It’s a Friday night and an overflow crowd is jammed into the penthouse of the former May Co. store on Wilshire Boulevard — now Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) West — to hear a conversation between French journalist and philosopher Bernard-Henri Levy and The New Yorker’s Adam Gopnik.

Presiding over this abundance of intelligence is Paul Holdengräber, the founder and director of LACMA’s Institute for Art and Cultures (IAC). Holdengräber is erudite, worldly, self-deprecating and all the more charming for being so, equal parts Joel Grey in “Cabaret,” and Humphrey Bogart in “Casablanca.”

As a swimmer in the shallower pools of life in Los Angeles, there is something shocking (and exciting) about all these people hungry to hear intellectuals go at it in the Southland. It makes you want to ask: who is Paul Holdengräber and what is he doing in Los Angeles?

Holdengräber often describes his position as being akin to the “art of the dinner party” and his goal, he told me recently, is nothing more or less than to animate the intellectual life of Los Angeles. In many ways, this is the perfect job for Holdengräber — if it didn’t exist he would have had to invent it. Actually, as matter of fact, he did.

Five years ago, Holdengräber, then a fellow at the Getty Research Institute, approached LACMA about creating an institute for art and cultures. He argued that a museum should not be a mausoleum, that it should have an intellectual mission.

“I wanted to expand the definition of ‘museum,’” he said. Holdengräber argued that just as curators exhibited talented visual artists, he wanted to bring some of the most articulate thinkers, critics and writers to engage in debate and create a public forum for ideas about art and culture. LACMA decided to give Holdengräber a shot and the IAC was born.

Since 1998, Holdengräber has hosted conversations with Pierre Boulez and Frank Gehry, Esa-Pekka Salonen, Peter Sellars, Susan Sontag, Pico Iyer, André Aciman, R.B. Kitaj and David Hockney. The institute hosts a dozen events a year.

Many, like the evening I attended, are sold out. The crowd is a mix of old and young, Eastside and Westside, industry and civilian. Just this week, on Dec. 4, former Talking Head and multimedia artist David Byrne gave a presentation, “I Love PowerPoint.”

In many ways, Holdengräber’s position is the culmination of his upbringing and education. The son of Viennese Jews who fled Austria before the Anschluss, only to find refuge first in Haiti and then in Mexico, Holdengräber spent much of his formative years on the move, living in Mexico, Switzerland, Austria, Belgium and France.

He studied law and philosophy at Louvain in Belgium and earned a doctorate in comparative literature at Princeton, before teaching for several years at Williams, the University of Miami and Claremont College. He arrived in Los Angeles in 1995.

Holdengräber, raised in the old world, has brought his sensibilities to the new world. Although he would have loved to have been among the cafes of Vienna at the start of the 20th century — to have known Schnitzler and Zweig — he sees his current position as the opportunity to make Los Angeles a forum for ideas of the 21st century. “For once, I’m in the right city at the right time,” he said.

“Los Angeles,” Holdengräber said, “is a work in progress. You have to expend effort.” To make it work, he said, “you have to interact.”

That, in a nutshell, is Holdengräber’s mission — to make us interact, to engage, to inspire us, as he puts it so well, “to pursue the journey of knowing.”

As we all know, it is easy to be complacent in Los Angeles. The entertainment industry can reduce one’s spectrum to a world of pitches and spec scripts, of hot manuscripts and trade-related gossip focusing on who’s in and who’s out at the agencies and studios. What appears in Variety and The Hollywood Reporter drives the conversation, fueling an inner life that swings between envy and schadenfreude. That world can be stifling.

Some weeks it seems that the search for intellectual life in Los Angeles is limited to getting a copy of the Paris Hilton video. Although now that I’ve managed to work the tape into this column, I would like to say one thing to Mr. Solomon and Ms. Hilton: Used to be all a nice Jewish boy and his shiksa goddess girlfriend had to do to piss off their parents was show up at their parents’ home for dinner — boy oh boy, have you two raised the stakes!

In any event, over the last year in writing this column, I have discovered another Los Angeles — Friday luncheons for fellows of the L.A. Institute for the Humanities, panels at the Skirball, the Villa Aurora and UCLA LIVE’s ever-more eclectic programs. Each, in its own way, is altering the consciousness of Los Angeles.

Holdengräber wants his LACMA debates “to act as an aphrodisiac.” Who can argue with that?

For more information about LACMA’s Institute for Art and Cultures, visit www.lacmainstitute.org.

At 14, I had never read a book outside of school assignments — certainly not for pleasure. I was more of a comic book kid. My parents were concerned and even asked one of my friends to talk to me. I just wasn’t interested.

But I liked hanging out at Marboro books in Manhattan. Marboro was a New York book chain that sold books and posters and had large tables with discounted books stacked on them, many for 99 cents. There were piles of art books, coffee-table books and Victorian erotica, a very good way to encourage browsing in a teenager.

I spent hours studying “The Art of the Limerick” — poetry for adolescents of all ages. To this day, ply me with enough vodka and I may start recalling memorized couplets about complicated couplings.

In my teen years, also known as the meta-spastic era, parents were more concerned about grades than child safety, hence the expression: “You do better in that class or your father will kill you.” I think my mother actually said, “disappointed,” which in my home was worse than death.

As a corollary, teenagers roamed Manhattan unsupervised, mini-Lewis and Clarks searching to chart the territory and hoping to make discoveries. One particular afternoon found me making my way up Third Avenue, past Woolworth’s, Alexander’s and Bloomingdale’s. I wandered into Marboro.

