very much a city. There’s a beat, a pulse. You can head out the door; down the streets. On every corner there’s something to see: There’s the pedestrian mall of Vaci Utca and the enclosed Central Market with its busy stalls of foods and handicrafts. You can hop on the subway, which is easy to use and get just about anywhere. Anywhere that the trains don’t go, there’s a tramway waiting to take you there. Taxis abound and they are reasonable (by American standards). Budapest is small enough to get around but large enough to feel like a metropolitan cosmopolis. Many people speak English and the chirping sound of Hungarian will tickle your ears.

Budapest is also famous for its thermal hot springs and its spas, some dating back to the Roman and Ottoman empires. The Gellert Hotel, with its renowned Turkish bath, is a delightful way to spend an afternoon and a perfect way to get over jet lag. The outdoor pool of the Gellert is also famous for its artificial waves that cascade through the pool for 10 minutes every hour and delight adults and children of all ages.

Easy walking distance from the city center is what tour books refer to as “the Jewish triangle,” an area that comprises many sites of Jewish interest. There is the magnificent Dohany Synagogue, with its neo-Moorish architecture, restored to its former glory by funds from the Hungarian government and American charities. Next door is a Jewish museum housed on the site where Theodore Herzl once lived. Behind the synagogue is a Holocaust memorial sculpture. The old Jewish Quarter, where the ghetto existed under the Nazis, is there in addition to the Rumbach and Kazinczy synagogues, which are currently being renovated. A Holocaust museum is being dedicated this April, on the 50th anniversary of the Nazi’s entering Budapest. Not far away is “The Terror House,” a former prison that is now a museum devoted to the history and crimes of the Hungarian fascist and communist totalitarian regimes.

A visit to Budapest is also a great way to explore one’s roots. The Budapest Jewish Community Center at 12 Sip Utca (street) houses record offices of the Jewish community where it is possible to locate birth, marriage and death certificates of relatives. And, if you have a date of death, you may also be able to find the graves of your relatives. In my own case I was also able to find and visit the graves of my great-uncle Hugo Hatschek (my grandmother’s older brother), as well as the grave of my great-great-grandmother, Jeannette Back, who was born in 1849 and died in Budapest in 1891.

Relatives or not, I can say that one of the highlights of my trip was the almost three hours I spent early one Monday morning wandering around the Salgotarjani Utca cemetery. Opened in 1874, this is the cemetery of the Hungarian Jewish bourgeoisie. As a place to wander, this cemetery is comparable to Pere-Lachaise in Paris or Hillside in Los Angeles, for that matter.

In Salgotarjani, the walls closest to the entrance and next to the cemetery walls house the vast mausoleums of the wealthy families. They are elaborate architectural statements. In keeping with ancient Jewish tradition, the brush there grows wild. Hiking through the brambles it is possible to leave the path behind and feel lost in the necropolis. A haunting feeling: lost in the lost world of Hungarian Jewry.

As I wandered around, it was fascinating to see the names on the gravestones, itself a chronicle of assimilation. There was a vogue, apparently, for French names, as witnessed by graves of women with such unlikely Jewish names as Nannette and Babbette. Other popular Jewish names included Jospehina, Antonia and Terez (as in the empress Marie-Therese). Men’s names such as Mor (Maurice) Sandor (Alexander), Vilmos, Lipot, Fulop (Phillip) are not names we think of today as Jewish but they were common then.

Budapest boasts many summer festivals, including an opera and ballet festival (Aug. 1-19), as well as a Jewish arts festival, now in its seventh year, which will be held Aug. 29-Sept. 4.

Having attended last year’s Jewish arts festival as a guest of the Hungarian Tourist Board, I can give you some idea of what to expect.

During the day, one is free to explore Budapest and its environs. A Jewish book festival takes place that same week — this is a festival of books in Hungarian of Jewish interest, not books in English. However it is worth stopping by, not only because they have various klezmer bands playing, but it is fascinating to see and meet young Jewish book editors, magazine owners and see the crowds of young Hungarians there for whom being Jewish is not a political act, but rather just a fact of their being — which to most Hungarians is progress.

In the evenings, there were concerts of classical music, opera, operetta as well as jazz and klezmer. There were also dance performances, even Israeli film screenings. While I was there I attended an evening of Hungarian operetta. (I have always had a weakness for Lehar’s “Merry Widow.”) There was a classical music concert in the Dohany, and a performance in the State Opera House by David D’or (whom I was assured is the Israeli John Mellencamp but who seemed more like Billy Joel to me), and Dudu Fisher .

As for lodging, we were put up at the Hotel Mercur-Korona, which was located within walking distance of the Central Market, the Vaci Utca pedestrian mall and the Dohany Synagogue. The rooms were somewhat dorm-room/Ikea but I would not complain (if my wife were there, she might have). The staff were extremely helpful and the breakfasts excellent (a buffet of Hungarian cheeses, meats, vegetables, along with the usual eggs, etc.). The chain is owned by Accor, who own Motel Six in the States, and I would say it’s better than that. As for other hotels, if you want the high-end, there is the Kempinski Hotel in the center of town, and the Hilton, which sits atop Buda near the old castle hill. For many years the favorite for businessmen was the Forum but it seems in need of renovation. There are also several boutique hotels that have opened in the last few years worth exploring.

But all that running around is just an excuse to kill time between meals. Leave Dr. Atkins and your diet back home. In Budapest there is not just foie gras (cold), or foie gras (hot) for which the Hungarians are justifiably famous, but let’s talk goose fat, or worse yet, goose cracklings. But those were just the appetizers. By the time dessert rolled around, chestnut puree seemed like just another several-thousand calories to charm the palate with. Although I didn’t make it on this trip to the tourist mecca Gundel’s or to any of the classic restaurants like Apostolok (though I visited it and it looks great), Szas Eves or Matyas Pince — which I have visited on past trips. Several hip restaurants have opened such as Spoon on a barge on the Danube and the romantic Robinson’s.

On my last trip, we went to a good assortment of restaurants: Jiraffe where, as an aficionado of cold cherry soup, I had a delicious cold raspberry soup; Karpathia where I gnawed on the roast goose as the zymbalom player performed my request: “The Third Man” theme. There’s now a high-end restaurant at Gerbeaud’s, probably the best cooking we had, but at lunch we were the only patrons (the dessert — a somloy galuska, a pound cake with cream and chocolate sauce — was off the charts). Strangely enough, one of the best meals we had was at a restaurant called Shakespeare — not the most Hungarian-sounding — but then again, Budapest boasts a statue to Shakespeare. (In fact, my grandmother’s claim to fame was playing Puck in “A Midsummer’s Night Dream” in Hungarian.) So despite the name, I recommend the food at Shakespeare as delicious.