On that particular afternoon, one of the long-haired college students working there started talking to me. He asked me what kind of books I liked. I said I didn’t know.

He asked if I had read “Catcher in the Rye” and did I like it? Of course. But who didn’t?

He explained that school could only teach you certain things. There was an alternative education out there, and those were things you needed to teach yourself. He gave me three books to read — a sort of anti-establishment trilogy: Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World,” George Orwell’s “1984” and Richard Farina’s “Been Down So Long it Looks Like Up to Me,” which he described as Holden finally goes to college.

I never saw that book clerk again. The next time I went in he was gone. But I read those novels. And after that, I never stopped reading.

I read all of Huxley. My favorite was “After Many a Summer Dies the Swan,” which given that it is a novel devoted to a comic look at Hollywood narcissism, seems prescient of my current interests and affectations. I read more Orwell and every spring until I went to college I re-read “Been Down So Long.”

Farina made me want to be a writer. Although I’ve never thought about it — until this moment as I write this — there’s a bit of Farina in my columns.

There is a great debate about how kids learn and who they learn from. To what extent do we attribute genetics, how much influence do teachers or curriculum have, what role do peers play in what we learn?

Regardless of where you come out on this, we are all, to one extent or another, autodidacts, self-taught, self-invented — and, in the long haul, it is not just what we are taught that is important but what sticks with us, what we remember.

A guy in a bookstore started me on a lifetime of reading. If my life were broken down into episodes of “Joan of Arcadia,” I might think he was a divine messenger.

I would say it never happened again. But something like it did happen just two years ago. My wife and I were at a car wash in Santa Barbara. Another woman was waiting, and we got to talking.

She was teaching at UC Santa Barbara and finishing up her doctorate in literature. What was her thesis on? George Eliot. I told her I was a big “Middlemarch” fan — the first 400 pages are slow, but after that….

She told me I had to read “Daniel Deronda” and strangely enough I believed her. I never saw her again either.

About two months later, my mother died. As I rambled around the house in midnight insomnia bouts looking for something to read, I started in on “Daniel Deronda.” I had found no solace in contemporary work, but I became absorbed with this 19th-century classic.

November is Jewish book month, so let me say this: “Daniel Deronda” is one of the greatest Jewish books ever written by a non-Jew. It is two different books, one about a beautiful young woman, Gwendolen, who decides on a bad marriage, and Daniel who is tempted by Gwendolen but falls for Mirah — a Jewish woman — and gets involved in her family, even as he discovers that he is, in fact, Jewish himself.

Deronda forces us to consider the price we pay for compromise, for not following our heart. At the same time, it also ponders facing our decisions, our lives and making the best of them. At the same time, the arguments concerning assimilation, a Jewish nation and life in the Diaspora are so contemporary as to seem ripped from the pages of, well, The Jewish Journal.

Books can give direction to a 14-year-old, give comfort and solace to one in mourning, can explain the world at whatever age or stage of life. Seems like just yesterday, I was at Marboro books, memorizing: “There was a young man from Siam….”

This weekend the story of Los Angeles, and its future, is all about one building, the Walt Disney Concert Hall. Critics have already hailed our new symphony hall as a triumph of design, determination and a marriage of form, function and acoustic feng shui. But more significantly, in the Walt Disney Concert Hall, Los Angeles is finally acknowledging Frank Gehry’s central role in our culture. One building, as Gehry taught us with Bilbao, can change a city (even as the destruction of buildings, such as the World Trade Center, can change not only a city, but a nation — even the world).

Real estate touches our lives so pervasively that sometimes we take its impact for granted. The buildings we live in, the ones in which we work, what we see as we make our daily rounds — their shape, the materials they are made of, their density, how we interact with them and the light and air — all aggregate to inform the character of our city. Some of this is planned, some is happenstance, some is just business.

So this column is about real estate and two men: Frank Gehry and Larry Field, friends and, on occasion, partners, who shape this city. Gehry is the man of the moment; Field is best known in real estate circles. In some ways they couldn’t be more different — in politics, temperament, personal interests. Yet, both are men who see, in the jumble of Los Angeles, what is real.

Real estate: Gehry builds it, transforms it, makes it usable, memorable. Field buys it, leases it, develops it. Real estate has fed their families, made them rich. Neither was born here, but both have made Los Angeles home.

Field was born in the Bronx and moved to Los Angeles in 1965. He had been in the real estate business in New York and started out by managing some downtown commercial properties. Very quickly he realized that Los Angeles was a real estate bargain. Even in the best areas, such as Mid-Wilshire, commercial property sold for $10 a square foot while in New York comparable properties went for $25-$40 a square foot. He also realized that Los Angeles was one of those cities, like New York, that people from all over the country and all over the world moved to when they had made money elsewhere. Over the last 30 years he has developed more than 1 million square feet, primarily on the Westside. His company is called NSB, and Field is often heard to say “not so bad,” which is exactly how he has done.

Around the beginning of 1977, Field bought two square blocks of commercial property on Main Street in Venice, seven and a half acres, for $1 million. One day, he got a call from a young architect, Gehry, who wanted to buy a parcel of the Venice property. That’s how they first met.

For his part, Gehry moved to Los Angeles from Canada with his family as a teenager. Although he went east to MIT to study, he wasn’t interested in playing by East Coast rules. He came back to Los Angeles and eventually settled in Santa Monica, where he lives to this day.