I’m getting hungry again. I may just have to go over to the Csardas restaurant on Melrose for a little a wiener schnitzel and some cucumber salad to hold me until I can get back to Budapest. Or maybe some dumpling soup and the roast duck. A little Tokay wine would be nice….

For more information on Hungary, visit www.gotohungary.com.

In May 1995, I found myself in Lviv, Ukraine. My father died two years before, and I was there on a roots trip. I wanted to see the city where he grew up and perhaps unearth some of the information that he could never bring himself to share, such as the names and birthdates of his brothers and sisters, all murdered. I discovered his own real birthday to be a completely different day, month and year than we had always celebrated.

On that day, I visited a hill outside a prison camp that was likely where his parents and brothers and sisters were murdered, as a reprisal for his having escaped from the ghetto. It was another fact that I had only learned since his death. I said “Kaddish” and went back to my hotel to collapse, emotionally spent.

That night, alone in my hotel room, I channel surfed. Suddenly, there before my eyes was a black-and-white nightclub scene that pulled back to reveal Liam Neeson dubbed in Russian. “Schindler’s List” was being broadcast for the first time on Russian TV (bootleg tapes had circulated but the movie had never been on TV). This was the first time most Ukrainians would see the film. I was transfixed.

I understood little of what was being said in Russian, but freed from the language I was enthralled with the images and their emotional manipulation. Tears started rolling down my cheeks. I don’t remember the movie ending; I don’t remember turning the TV off; I don’t remember falling asleep.

The next morning, I spoke with people at the hotel, at the Central archives in a church — they had all watched “Schindler’s” the night before and were moved. One young woman said to me, “I thought I knew. I didn’t. I thought I understood. I didn’t.” That’s when I realized the importance of “Schindler’s List,” its ability to permeate the consciousness of people in Lviv, Ukraine.

When I first heard that Steven Spielberg was set to make a film version of Thomas Keneally’s “Schindler’s Ark” — the special 10th anniversary of edition of “Schindler’s List” comes out this week — I worried. I feared that in the story of Oskar Schindler, Spielberg, like Keneally, had found a gentile prism, rather than a Jewish one, through which to tell the horrific events of the Holocaust era. Although Oskar Schindler saved more than 1,000 Jewish lives during the Holocaust, there were many aspects of his story that bothered me. There was something offensive about the paternalistic attitude of Schindler toward “his Jews.” Conversely, the devotion of the Schindlerjuden to him, basically supporting him for the rest of his life, seemed like an unhealthy Stockholm syndrome-like reaction. But that was not my biggest concern. I worried that the story of Schindler would be misleading, that the emphasis would be on Schindler and not the Jews.

“For one Oskar Schindler, how many collaborators were there?” Elie Wiesel once wrote in TV Guide. Schindler and the others deemed “the Righteous” and “the Just” stand out because they were the exceptions to human behavior during those dark years. As Wiesel noted, in his own Holocaust experience there were no Schindlers: “None of the Just crossed my path during the war. None of our Christian neighbors in my small village of Sighet, in Romania, risked his life to take in, to hide, to rescue a Jewish child or Jewish friend.”

I worried that the story of Schindler, rather than showing the truth of what occurred, would create a dangerous myth: That not only were non-Jews in Poland not complicit in the murders, but regular people, Nazi Party members like Oskar Schindler, saved Jews — Jews who were too weak, too powerless, too lacking in any heroism to even save themselves. This would be a slur on the survivors and a second death for the murdered. Such is the problem of making an example of the exceptional.

Then I saw the film and all my reservations disappeared. I succumbed to the power of the movie making. It was as if Spielberg had used all the tools at his disposal to tell a compelling and engrossing story. He checked his ego at the door and let the story be the star. It was an amazing achievement: Spielberg used Liam Neeson as the handsome gentile to seduce the audience into caring, much as Schindler seduced the Nazis into saving lives. It was a valid way, even a commercial way, to tell the story of the Holocaust. For once he had not made a Spielberg film. For that he received an Oscar. For that the film went on to make a fortune. Spielberg used the money to fund the Survivors of the Shoah Foundation — once again, reaching beyond himself to make something that would have a lasting impact on others. But I still didn’t grasp the full impact of the film until that evening in my hotel room in Ukraine.

Schindler rescued 1,100 men, women and children — “his workers,” “his people.” In connection with Schindler, the talmudic saying is often quoted that “whoever saves one life, saves the entire world.” What then can we say about Spielberg who opened the hearts and minds of millions? An estimated 50 million people worldwide saw “Schindler’s List” in movie theaters, and 65 million watched it when it was first broadcast on television.

While there are only 13 million Jews in the world, Rabbi Steven Leder of Wilshire Boulevard Temple said, Spielberg with one film shed light on the Holocaust to more than 100 million non-Jews. “I find that staggering in its importance.”

Annette Insdorf, author of “Indelible Shadows: Film and the Holocaust,” the definitive and essential tome on the subject, feels “Schindler’s List” also made it easier for Holocaust films to get made, because, as she wrote me by e-mail, “despite the difficult subject matter, hefty running time and choice of black and white, it had both commercial and critical success.” In the recently published third edition, which looks to be about three times as thick as the first, Insdorf notes that since her last update in 1989, she’s seen approximately 170 Holocaust-related films. As she notes in her introduction to the third edition, “The number of cinematic reconstructions — fictional as well as documentary — is staggering. They both reflect and contribute to the fact that awareness has replaced silence about the Shoah.”

Further, in founding the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation, Spielberg has dramatically increased our storehouse of knowledge. The recording of 52,000 Holocaust survivors’ testimonies is a great accomplishment, a monumental resource for historians, students — it gives succor and satisfaction to Holocaust survivors and their families, that their experiences are recorded for history for posterity. At best it gives lie to the intention of the Nazis and their henchmen that their crimes and the lives they plundered would be forgotten, would disappear like the ashes dispersed to the wind from the crematoria chimneys at Auschwitz and the other extermination camps.

Ten years after the release of “Schindler’s List” our knowledge is wider, but is it deeper? What has “Schindler’s List” taught us? Certainly, Spielberg has said that the movie shows how one person can make a difference. But that speaks to the good in man. What does “Schindler” teach us about evil?

As concerns the Shoah, itself, the search for meaning must remain elusive. The words of Pinhas Epstein, a survivor of Treblinka, still ring in my ears: “Whoever was in Treblinka, will not go out of it, and whoever was not in Treblinka, will not go into Treblinka.” The Holocaust is not a thing to be understood. It is an event to be remembered. It can serve as inspiration, as lesson, as reminder, as a spur — but even the survivors themselves who experienced it are at a loss to understand it.

Even more difficult, we must ask some tough questions: What good has it done to have released “Schindler’s List” all over the globe in the last decade? To what end?

Was “Schindler’s List” shown in Pakistan? It certainly seemed to make no impression on the murderers of Daniel Pearl who chose to film his violent death, even as they made him exclaim with his last breath, “I am a Jew.” Nor has it inhibited murders in the last decade in Rwanda or currently in the Sudan — or caused the world to stop these murders.

Has it promoted tolerance and stemmed the tide of anti-Semitism? Doesn’t look that way, not in Europe, the Middle East or Asia.

Has it put an end to Holocaust denial? Don’t think so. But let’s ask Mel Gibson’s father what he thinks.

It is a curious coincidence that even as “Schindler’s List” is released on DVD and its 10th anniversary is celebrated, the media has been headlining the subject of the power of film to foster anti-Semitism rather than extinguish it. “The Passion” is the 800-pound elephant in the room. No one brings it up in public, but when I mention the 10th anniversary of “Schindler” to friends, they bring up “The Passion.” As if “The Passion” is payback or backlash for years of Holocaust films. As if “The Passion” were saying: “You’ve had your turn making important Holocaust films, now I want to tell you the most important story for the Christians — one as horrific and violent as anything that occurred during World War II. A story that the world needs to hear, know and see. A story that many people, to this day, denied occurred.” As if “The Passion” is not so much anti-Semitic as it is pro-Christian, and anti-Jewish. “The Passion,” you see, is not a film about the Christ killers. Instead, it is a film that responds to the Christ deniers. Because that’s who the Jews are: The people who deny that Christ is the messiah. Crazy? Sure. That’s why I write “As if.” But it does bring me back to my point: What 10 years later is the impact of “Schindler’s List”?

To answer that question, I watched “Schindler’s List” again, this time on DVD. I was more aware of the film’s artistry this time — which Insdorf details with great precision in her book. What Schindler accomplished did not seem possible: women arrived at Auschwitz, were there in fact for three weeks and Schindler was able to rescue them. It was true but never did fact seem more like fiction.

Finally, I was struck by the moral universe presented in “Schindler’s List.” In Schindler we are presented with absolute evil — embodied in Amon Goeth and witnessed by the liquidation of the Krakow ghetto; and absolute good — in the words of Itzhak Stern, “The list is life.” In between the two is a world of moral ambiguity.

Sid Sheinberg, the former MCA executive who first brought the novel “Schindler’s List” to Spielberg’s attention, told me this week that for him the essential drama of the movie is simply: “Why did he do it?” Schindler, a Nazi Party member and war profiteer, loves wine, women and fine food. He appears to be amoral in every way.

Then I recalled a peculiarity of Jewish belief — the yetzer ha’rah, or evil inclination. As Rabbi Joseph Telushkin explains in “Jewish Literacy,” Jewish tradition would have us born with the evil impulse, while the impulse to be good and altruistic, the yetzer ha’tov is thought to be a learned trait.” As Jewish lore reminds us on several occasions, the evil impulse (ego, envy, lust) has often fueled great accomplishments, even good deeds. This is the story of “Schindler’s List,” I realized: How greed, wine, women, lies and bribes saved Jewish lives. Schindler saved Jews by appealing to people’s basest impulses.

It now appears that we were wrong to think that a movie, even one as powerful as “Schindler’s List,” would rid us of Holocaust deniers, or even reduce anti-Semitism. That is not the way the world works. The evil impulse is always among us. However, we must never forget that one Schindler can subvert the evil inclination, and induce people to accomplish great things. That is man’s challenge and our never-ending struggle. And, 10 years later, the lesson of “Schindler’s List.”

You’ve seen them around town: a poster of a grinning, gnarly Arnold Schwarzenegger with red eyes and the words, “Achtung, Baby,” scrawled in German Gothic type across his forehead. It may have made you smile; you may have felt it was in bad taste. Perhaps a bit of both. In any event, you probably thought: There goes the poster guy again.

By now, even if you can’t name the artist, Robbie Conal, the style has become familiar: a black-and-white head-and-shoulders portrait made up of an agglomeration of wrinkles, blemishes, receding hairlines — the polar opposite of air-brushing — that build to define a recognizable face surrounded by words that amount to an indictment or in Conal’s term, an “art attack.” Over the years, few public figures of any note, from Ronald Reagan to Bill Clinton and from Tammy Faye to Martha Stewart, have dodged the brush.

About four times a year, for the last 18 years, Conal and crew go out midnight postering, and thus far they’ve managed to avoid arrest — Conal’s Web site, www.robbieconal.com, recommends telling police officers that “you’re doing an art project.” For those who prefer their Conal without a side of potential misdemeanor, his work appears on a monthly basis in the L.A. Weekly since 1997 and has recently been collected in a book, “ARTBURN” (RDV Books), with a foreword by Howard Zinn of “The People’s History” (and yes, of Matt and Ben fame).

Conal (the name comes from Russian Jews who fled to Ireland and then to the United States where they conflated Cohen and Connally) grew up on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. Conal’s art education began early. His parents were union organizers, often out marching or instigating, leaving Conal, an only child, to his own devices.

They would leave a brown-bag lunch for him, a $1 bill and two subway tokens, with a note to go to any art museum in the city until it closed. Such benign neglect was strangely empowering.

Conal attended P.S. 93, P.S. 118 and then the High School of Music and Art. He graduated at 16 and then spent a brief year at Brooklyn College before heading to the West Coast, where, after a more than decade-long odyssey that had him living in the Haight, working the night shift at the post office, getting kicked out of San Francisco State for occupying school buildings as a protest, going to Canada and playing semipro baseball, getting adjudged 1-Y by the draft board (psychologically unfit to serve), returning to San Francisco to drive a Yellow Cab during the graveyard shift (he is currently writing a “comedic noir” novel about the experience) he enrolled in Stanford’s master of fine arts program, where his teachers included Frank Lobdell and Nathan Olivera, the tough guys of Bay Area abstraction. But he still hadn’t found his way.