At that time, art collector Fred Weisman wanted Gehry to build an art museum to house his collection. In no time, Weisman, Gehry and Field joined together to develop the parcel as museum, commercial space and below market artist’s studios. However the Jewish community from the Venice synagogue came out in force against them saying they threatened the senior citizens’ community. They abandoned the project. Field’ property became home to Gold’s Gym, The Rose Café and the Gas Company building. Gehry eventually sold his parcel to Jay Chiat who in turn had Gehry build the Venice landmark, the Chiat/Day Building, which many (including my daughter) call “the binoculars building.”

A few years later, when Gehry and artist Chuck Arnoldi wanted to buy a building at Brooks, they asked Field to be a partner in return for investing his money. Field explained that Gehry didn’t need him; the bank would finance the purchase. As Gehry says today, “He could have been greedy. He could have inserted himself. He didn’t. He was very generous.”

Field and Gehry became friends. Field does not know many artists; Gehry does not socialize with many real estate developers. Their friendship allows them to speak honestly and openly to each other about family and work — about things that are real.

Now more than 30 years later, they are finally partners in a real estate deal. When Gehry needed new offices, he called Field. Field found them a giant Playa Vista warehouse that BMW used to own. Gehry took the back half and has his offices there and is designing the front as two office spaces — there are many Gehry design touches — an interior street between the front and back halves, a garden and a cafe (which will be run by Field’ daughter, Lisa, who has a catering firm). The front offices are under construction and will be ready by January. At the same time, Gehry has asked Field to be a director in his new company, Gehry Technologies (the design software Gehry pioneered).

“After all these years, I wanted to give something back to Larry,” Gehry said recently.

Field looks at real estate and he sees what could be there. Gehry is famous for using everyday materials: chain link, plywood, cardboard. He has made metal curve in ways even Uri Geller could not have imagined. Both men have had an enormous impact on the character of the Westside. They are able to see what sometimes we can’t or what we take for granted. They make it real.

Reality TV is nothing new. Since the dawn of television, there have always been unscripted formats and game shows of one kind or another. However, the current incarnation of reality programming — shows such as “Survivor,” “The Bachelor,” and “Fear Factor” — may be the most durable and successful shows in the history of reality programming. What’s more, reality TV is the most innovative area of current programming, far more creative than sitcoms, hour-long dramas, sports, news or movies and miniseries. In fact, it may be helpful to think of current reality shows as game shows or “event programming” much like the highly touted TV movies of the 1970s and ’80s.

I learned all this and more when I attended a recent panel at The Museum of Television and Radio in Beverly Hills called, “Keeping it Real: The Past, Present and Future of Reality Television.”

Hosted by the museum’s vice president and director Barbara Dixon, the panelists included the producers and executives most responsible for the current craze, including Mike Darnell, Fox’s reality guru; Mike Fleiss, the executive producer of the highly addictive “The Bachelor” and “The Bachelorette”; Ghen Maynard, the CBS executive behind “Survivor”; Jonathan Murray of Bunim-Murray’s “The Real World” and “Road Rules”; Arnold Shapiro, who produces “Big Brother”; Scott Stone, of Stone Stanley Productions, who produced “Celebrity Mole” and “Fame”; and Andrea Wong, ABC’s reality exec.

Dixon led the panel in a discussion of their programs’ antecedents and influences: the 1973 PBS documentary, “An American Family”; raw reality shows like “COPS” and “Rescue 911,” which Shapiro produced; and MTV’s “The Real World.” I am happy to tell you that neither Dickens nor Shakespeare was cited, but these are intelligent people who know exactly what they are doing.

What I learned was this: When all is said and done, a reality show is about inexpensive, compelling TV programming. Like scripted shows, reality programs are driven by story and character, and sold on an explosive idea that you can promote in 30 seconds. Casting is critical — it’s part of how the producers influence story. The audiences are, for the most part, women ages 18-34. Although there is no script, there is editing and music and the host to help shape a final product.

You may think that anything goes, but the producers are keenly conscious of the shifting lines they will not cross. As one panelist put it bluntly, “No one wants to have the first show that someone dies on.” But one thing is clear: the producers and executives are following their gut instincts to guess what it is America wants.

Darnell, the executive who was reality TV before reality TV was cool (remember “When Animals Attack”?) described the current shows as “social psychology experiments.” Darnell is right, perhaps more than he knows.

One hundred years ago, as Neal Gabler so ably chronicled in “An Empire of Their Own,” a group of mostly Jewish immigrants and their children settled in California and founded a movie industry that defined the American dream from their own inner strivings, dreams and projections.

Today, television reaches far more Americans than movies. More hours of television programming are devoted to reality than to news. I would argue that it is no coincidence that these are the producers and executives defining our reality.

Looking out at the panel — what you did not see was prototypical all-Americans, Mayflower descendants or the prom king and queen. They are, as a group, the outsiders.

Fleiss says he turned to reality TV because he was a failed sitcom writer. Wang started in strategic planning; Maynard in drama. Darnell has endured a lifetime of mocking on his road to success.

For the first generation of movie moguls it was enough to present America as they imagined it. But for these executives and producers, born in America, living in California, the children and grandchildren of immigrants (literally or figuratively), they have looked inward to create programming based on their own neurotic reactions to the American dream.

What are “Survivor,” “Fear Factor,” “Big Brother,” “Joe Millionaire” and “American Idol” if not the inner drama of the outsider wanting to conquer the American mainstream? Each show is like the deepest anxiety of any teenager: Will I be tough enough? Am I a wimp? Is everyone watching me? Do people like me for me? And increasingly, there is another question in America: Can I be famous?