With 20/20 hindsight, there were several important landmarks over the next decade that would lead to his decision to start postering.

At that time, abstract expressionism ruled. Conal was one of its adherents until he went to visit a girlfriend who was studying Renaissance art in Rome. She took him to see Michaelangelo’s “Last Judgment.”

It spoke to him: “Art about the human condition — the human figure in dire straights.” It seemed like something he should be addressing in his work.

The final elements in Conal’s journey to becoming a guerrilla poster artist were the election and subsequent reelection of Ronald Reagan. Reagan, you could say, made Conal the artist he is today.

Reading the newspaper during the early ’80s, Conal “found steam coming out of my eyes, ears, nose and throat.” In “Art Attack,” a now out-of-print book that collected Conal’s posters between 1986 and 1992, Conal describes his 1986 Archimedes moment: “I’d just stare at Reagan, Regan, Weinberger, James Baker III, Shultz and Casey. Suddenly, I found myself making nasty little portraits of ugly old white men with pursed lips — okay, no lips. And it came together — this tight little club of power-mongers were: MEN WITH NO LIPS.”

Conal wanted his work to reach the public. That wasn’t going to happen by showing in art galleries. Instead, he decided to translate his work into posters and “hit the street.”

There was one hitch: Conal knew nothing about making posters. But the first baseman on his Sunday softball team, John Berley, did — he was a printer.

Conal spent $600 for 1,000 posters that featured four portraits, each with a word beneath the face: Reagan (MEN), Regan (WITH), Weinberger (NO) and Baker (LIPS). Conal and his friend, Lenny Silverberg, went out late one night in Conal’s Honda Civic wagon filled with posters, brushes and pots of glue, following a basic route between Conal’s studio in Venice (at 5th and Rose avenues) and his mother’s apartment in Park La Brea.

Reagan had been dubbed “The Teflon President,” because no scandal stuck to him. Conal decided instead to stick it to Reagan. Conal deliberately placed posters at traffic switch boxes, where drivers would see them.

Los Angeles has always been a semioticians’ paradise, where people are attuned to every sign, from which car you drive to the thickness of your yoga mat. They noticed. People weren’t sure what the posters meant or whose agenda or product they were pushing. But Conal knew he was on to something.

“Men With No Lips” was followed by “Women With Teeth” (Nancy Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, Jeanne Kirkpatrick and Joan Rivers). By the third poster, Ollie North (CONFESS), Conal had found his voice, his medium, his métier.

Conal, the former art brat, had tapped into a tradition reaching back to Goya and that referenced Kathe Kollwitz, Georg Grosz and the Mexican muralists Orozco and Rivera. To see Conal’s work in art-historical context, you need do little more than walk into the UCLA Hammer Museum in Westwood and check out their collection of drawings and busts by Daumier. Even today, the portraits are simultaneously entertaining and damning.

Over the years, Conal’s haiku-like commentary on our times has often captured the zeitgeist. Some of my favorites include a portrait of Reagan with the words: “Contra” above his face and “Diction” below; Jim Bakker and Tammy Faye with the words, “False Profit”; and George H. W. Bush with the phrase, “It can’t happen here,” written so that “here” is on his forehead.

Among the most notorious is a portrait of then-L.A. Police Chief Daryl Gates’ head superimposed on a rifle target. Writ large is a quote from Gates: “Casual drug users should be taken out and shot” — Conal took a blue grease pen, crossed out “shot” and wrote “Beaten,” a reference to Rodney King. Love it or hate it, fair or unfair, it remains one of Conal’s most powerful works.

Carol Wells of the Center for the Study of Political Graphics, says: “Conal has made the political poster his own.”

Conal is unique, she says, in that his work is “half-art, half-protest.” Most distinctive, Wells feels is Conal’s use of humor. His provocative and at times ambiguous word play is all the more powerful, she says, because it makes you “look at the world a little differently.”

Conal’s monthly cartoon/column in the L.A. Weekly has allowed him to experiment with larger blocks of text and make more direct commentary on events and subjects in the news, such as Clinton, Colin Powell, Dick Cheney and Stewart.

Part of Conal would like to retire from the art attacks. It’s been 18 years, but, as Conal says, “Stuff keeps happening.” In fact, as election season heats up, Conal’s planning an anti-Bush project, which will be a collaborative artwork with two other young artists, Sheperd Fairey of “Obey Giant” fame, and L.A. Graffiti writer Mear. They plan on doing a triptych, with each doing a portrait with text.

Conal has been criticized for making his subjects ugly. Although one could argue that by 50, everyone gets the face they deserve, or that the face tells the story of the soul, or that “ugly” art has a long history and is part of the aesthetic Conal imbued from his teachers at Stanford. Whether in response to this criticism or not, Conal has recently done some inspirational images that have a beauty rarely found in his earlier work.

After Sept. 11, Conal was approached by Jim Otis, a filmmaker who is devoted to the principles of nonviolence, to do portraits of inspiration. Conal was concerned about the dangers of overreaction to the World Trade Center bombing, or as Chris Rock put it in his current stand-up tour, about “Patriotism becoming hate-triotism.”

Conal drew portraits of Ghandi, the Dalai Lama and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., with the words for each, “Waiting, Watching, Dreaming.” Once the posters went up, it was as if these modern-era apostles of nonviolence were standing on street corners watching how we behaved.

More recently, guerrilla poster crew member and actor David Arquette suggested Conal do a series about musicians who’ve inspired us and commissioned a portrait of John Lennon. Bob Marley and others are to follow in the series.

All through my interview with Conal, I kept thinking of that other master of the multiple, Andy Warhol. Although Warhol’s work was thought to be consciously apolitical, similarities kept popping into mind. Both artists sought to transmute popular culture and create a dissonance that would serve as commentary.

Consider Warhol’s early work, “Electric Chairs,” and even his later portraits of “Mao.” Warhol was famous for his commissioned portraits — and his commissioned series, such as “Famous Jews of the 20th Century.” Warhol also collaborated with younger artists, most notably with Basquiat.

Despite the similarities, the more I thought about it, the more I realized Conal is the anti-Warhol. Warhol made art of the shallow; Conal makes art by showing us the shallowness of the high and mighty. Warhol, on occasion, made art that had a political dimension. Conal’s art is politics.

Are we the luckiest people in the world to live in Los Angeles, leading the lives others only dream about? Or is this the most unfair city in the nation, where the few are insulated from the harsh realities of the many? And what, you may wonder, does any of this have to do with Randy Newman?