Consider these programs: 25 women vie for the attention of one bachelor; 25 men vie for the affections of one dream woman. Are these our dreams, or the revenge fantasy of the outcast? And just who considers their children such princes or princesses? How about this show: Parents choose the right partner for their child, resorting to a lie-detector test at one point. Whose parents interfere too much in their child’s selection of a mate? Just ask Nia Vardalos, who made a fortune off her “Big Fat Greek Wedding.” She knows.

If you asked these producers and executives about their inspiration, they would say one thing: they create shows that first, they believe they can sell, and second, shows whose concepts grab them. It is a subjective call — and that’s the point — their own sensibilities are informing America’s reality. One-hundred years after the moguls ruled Hollywood, a new generation has plumbed its own dreams and neuroses to create a reality of its own.

In the coming weeks I will spend many dreamy hours inside Wilshire Boulevard Temple. Two blocks east of Western on Wilshire, the landmark building is an imposing and awe-inspiring architectural gem that belongs to that school of temple architecture that says: We Jews are citizens, and our house of worship is as glorious as any non-Jewish one — maybe more so.

Wilshire Boulevard Temple was completed in 1929, the same year as New York’s Temple Emanu-El, the world’s largest synagogue. The world’s second-largest synagogue is the Dohany Utca Synagogue in Budapest, Hungary, dedicated in 1859. I was in Budapest last week and spent time in the synagogue thinking about my own family’s deep connection to the city, wondering whether Los Angeles will be the Budapest of the 21st century.

One hundred years ago, Budapest was home to the wealthiest, most educated, most assimilated Jewish society since — to paraphrase JFK — Moses Maimonides dined alone. Hungarian Jews essentially formed the middle and upper class of Hungarian society, dominating business, science, arts and letters. They even had their own liberal variant of Judaism called “Neolog” of which the Dohany was its temple.

My connections to Budapest and to the Dohany synagogue run deep. My great-grandfather, Bela Hatschek, was married in the Dohany Temple, on July 4, 1886. His mother-in-law, Jeannette Reizer Back, attended the wedding and her grave marker still stands in the Salgotarjani Utca cemetery which I visited last week. Bela Hatschek owned Budapest’s first car, a 1894 Benz Velo which he brought in from Germany on a flatbed train in 1896. His daughter Adrienne (my grandmother) married Kornel Saar. She was a stage actress who performed at Budapest’s Opera House. Kornel Saar, my grandfather, was related to Theodore Herzl, who lived in the building next to the Dohany Temple and which now houses the Jewish Museum.

As a young girl my mother attended the Dohany Temple, looking out from the balcony to check out the young men downstairs. She too was an actress, and she performed small roles in films, including one I watched recently written by Erno Szep who would later write the Holocaust memoir, “The Smell of Humans.”

My father was born in Poland but spent part of the war years in Budapest. In 1988, a Holocaust memorial was dedicated in the courtyard of the Dohany Synagogue. I attended with my parents, at which time my father was given an award in the Dohany Utca Synagogue for his work on behalf of Hungarian Jewry. My father died 10 years ago. Since then a plaque was placed on the memorial in his honor, which I got to see for the first time last week. It reads “Bruce B. Teicholz, a leader of the Jewish Resistance, 1942-1945, he will be remembered for the lives he saved.”

At one time, one-third of all Budapest’s residents were Jewish. By the 1930s, many Hungarian Jews had changed their German-sounding names to Hungarian ones.

There are those who would see in the assimilation of Hungarian Jewry a morality tale, with the Nazis and the Holocaust being the price one pays. But the reality is that the Nazis were nondenominational in their anti-Semitism, murdering Chasids alongside converts to Christianity. The lesson, if there is one, is that assimilation affords no protection from anti-Semitism. But that does not mean that the success of Budapest’s Jewish community cannot inspire us today in Los Angeles.

When the first National Jewish Population Survey was published a decade ago, pundits and proselytizers argued that the only way to stem the loss of Jewish identity was to combat the dual sins of assimilation and intermarriage. Suddenly, Jewish day schools were opening as fast as coffee joints. Now a new survey has been published, and it once again begs the question: What is the best way to cultivate a vibrant Jewish population?

I say we focus on the majority of Jews who view their Judaism as one item on a list of characteristics that begins with American. Let us celebrate Jewish values, Jewish culture, Jewish achievement. Let us not be afraid to have Judaism be a part of who we are, but also a part of being American. Let us make Los Angeles the Budapest of the 21st century, a place where Judaism is part and parcel of the city’s cultural landscape.

Southern California influences TV, movies, fashion, sports and science.

Los Angeles is where the world’s Jewish communities are migrating. We have one of the oldest exile communities, the Persian Jews, right here. The European exiles of the 1930s as well as plenty of New Yorkers and a healthy dose of Israelis and citizens from the former Soviet Republics travel down the same freeways. All are potent ingredients for a 21st Century goulash that speaks of our strengths as a people and as a community. That’s food for thought — or at least what I’ll be thinking about as I gaze upon the gorgeous murals inside the Wilshire Boulevard Temple.

I had planned to spend my summer in Hollywood. I had teed up on my reading list “Maneater” by Gigi Levangie Grazer, “Action!” by Robert Cort and “San Remo Drive” by Leslie Epstein. But, as Primo Levi used to say, life proved otherwise.

I had high hopes for “Maneater.” I like Grazier’s scripts and, as the wife of producer Brian Grazer, she is uniquely poised to see and hear a lot of dish. However, the accumulation of sordid details overwhelmed me. It was like being at an extravagant buffet where you keep tasting to find the best bits but end the evening with a stomachache. It put me off my reading plan. It turns out that one swallow of “Maneater” does a summer make.