Those are among the many questions that came to mind while attending “Shock and Awe: The Songs of Randy Newman,” a recent UCLA Live event at Royce Hall. Organized by Hal Willner and Janine Nichols, an eclectic mix of mostly local artists (many of whom I did not recognize onstage) performed 46 works from Newman’s canon. The featured artists included Victoria Williams, Vic Chesnutt, Ellen Greene, David Hidalgo, Howard Tate, Bob Neuwirth, Van Dyke Parks, Jon Brion and Gavin Friday. A nifty night in Los Angeles, for sure.

The next day, I went to Second Spin in Santa Monica and cleaned out their Randy Newman section.

I still remember the first time I heard “Sail Away” — a friend’s older brother insisted we listen. We sat there stunned, and the album remains today just as exhilarating, clever, funny, subversive and hypnotic. Some of the lines from “Political Science” remain imprinted on my brain.

Repeated listenings this past week of the “Randy Newman Songbook Vol. 1,” “Sail Away,” “Trouble in Paradise” and “Faust” produced great pleasure but also great confusion. It is hard to get a fix on Newman. His songs are detached, cynical, ambiguous, perverse, yet they seem confessional, intimate and revealing. But of what?

In “Sail Away,” the narrator is a slave trader beckoning Africans to board his ship and come to America. In other tunes, Newman gives voice to rednecks, militarists and racists, and, of course, there is that song about short people. Are we supposed to see these noxious characters as alarming or ironic put-downs? In several songs, Newman takes on the persona of God, and in his play, “Faust,” he sang the part of the devil (this, from an atheist). Other songs conjure up specific places or times, Louisiana, Baltimore, Capetown, Miami and L.A. (we love it!). The music itself conjures up distinct pictures as well, from a New Orleans second-line shuffle to a Kurt Weill/Lotte Lenye cabaret, from traditional music of the Deep South to modern pop anthems. What’s it all about, Randy?

Here’s what I think: Randy Newman is the songsmith of human frailty. He doesn’t want to let us or himself off the hook.

Newman, in many ways, need not complain. He spent part of his youth in his mother’s native New Orleans, before moving to Los Angeles. His father was a doctor, and his uncle, Alfred Newman, was music director for 20th Century Fox and the most famous film composer of all time with nine Oscars. As a teenager, Newman often visited the scoring stage at Fox to see his uncle conduct. After high school, he worked for several years writing songs in the legendary Brill Building in New York. His first album came out when he was in his mid-20s and for more than 30 years, he’s led a privileged life in Los Angeles. He’s had his periods of inactivity but eventually he joined the family business — writing movie scores, contributing to “Toy Story,” “Ragtime,” “Parenthood” and “James and the Giant Peach,” among many others. He won an Oscar in 2002 for “If I Didn’t Have You” from “Monsters, Inc.” Currently on any Friday night you can hear him singing “It’s a Jungle Out There” over the opening credits of “Monk.” So what’s there to complain about?

I think that’s the point. Privilege does not give you a pass. Newman recalls seeing ice cream trucks in the South as a child that had one side for whites and the other for “colored.” Newman’s father told the late Timothy White, that as a kid in Los Angeles, Newman was asked by a girl to a cotillion at the Riviera Country Club. Her father called to uninvite Newman because the club didn’t allow Jews. This prompted Newman to research all religions and become an atheist. As a young man, he saw that his uncle was no saint, and that great job at Fox, sometimes was just work. Newman married at an early age, raised a family. Then he found himself to be just a man — a man who, as he told one interviewer, left his wife and family for a younger woman. At an age when his own children were getting married and having children, Newman found himself starting a new family.

One recent song, “Life Isn’t Fair,” says it all. It opens with Newman singing about Karl Marx and Marx’s dream of a better society. However, if Marx were alive today, Newman sings, he’d bring him over to his “mansion on the hill” and tell him a story that would “give his heart a chill.” What’s the story? It’s about going to orientation at his kids’ school and seeing all the beautiful moms with their husbands, like him “froggish men, unpleasant to see.” (Been there, seen that!) Marx would be glad he was dead, Newman sings, because his plan just brought misery and in the land of the free “the rich get richer and the poor you don’t ever have to see.” Newman concludes: “It would depress us Karl, because we care / that the world still isn’t fair.”

To me, that’s Newman’s point. The lives we lead can insulate us from some of the injustice. But don’t pretend it doesn’t exist. We don’t get a pass and we can’t ignore it. That is life. That is man. Maybe you can’t change it, but if you don’t sing or talk about it, the things that humans think and do — perverse, evil or ironic as they may be — well then, the joke’s on you.

Newman cares. Maybe that’s why we care about him.

As I write this, it’s 64 degrees in Santa Monica and Sub-Zero is just a brand of refrigerator I covet. On the East Coast, there is a record cold spell and everyone is paying rapt attention to the wind-chill factor.

The climatic difference can best be explained not merely by boasting or gloating — but by the fact that Los Angeles is a desert.

For most Angelenos, heading out to the desert means driving on Interstate 10 for about two hours to reach the desert communities, so-called: Palm Springs, Cathedral City, Palm Desert and La Quinta. Here the desert blooms green with golf courses and condos.

In some ways, the relationship between the desert and Los Angeles is as if some mad scientist had extracted variant strains from the local culture and seeded them in its own petri dish (not unlike the relationship of the Hamptons to New York). There is the Palm Springs of the 1950s, of Frank Sinatra, Lucille Ball, Bing Crosby and, to toss in a literary reference, Norman Mailer’s “Deer Park.” You can even board an air-conditioned bus to tour the movie stars’ homes. A whole cult has arisen around the architecture and furniture of the period that the more serious-minded refer to as “mid-century.” To paraphrase Mr. Eliot, in the consignment shops cool hunters come to play / speaking of houses by Richard Neutra and Albert Frey.

In downtown Palm Springs, you can feel the hipness quotient rising. Trina Turk has her first boutique there. Hotels for the hipoisie are sprouting right and left: there is the Korzen-Wearstler-designed Estrella Inn (think of it as Viceroy Jr.), the Jetson-like Orbit Inn and the Moroccan-inspired Korakia Pensione. The early adopters are buying second homes nearby. There is an enclave by the airport where trend definers like Lynda Keeler of www.la.com (my wife consults there) have purchased ’50s desert abodes and redone them. People more wise in the ways of money than I (regrettably that’s not saying much) believe Indian casino money (both people spending it and hoping to earn it) will continue to fuel the current upgrade.