Instead, I found myself one evening at Villa Aurora, a mansion in the Pacific Palisades. In the 1940s, German novelist Lion Feuchtwanger lived there, and his home became a salon for émigré intellectuals. Today it is home to a foundation devoted to bringing European intellectuals to Los Angeles.

I was the guest of the Getty Museum’s own resident European intellectual and newly minted noble, Sir Kenneth (“Just call me Ken”) Robinson. Ken, the Getty’s education Guru, is very funny and very charming, but the evening, devoted to translation, was painfully boring. So much so that we both fled and consoled ourselves with burgers at Father’s Office — so the evening wasn’t a total loss. Also we did manage a quick tour of Feuchtwanger’s private library. The names on the bindings — Stefan Sweig, Herman Broch, Arthur Schnitzler — belonged to another era. But they reminded me that not every novel need explain (and feel like) a Brazilian bikini wax.

So I found myself returning to Central Europe for my summer reading. I had not been there in a long, long time. Once upon a time, in a galaxy far away called high school, I got hooked on German novels. I read all of Hermann Hesse, from “Siddhartha” (very high school hippie), to the dark “Steppenwolf” and ending up at the esoteric “The Glass Bead Game.” It was only a short few years later that I was scaling that literary Everest, Thomas Mann’s “The Magic Mountain.” I got so in so deep I developed a psychosomatic fever. Soon after I left the Germans for the Russians. Goodbye Hans Castorp, hello Prince Mishkin! As I said, it was a long time ago.

So this summer, whether by chance or intent, the three best novels I read were all from the other side of the Atlantic, all from Mitteleuropa: “Crabwalk” by Gunter Grass, “Embers” by Sandor Marai and “Azarel” by Karoly Pap.

“Embers” might well be the best novel I’ve read this year. Little happens — yet the novel is about all that is important in life. An old man living in an ancestral castle deep in the Carpathian forest receives a dinner visit from the best friend of his youth, who left his home without explanation 41 years ago — after which the old general never spoke to his wife again. Was there a betrayal? Will a duel ensue? Will all be explained? That is what keeps you turning the pages. (Fellow producers, hold on: It’s already been optioned and will star Sean Connery and Winona Ryder.) Marai was born in Hungary in 1900, but arrived in the United States after the Holocaust. He lived for many years in San Diego where he died in 1989 — a suicide.

“Crabwalk” explores German guilt in three successive generations surrounding the sinking of a German ship, the Wilhelm Gustloff, by the Russians, a true event with a greater civilian toll than the sinking of the Titanic. Nobel prize-winning Grass’ deftness as a novelist allows him to “crabwalk” sideways in time and plot to discuss the Holocaust, neo-Nazi revisionists, Stalin and German reunification. It is a masterful work that raises important questions while providing a gripping drama that surprises to the end.

Finally, “Azarel” is a lost classic recently translated and published in English by Steerforth Press. Originally published in Budapest in 1937, “Azarel” tells the story of a young child who not only rebels against his family — modern Orthodox Hungarian Jews — but also against God. At the time, “Azarel” was regarded as controversial for several reasons: Literary writers, even those who were Jewish, never wrote about Jewish matters. Pap did so, but in a Hungarian understandable to Jew and non-Jew alike. Second, he didn’t write about Jews in Hungarian society, rather he revealed the inner dramas of the observant community. Finally, he cast a critical eye on the believers and the hypocrisy of those who observed but didn’t believe. Pap ominously predicted that Hungarian Jews would disappear in a pyre of their own making. This did not endear him to the Hungarian Jewish community.

In 1944, Pap was arrested for being a Jew and sent to Buchenwald. There, his fellow inmates offered to smuggle him out so he could write about the camp. He refused. In 1945 he was transferred to Bergen-Belsen where he died.

“Azarel” is a tough read. The sentences are terse, the writing dense. Pages do not fly by. I had to take a break halfway in. But it is the intensity of Pap’s emotion and his powers of observation that make “Azarel” a literary masterwork that feels contemporary — as if Daphne Merkin and Allegra Goodman had rewritten Harold Brodkey.

My summer in Mitteleuropa was, to quote The Grateful Dead, “a long strange trip.” But like all good vacations, my summer reading took me to places I’d never been, taught me things I never knew and gave me pleasures I never expected. All that without ever leaving home.

What, you may be asking yourself, is the next hot trend? The style universe looks to Los Angeles in general, and this column in particular, for those cutting-edge trends that define the culture. No wonder this column has become such a favorite of trendsetters and fashionistas everywhere. (Nonetheless, I continue to deny “sexing up” reports for W, Ingrid Sischy, Kal Ruttenstein, Bonnie Fuller or Hello! Magazine — no matter what the BBC claims.)

But back to the future: A movement is happening. L.A. women — for whom kabbalah is so two years ago — who’ve been wearing Havaiana flip-flops since way before last summer, are meeting all over town. They’re finished with health clubs, they’re beyond personal trainers. They may have their own yoga mats, but they’ve long abandoned Yoga Works, Bikram and Maha Yoga and moved on to a smaller studio you haven’t heard of — yet. They no longer care about Manolos, think Jimmy Choos are for “Sex and the City” clones and Sigerson Morrison was yesterday. They’re over with Burberry’s plaids. No. No. No. So what are the relentlessly trendy up to?

What they are doing is playing mahjongg. That’s right. The American version of the ancient Chinese tile game once played by old ladies in Miami Beach is now the passion of the beyond-fashion-forward women in Los Angeles. I refer, of course, to my wife and her friends. Listen closely, and you’ll hear the click clack of tiles and hands moving around the table.

I date the current mahjongg explosion to the moment when Jill Nadlman’s monthly all-woman poker game decided to learn “maahj,” as they call it. They’re in so deep they started a separate maahj evening. Word got around. Suddenly maahj is everywhere.

There’s a game happening over breakfast at the Kinara Spa and Cafe on Robertson Boulevard. Someone’s got a room at the Bel Air Hotel for afternoon games. Last week, there was a lunch at a private home in Beverly Hills. You won’t be surprised to hear that a group of übermoms from the Center for Early Education have a group. Or that the A-list at Brentwood needed to have their own. It is spreading — fast.

Which is why I am sitting in Johnni Levene’s home in Rustic Canyon. Levene collects and deals in antique mahjongg sets. She has offered to show me her collection and give me a little tutorial in the “chirping sparrows” (mahjongg).

Mahjongg for the uninitiated, is a Chinese game with beginnings some attribute to Confucius himself. It was introduced to the English clubs in Shanghai in the early 1900s by two brothers named White. In 1920, Standard Oil’s man in Soochow, Joseph Babcock, came up with a standardized set of rules for Americans. By 1923, the craze was so big that sales of mahjongg sets topped $1.5 million in the United States.

Levene is an obsessive collector — her prior obsessions have included vintage aquarium mermaids (made in Japan in the 1950s), Victorian butterfly jewelry and Enid Collins purses. Five years ago, she spotted her first mahjongg set at a flea market. What she saw delighted and horrified her. She loved the artistry of the hand carved tiles, but someone had drilled holes in them to make them into bracelets. Levene now had a mission: She would rescue mahjongg sets from the drillers. Several hundred sets later, she is making headway.

The Chinese game was played with 144 tiles, the American is now played with 152 (144 plus eight jokers). Herein lies where collectors go crazy: some sets are incomplete. In some, the tiles have aged poorly. Levene lists the main criteria as: condition, color, artistry and rarity. What Levene does is restore and complete the sets, sometimes restoring not only the tiles, but the cradles they sit in and the cases that hold them. Like all things worth collecting, each can be a work of art.

There are more than 300 sets in Levene’s mahjongg room. Although sets have been made in bone, celluloid, ivory (mostly traveling sets) and modern plastics, Levene’s favorites are the bakelite/catalin sets, which were discontinued in the 1960s. Levene’s vintage sets run anywhere from $100 to $950. In her own collection, the holy grail is “enrobed” sets that feature two colors, one encircling the other.

Why mahjongg now? Levene suggest two reasons. First, after Sept. 11, more people wanted to stay in or entertain privately, and second, as she says, “It’s hard for girls to find something to do together.” (Better she says it than me.)

Levene is on to something: in Los Angeles a Chinese/Jewish tile game, played by our ancestors, creates bonds between women and history that no spiritual or athelitic trend can.

Personally, I was hoping the whole “pole dancing as exercise” fad was going to catch on. But fashion serves a fickle master. Right now the craze is for maahj. In Los Angeles, as Don Henley’s buddy, Thoreau, once said: “We worship not the Graces, nor the Parcae, but Fashion.”

“Mr. S, My Life With Frank Sinatra” by George Jacobs and William Stadiem is this summer’s guilty pleasure. Jacobs was Frank Sinatra’s valet from 1953 to 1968, and his memoirs are the excuse for a polished backstage tour of Sinatraland, a roller-coaster ride of the high life and the lowdown on almost every scandal, scoop, star, starlet, call girl and politician of the ’40s ’50s and ’60s.

I enjoy good gossip. Not the malicious betrayal of personal confidences, but the reported details of the lives of people I don’t know and probably will never meet. For me, the stories of the social and the social climbers, the arrived and the arriviste, accumulate like evidence to suggest patterns about human nature. Either that or they just entertain.

I can’t explain why the private dramas of people we don’t know are so compelling. But the Bible is filled with them. Imagine if the tabloids covered the Good Book. I can see the headlines now: Eve — Her Bite With the Serpent! Abraham and Sara: Their Struggle to Have a Child! Breaking News: Accused Cain’s Plaintive Plea: “Am I My Brother’s Keeper?” Time moves on, but we remain human. As Philip Roth suggested in “The Human Stain,” perhaps a banner should have been hung across the Clinton White House proclaiming: “A HUMAN BEING LIVES HERE.”

Cafe society has often inspired literature: Thackeray, Proust, Zola were all chroniclers of, as Balzac put it, “harlots high and low.” In our own time, newspaper gossip columns from Winchell to Rush & Molloy, have provided a running commentary on the demimonde as successive generations fade in and out of bold print. It’s not Howard Zinn’s “People’s History”; more like the People magazine history of “hanging out.” So let me be clear — lest you had any doubts — “Mr. S.” is not literature, but it is a fun read; an enjoyable dose of high-quality gossip.

George Jacobs, New Orleans born, black and Jewish (Sinatra got him interested in his religion, took him to Israel and arranged for his late-in-life bar mitzvah), was the outsider in the ultimate insider’s world. He found a kindred spirit in Bill Stadiem, in part because of Bill’s own outsider status, having grown up Southern and Jewish in North Carolina.

Stadiem is a friend of mine. We first met in a far-away galaxy called the 1980s. Stadiem was held up to me as someone who had achieved the remarkable: A Harvard Law grad, he had recently left Sullivan & Cromwell, the prestigious white-shoe Wall Street firm, and then wrote two books, “A Class by Themselves,” a serious volume on the Southern Aristocracy, and “Marilyn Monroe Confidential” a racy tome by Lena Pepitone, Marilyn Monroe’s maid.