This is the resort life and I’m a resort kind of guy. For Team Teicholz, that means sitting by the pool at midday in between trips down the water slide; seeing every family movie on view at the many desert multiplexes, capped by some wardrobe enhancement missions at the Cabazon premium outlet mall. There are also some excellent eating opportunities: from the breakfast at Keedy’s Fountain & Grill (big on classic ambience), to Crazy Coyote Tacos in Banning, to Fleming’s for steaks (I don’t know why their rib-eye is better than anyone else’s, it just is). I have yet to make it to Gramma’s Country Kitchen in Banning, but my fellow fressers, Eric Rahn and Rob Stavis, put it on their top 10 breakfasts at No. 3, just behind Pasquale’s in Santa Fe and the Camelia Grill in New Orleans.

However, like Los Angeles, it all depends what road you are on. Stay on Highway 111 and you are in the resort world. Take Highway 62 off the 10 and you are headed into Joshua Tree and toward Twentynine Palms. Highway 62 reveals the natural beauty of the desert, and some of the ugliness of the broken dreams that we would like to forget.

Deanne Stillman knows this world. More than any writer I know, the desert speaks to her, and she speaks for it. Stillman grew up in Cleveland, but even as a child the desert captured her imagination. After attending college in New Mexico and despite a flirtation with New York (where we first met), she made Los Angeles home. Still, the desert called to her. In articles for The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times and L.A. Weekly, Stillman started to cover the desert. Exploring the Mojave, which she has called “this windswept museum of hope, this weird bakery of the impossible,” and Joshua Tree (in her words: “the ecstatic vegetable”), she followed Highway 62 until it led to Twentynine Palms.

One day in a desert bar, she heard a story about two girls who’d been killed: Amanda Scott and Rosalie Ortega. Mandi and Rosie. Mandi was two days shy of her 16th birthday. Deanne asked who they were.

“Just two girls,” someone said.

“They partied too hard,” someone said later.

In a nightmare version of “An Officer and a Gentleman,” they had been murdered by a Marine from the local base, recently returned from the first Gulf War.

Stillman spent the next 10 years researching, writing, living the trial, soaking up the desert till she had to run away — and staying away until she had to come back. The resulting book, “Twentynine Palms: A True Story of Murder, Marines and the Mojave” (Perennial, 2002), is a true crime story in the tradition of “In Cold Blood” and the “The Executioner’s Song.” They used to call it the nonfiction novel, today they call it narrative nonfiction. It’s just fine writing, a searing story and tour of the desert most people prefer to avoid. She did justice to Mandi and Rosie and to the desert, as well.

So when I knew I was going to write about the desert, I called Stillman. Most people view the desert as arid and barren. To her the desert is alive in a literal way, filled with surprises from the most sublime wildflowers, to offering her a spiritual and emotional center. It is, in her words “the elusive core of Los Angeles.”

The desert is what you get when you pare away the city — good and bad, high life and low life, real and fake. As Stillman told me, Joan Didion wrote about the disconnect in Los Angeles. Stillman feels it’s just the opposite: the desert is the connection.

Around this time of year, I’m often prone to recall Rod Serling, who was born on Christmas Day. I’m helped along by the fact that PBS ran their “American Masters” portrait of Serling over the New Year’s weekend even as the Sci Fi Channel ran a “Twilight Zone” marathon. It makes me wonder: Where is Serling — or today’s Serling — when you really need him?

My interest in Serling is professional as well as personal: For the last several years, together with writers Ron Magid and Paul Clemens, I’ve been trying to produce a Serling biopic in partnership with producer Steve Rubin and Serling’s widow, Carol.

What I find so compelling about Serling is this: It’s 1950s Eisenhower America and the country has been lulled into a false sense of comfort by Betty Crocker images of the happy and prosperous American middle-class family. But Serling knows different.

Raised in upstate New York, one of the few Jews in Binghampton, he served as a paratrooper in the Pacific, and returned home suffering from nightmares about his service there. A driven writer, he wanted to wake up America to another reality: He wanted Americans to know about lynchings in the South, about the Holocaust, about the possibility of nuclear destruction. TV networks and their advertisers didn’t want controversy, they wanted audiences. But Serling conceived a way to get his message across, using science fiction. Serling created “The Twilight Zone,” transforming the medium and its viewers.

Over the course of five seasons, Serling poured out his heart and soul, driving himself to near creative exhaustion. As host and narrator, he kept the show on the air by being its pitchman, gaining fame but almost selling his soul in the process. By the time “The Twilight Zone” went off the air in 1965, a different America was dawning — an America that had witnessed nuclear tests, the Bay of Pigs and President Kennedy’s assassination. An America that would soon be marching in the streets to protest civil rights and the war in Vietnam.

Prior to Serling, neither news nor entertainment programming exposed America’s real crises. Now that the news was finally conveying the reality that Serling wanted to reveal, Americans sought refuge from those darker truths in sitcoms, escaping to “Gilligan’s Island.”

To some extent we’ve been escaping since. Despite the nomenclature of “reality” TV, current programming has little to do with reality. The one-hour dramas that I so enjoy are as escapist as sitcoms. They, too, provide comfort, in their way, from today’s realities. “CSI: Crime Scene Investigation” and its offshoot tell us that evidence prevails, that O.J. to the contrary, forensics trap criminals. And, as Saddam exits his spider hole and Osama continues to bedevil us, “Cold Case” and “Without a Trace” (one of my favorite shows) let us know that evil-doers will be caught no matter how long it takes, and that the missing will be searched for — all antidotes to the fear trafficked in by local newscasts and tabloid headlines.

Some shows provide windows into our fears and neuroses: “24” is particularly adept at taking our greatest fears and heightening them beyond a point we ever imagined; “The O.C.” reports on teenage angst; and “Joan of Arcadia” brings God, if not spirituality, into the conversation. But these shows, as good as they are, do not challenge us to improve the world we encounter. That is what “The Twilight Zone,” at its best, accomplished.

This is not to say that no shows have tried to reach Serling’s standard. The “Law & Order” franchise boasts plots “ripped from the headlines,” but they are exploiting facts, not deepening our understanding of them. Aaron Sorkin’s “West Wing” certainly had the passion and the will to tackle issues but somehow those efforts appeared, even while watching, quixotic. In recent memory, perhaps “The X-Files” came closest, but while they occasionally walked up to the line of truth and provocation, they never dared to cross it as Serling did over and over.