Over the years, Stadiem continued to bounce between serious volumes such as “Too Rich,” a fascinating bio of Egypt’s King Farouk, and “Madame 90210,” the memoirs of Beverly Hills’ infamous Madame Alex. Stadiem has done it all, freelancing for every magazine here and in Europe, and selling the occasional screenplay (Stadiem wrote “Young Toscanini,” a Zeffirelli film that became a Liz Taylor fiasco).

One day attorney Henry Bushkin (as Johnny Carson used to call him) asked Stadiem to lunch at Matteo’s, the old-guard establishment in Westwood, to introduce him to Jacobs — who lives in Palm Springs as a master carpenter, and who was considering telling his story. I have joked that Stadiem should open a domestic agency so he can place future sources, but in George Jacobs, Stadiem found what he called, “a live one.”

As a result, “Mr. S” swings with style, filled with ring-a-ding-ding detail. Stadiem has poured a lifetime of accumulated gossip into every chapter. Stars, politicians, potentates, pimps, hookers, drug dealers — Stadiem knows these characters and as Jacobs brings them into the narrative, they are painted with verisimilitude. As the anecdotes accumulate — and many of the stories are too salacious to repeat here — you get a sense of the characters of Sinatra, Ava Gardner, Marilyn Monroe, Dean Martin, Sammy Davis, Jr., and the influences and events that propelled them onto the public imagination.

Unfortunately, the book turns sour at the end, and Sinatra, who early on is a complex but genuine character, morphs into a cruel, empty and unredeemed persona. Apparently, Hell hath no fury like a domestic dispatched.

Reading “Mr. S” it might be fair to ask, as reviewers have, how it is that George Jacobs — whose service to the Chairman of the Board ended in 1968 — could possibly recall so many details. Good question. It helps that most of the tarnished are no longer among the living.

For “Mr. S.,” as with most gossip columns, truth itself is, as fabulist Jerzy Kosinski once wrote, “a temporary resolution of various contradictions.” And a guilty pleasure of summer.

On Monday, July 7, Comedy Central will premiere the first of a six-part series called, “Heroes of Jewish Comedy.” Unfortunately, the series suffers for being a clip job not up to its subject. Less documentary and more comedy would help.

Produced in Britain, the show already seems dated (the series has high hopes for NBC’s “The In-Laws,” a show that has already been canceled). The narration, read by iconic TV Semite Judd Hirsch, is equally underwhelming.

As my mind wandered while watching, I thought of a bleak future where the direst predictions of professional Jewish pessimists had come true: the Jewish race had disappeared, and all that was left was Holocaust memorials and Jewish museums showing this video in a hall with dioramas of Tussaud-like wax figures doing shtick. A frightening thought.

Not to worry. The true heroes of Jewish comedy in television, much like their counterparts in film, are not Jewish — at least not on screen. They remain offscreen — the writers and executives who borrowed their own personal history to create characters whose values and humor inform the American experience. This is the real assimilation — of Jewish experience and values into American culture or, as I like to call it, “the bagelization of America.”

Currently the most popular sitcom on television is “Everybody Loves Raymond.” Fortunately, our home has been earthquake retrofitted, because when Raymond comes on, our house shakes, literally, with my laughter. As the credits reveal, the show is based on the comedy of Ray Romano, but the show’s success owes much to executive producer Phil Rosenthal (former maitre d’ at New York’s PJ Bernstein Deli) and his aesthetic of pain. The Barone family may be Italian but their family psychopathology is Jewish — the vain cruel love his mother offers, the father’s aggression, his brother’s resentment, Ray’s simultaneous embarassment, disdain and love of his parents. Rosenthal’s credentials as a child of Holocaust survivors are assured (trust me on this).

“Something Ain’t Kosher Here: The Rise of the Jewish Sitcom” by Vincent Brook details a history that begins with “The Goldbergs,” hits its apogee with “Seinfeld” and concludes that “Jewish representation on TV is no longer a big deal; it appears to be a done deal.” But again, that is only if you imagine that Jewish representation is what matters.

Let’s look at the history of sitcoms another way. In the beginning, working as a sitcom writer was a profession for people who were not going to be accepted in the mainstream. Jewish kids who became comics were never going to college, or were fleeing the garment industry (Carl Reiner, for example). The career path, such as it was, went: borscht belt, standup, gag writing, radio, TV. But, in class-conscious America, humor was still lower class

In the late 1960s, Doug Kenney and Henry Beard found success at the Harvard Lampoon creating parody magazines. Upon graduation, they saw no reason to get serious. Instead, they founded The National Lampoon, a magazine that captured the zeitgeist and launched the ambitions, and careers, of a generation of humorists. Only a few short years later, the pair sold out for millions. Suddenly a career in comedy became respectable.

The National Lampoon begot a radio program and then a stage show, “Lemmings,” whose cast members were recruited by Lorne Michaels for “Saturday Night Live” and were managed by Bernie Brillstein, who partnered with Brad Grey to form Brillstein-Grey Entertainment. No one would accuse Brillstein, Grey or Michaels of being part of a Jewish media cabal (at least no one we would listen to), but, like the movie moguls a century ago, their thumbprints are all over American humor. (In a similar fashion, if you look up the credits of James L. Brooks, Allan Burns and James Burrows, you get a list of almost every sitcom on TV.) But let me return to the history of employment opportunities for Harvard grads.