I won’t argue that every episode of “The Twilight Zone” was transcendent — many were just gimmicky. Serling, however, set a precedent — that television could be subversive — it could entertain, inform and take on the status quo, all the while asking us to be better than we are. It was ambitious.

Maybe that’s no longer possible. Perhaps television has changed too much. Perhaps there are too many channels chasing too segmented an audience. Maybe it is the audience that has changed into a country that thinks politics are too personal a subject to discuss out loud — except as entertainment on talk radio and other quasi-news programs. If television can manage to comfort us, distract us and even entertain us, isn’t that more than enough? Serling said no.

At the start of a new year, it’s a good time to remember Serling and to recall that one driven man could, by the mere force of his writing, wake up America.

Christmas came early this year — Nov. 7, when New Line Cinema released “Elf,” the family-friendly comedy that, as of this writing, has earned more than $156 million (see story, p. 19). Another surprise is the success of the far-more-cynical adult offering “Bad Santa,” which had a production cost of $18 million and, since its Nov. 26 release, has earned more than $43 million. These are Christmas films that, you could say, are good for the Jews. Both are written and directed by persons of the Jewish faith. “Elf” is directed (Jon Favreau), written by (David Berenbaum) and has stars (James Caan, Edward Asner) who are Jewish — a rare trifecta, particularly for a Christmas film — a feat that parallels the success of the 1954 “White Christmas” (Michael Curtiz, Norm Krasna and Danny Kaye, respectively).

Accordingly, you might wonder, as I do, in Carrie Bradshaw fashion: Did the Jews invent Christmas movies, or is making Christmas movies a way for Jews to reinvent themselves?

I grew up in a family where Christmas made my parents nervous. As December slid toward January, we were inevitably on edge, listening hard for the sound of pounding hooves or polished jackboots goose-stepping down the avenue that would announce the coming pogrom. Or maybe that was just me and my imagination. My Holocaust-refugee parents never really talked about their feelings.

In any event, I have a love/hate relation with Christmas — I like the spirit, the feeling of fellowship and the parties. But all that enforced cheer and caroling and people drinking too much makes me uncomfortable, even when I’m one of them. Let’s be clear about one thing: if eggnog were that good, people would drink it year-round. Still, as best I can, as a 21st-century Jew, I try to feel the love at Christmastime.

Growing up, our own Christmas ritual was simple: we got up early, wandered up Fifth Avenue (no crowds) to see the windows at Saks and the other stores (which were closed, so no shopping) and then we made our way to an afternoon movie.

This brings us back to Christmas movies. So many of them, so many made by Jews. On the one hand it would be easy to explain the phenomenon as “just a job” — just “working for the man.” But let’s face it, 100 years ago in the nascent film industry, as Neal Gabler’s “Empire of Their Own,” makes clear “the man” was circumcised.

In the history of the Jewish Christmas movie, I discern three separate periods, each revealing of its era. The first is the age of “the dream factory,” where Jewish immigrant movie moguls, eager to leave the Old World behind, became more American than the Americans: names changed, customs changed. For that first generation, creating Christmas stories was an affirmation of their ability to put a gloss on the mainstream culture and sell it to itself.

At the same time, the movies codified a secular version of Christmas as a picture-perfect event, complete with fireplace, stockings, mistletoe and children scurrying about — part Norman Rockwell, part Currier & Ives. It was assimilation in the purest sense — not as it is so often portrayed, as an attempt to deny their own past — but proof of how well they understood American culture. It was aspirational. They were creating what they thought America hoped to see when they looked in the mirror.

The second phase is epitomized by “White Christmas,” both the song and the movie. In the 1920s and 1930s another wave of Jewish émigrés came to Hollywood. They, too, changed their names. Many of them also left their past behind. They were mainly directors and actors, among them Billy Wilder, Leslie Howard and Michael Curtiz, who not only directed “Casablanca” but “White Christmas” as well. “White Christmas” was first born as a song written by Irving Berlin (né Izzy Baline in Siberia) for the 1942 film “Holiday Inn.” Wishing for an idealized world, “I used to know” that’s “merry and bright,” the lyrics are, at the same time, wistful, hopeful and all-inclusive. The song was so popular (it is one of the most popular songs of all time), it spawned a movie of its own.

The movie “White Christmas” pairs “Der Bingle” Bing Crosby with the very versatile Kaye in a romantic musical comedy about two World War II veterans who achieve success in show business and then success in love. Its message is not religious, but universal.

Curtiz presents the world as it was and as it should be. Curtiz, like Berlin, was often critiqued for having no signature style. But for Curtiz and Berlin’s generation, being able to work successfully in any number of styles was a virtue unto itself. Making a Christmas movie was not about assimilation, it was about versatility. Curtiz had already assimilated back in Hungary when he first changed his name from Mano Kaminer to Mihaly Kertesz (a more Hungarian-sounding name). The jump from Kertesz to Curtiz was itself a testament to having an identity that was easily translated — that worked, literally and figuratively, in any culture. America was the land of freedom, and it was a country where you could do anything, even make a Christmas movie.

We are now in phase three. Born in America, the second-, third- and fourth-generation of Jews in Hollywood were raised during a time when institutional anti-Semitism had all but disappeared and where assimilation was not so much a goal as a norm. The melting pot has given way to the multicultural quilt — and religious choice is as varied as the combo plates on a Chinese menu. Although Jews are still making Christmas movies, the reasons for doing so are as diverse as the movies made.

In the past, Jews played the non-Jewish roles. Today, in a sign of how Jewish culture has permeated popular culture, last weekends’ No. 1 hit, “Something’s Got to Give” has Diane Keaton playing a Jewish woman and Frances McDormand plays her sister. Oy!

For its part, “Elf” harks back to the “secular” Christmas movie. It is about Santa, reindeer, the joy of song — it is about “the Christmas Spirit.” The carpenter of Nazareth gets nary a mention. “Elf” leaves the “Christ” out of Christmas. Favreau does appear in one scene as a doctor and lest you think he has completely forsaken the Maccabees, there is a menorah on the shelf behind him.

More to the point, Favreau has now joined the club of directors whose movies have broken the $100 million barrier. Success is power. Today’s Hollywood belongs to no religion — save a corporate one. The first generation owned the studios. Today they are owned by corporations and controlled in great part by non-Jews. Although there are many Jewish executives, they are merely employees, serving at the whim of the marketplace and their masters. According to lore, the Jews in ancient Egypt built the pyramids — but does anyone consider the pyramids Jewish? Nonetheless what is remarkable about this era is that filmmakers can now express how uncomfortable Christmas makes them. Last year, Larry David, our poet laureate of discomfort, milked his resentment of Christmas into a hysterical and embarrassing episode of “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” called, “Mary, Joseph and Larry.”

Still nothing prepared me for “Bad Santa,” written and directed by Terry Zwigoff, a movie where the self-loathing hits toxic and keeps going. There are some very funny bits, and there also some moments when you just can’t believe what you just heard or saw on screen. Yet, there have been no major protests concerning this desecration of holiday traditions — most likely because the attack is on the secular Christmas, not the religious.

Finally, the 21st century has been witness to a landmark event: the release of the first animated Chanukah feature-length movie, Adam Sandler’s “Eight Crazy Nights.” Personally, I find Sandler’s cretin-savant aesthetic endearing because, although his mind may be trapped in adolescence, his heart inevitably is in the right place. That and he’s wicked funny. So phase three, it turns out, is about options. When we turn on the television or go to the multiplex, we the see the ghosts of Jewish Christmas movies past, present and future. These represent the world as it might be, as we wish it was and as it is — both good and bad. There have always been and will always be Christmas movies and, in a true democracy, Jews will continue to make them, just as non-Jews will make films from Jewish material. And each film will, for each generation, serve as a sign of how far we have come, and of where we are at. Happy Holidays.

I used to have this Thanksgiving Day ritual in New York: no matter what I was doing, or where I was going, I would find a way to be near a radio around 11:30 a.m., to tune in to WNEW-FM 102.7’s broadcast of Arlo Guthrie’s “Alice’s Restaurant,” in its entirety, in all its musical and comedic glory.

Over the last few years in Los Angeles, I’ve acquired a similar accidentally/on purpose habit: every year around this time, I manage to stumble onto Ruth Seymour’s annual Chanukah tribute to Yiddish, “Philosophers, Fiddlers & Fools,” on KCRW-FM 89.9. This year the show will air on Dec. 19, from noon-3 p.m. It’s the 25th anniversary program.

Radio is a very personal medium, and to be driving around in the bright sunshine and suddenly happen upon a Yiddish song from the days of the Second Avenue Theater — or hear a short story by a Yiddish master — is surreal. But the show is so personal, so eclectic, so compelling, that on more than one occasion I’ve found myself waiting in the parking lot to hear the end of a song or rushing back to my car after a meeting to hear what Seymour would play next.

Seymour’s credentials as a Yiddishist are impeccable: as a young girl growing up in the Bronx, she attended school at Sholem Aleichem; later at the City College of New York she studied under the great Yiddish scholar Max Weinreich. Back then, Seymour feared for the future of the language. However, Weinreich said to her: “Yiddish is magic. It will outlive history.”

Seymour joined KCRW in 1977, when the radio signal barely broadcast beyond Hollywood and their offices were located at John Adams Middle School — you had to cross the playground to enter the station. In 1978, Seymour, feeling that in a society that is overwhelmingly Christmas-oriented “we should do something for Chanukah,” created a program whose format has remained consistent to this day.

Regardless of when Chanukah begins, the show is always on a Friday so Seymour can wish her listeners a “good yontif” (happy holiday — a traditional greeting for the Sabbath and holidays). The first part is traditional folk music — and the selections are often eclectic with recordings from the United States, Romania, France and Canada.

The second part is a memorial section where Seymour plays such songs as the Warsaw Ghetto Partisan’s song, “Zog Nit Kayn Mol” (Never Say), as well as “Ani Ma’amin” (I Believe). She always ends this section by reading the final page of Andre Schwarz-Bart’s elegiac novel, “The Last of the Just.”

The third is a dramatic reading of a short story. One of the highlights, Seymour recalled, was the year Lauren Bacall read “A Ghetto Dog” by Isaiah Spiegel. This year, Theodore Bikel will read the late Isaac Bashevis Singer’s “Androgynous,” which was recently published in The New Yorker.

The final hour is what Seymour calls “the Second Avenue Hit Parade,” where she plays many of the old chestnuts — songs so familiar you forgot you even still knew them.

For Seymour, Yiddish remains the language of exile, of the galut (Diaspora) — it is the mamaloshen (the mother tongue). The program is a chance to share her heritage, which has informed a great part of her character. The Chanukah program, Seymour confesses, is “a love letter to my own childhood.”

The irony is that when Seymour first conceived the show, Yiddish seemed to be disappearing. Today there are more recordings than ever. The Milken Archive of American Jewish Music has just released “Great Songs from the Yiddish Stage: Abraham Ellstein (1907-1963).” That this CD is marked “Volume 1” speaks volumes in and of itself.

Need more evidence of a resurgence of Yiddish? This week, the California Institute for Yiddish Culture and Language in Marina del Rey is offering intensive classes in language and culture as well as a Dec. 20 concert at UCLA featuring Bikel.

Earlier I mentioned Singer’s passing because you wouldn’t guess it by his literary output. Since his death in 1991, Singer has published several novels, including my dream film project, “Shadows on the Hudson,” and many short stories. Frankly, I am equal parts jealous and annoyed that Singer has published more dead than I probably will alive. The whole point of dying is that other people get a turn — in estate law they have “Rule Against Perpetuities.” But apparently not at Singer’s publishing house.

That being said, it is worth noting that Singer’s “new” publications (originally published in Yiddish in the Forverts), reveal an earthier, darker side than his American image as a grandfatherly imp, the Yiddish Yoda. For example, “Shadows” is the underside of “Enemies: A Love Story” — a novel of “Survivors Gone Wild” in the New World. Similarly, “Androgynous” can be seen as the darker version of “Yentl” — not a woman who wants to be a man, but a woman who is both a man and a woman.

Nonetheless, Seymour still has cause for concern: she is worried about Yiddish being used as a marketing ploy in countries without Jews. Also, when the show first aired, “this one program received more mail than any other during the rest of the year combined. That,” she admits, “has diminished.”

“I no longer feel I am single-handedly keeping Yiddish alive,” Seymour says, “Now, it’s just a Chanukah program.”

Let me correct Seymour: it’s not just a Chanukah show — it’s a tradition, accidentally/on purpose. As for keeping the magic of Yiddish alive, Bikel said it best: “Yiddish is like the theater, ‘the fabulous invalid,’ always dying, never dead.”

For more information on the concert, call (310) 745-1190, or visit www.yiddishinstitute.org.