The next landmark occurred in the early 1990s, when Andy and Susan Borowitz created “The Fresh Prince of Bel Air,” a show about joining the mainstream in America without losing your identity. The show was based on the experiences of Benny Medina and starred the charismatic Will Smith — an African American — yet the Borowitzes, who themselves were Harvard Lampoon graduates, wrote a show that all Americans, but especially Jews, felt mirrored their experience “moving on up,” as the Jeffersons used to say.

The Borowitzes own success made being a sitcom writer a respectable and lucrative career. For a while there it seemed as if there was a direct path from the Lampoon to writing on a show. It also established the precedent for a series of shows, starring charismatic African Americans (“In Living Color,” “Martin,” “The Jamie Foxx Show,” “Bernie Mac”) staffed by Jewish American writers. The boom years have past, but sitcom writing still remains an acceptable career ambition.

“Remember,” I purr in my daughter’s ear each night before she falls asleep, “funny is money.”

Nonetheless, we also need to credit the executives themselves. The late Brandon Tartikoff comes to mind, but we can also look to leadership of Colin Callender, president at HBO, and of his executive vice president of original programming, Carolyn Strauss. They stand behind the success of “The Sopranos,” “Sex and the City,” “Six Feet Under” and “Curb Your Enthusiasm.”

In short, the heroes of Jewish comedy are not all Jewish, but in the history of the American sitcom, Jews continue to play an important — if not covert — role, fusing their sensibilities with the American mainstream. Now, that’s a documentary I’d like to watch.

The first episode airs on Comedy Central at 5 p.m. For additional dates and times, visit www.comedycentral.com.

Six years have passed since painter R.B. Kitaj moved from London to Los Angeles, following a hail of criticism and counterattacks (more on that later). Recently, I visited the artist at his home and studio on the occasion of “Los Angeles Pictures,” a breathtaking exhibit at Venice’s LA Louver Gallery.

Kitaj’s show in Venice includes more than 20 works, paintings, drawings, even a few abstracts. Clearly, Kitaj’s time in Los Angeles has been productive. But can a self-proclaimed “Diasporist” ever be truly at home?

Kitaj was born in Cleveland in 1932 and joined the merchant marines in 1949. After studying art in New York, Vienna and then London (where his classmate was David Hockney) in the 1950s, he spent the next 40 years in London. In 1989, Kitaj published his polemical work, “The First Diasporist Manifesto,” which argued that the conditions of being a Jew living in the Diaspora were important elements compelling Kitaj, who was struggling to create a “Jewish art.”

In 1994, the Tate Gallery in London held a retrospective of Kitaj’s works, a great honor rarely accorded non-British artists. The show, which traveled to Los Angeles in 1995 (the Los Angeles County Museum of Art) and New York (the Metropolitan Museum of Art) made much of Kitaj’s very distinctive use of color and figurative elements to achieve a personal iconography.

However, the English critics drew their knives and savaged the show. Schadenfreude filled the art pages.

Around the same time, Kitaj’s wife, the artist Sandra Fisher, whom he married in 1983 and with whom he had a son, Max, died suddenly of a cerebral hemorrhage at age 47 (she was 15 years his junior). Kitaj, in his grief, blamed her death on the bad reviews.

“No one knows what caused her hemorrhage, but stress is a contributing factor,” Kitaj told me. He also blamed the bad reviews on English “low-octane anti-Semitism” — whose existence (a question of tone, a comment, a description here and there) anyone who reads the British press regularly would be hard pressed to deny.

But can anti-Semitism, no matter how low octane, explain the bad reviews? Today Kitaj refers to the episode and the accusations he made as “my Tate war.”

“I fought back,” he says proudly. But shortly thereafter, he moved to Los Angeles. “London also died for me,” Kitaj has written.

Los Angeles holds many claims on Kitaj. His parents are buried here. His oldest daughter, Dominie, is in the Navy near San Diego (she recently served in Kuwait during the war in Iraq); his eldest son, the screenwriter Lem Dobbs, lives here with his sons in a house down the street from Kitaj, and Los Angeles is where he first met Sandra, when he was a visiting teacher at UCLA in 1970. Their son, Max, will attend college nearby next year.

Los Angeles also affected Kitaj’s work in an unexpected way. “I found a strange, new romantic subject out here.” Kitaj writes in the LA Louver catalogue. “Sandra and me.”

Kitaj writes: “Sandra and I became lovers again, after her death, in my old age in Los Angeles, The Angels. I could make love to my angel with my paintbrush, fondle her again, caress her contours. This greatest love story ever told, the Woman-Man Story has become quite rare in painting since the death of Picasso…. I’ve done about 20 of these love stories so far, and our romance need not die….”

A love so great that it transcends the grave has long been the subject of art: Orpheus descended into the underworld to retrieve Eurydice but failed to bring her back. Dante went in search of his Beatrice and was able to bring her back, but he is the exception.

There are long list of movies in which the former spouse returns, from “Blythe Spirit” to “Dona Flor” and “Ghost” (don’t get me started on Demi Moore in her T-shirt. Damn you, Ashton Kutcher!). Art Buchwald even wrote a bittersweet novel, “Stella in Heaven,” in which the hero’s late spouse nags him from the beyond to get a new wife.

The “Los Angeles Pictures” present Kitaj and Sandra in several guises. In one work, Kitaj clings desperately to her; in another, they meet eye to eye (though a tear drips from Kitaj’s). In some, they are joined as one; in others, they are separated by a large distance.

In one painting, Kitaj suckles at her breast; in another, he grabs beneath her dress. In some, Kitaj resembles Moses, other times Freud.

In one painting, he seems angry; in others, sad, desperate. In some, Sandra’s eyes are closed; in others, she looks straight ahead fiercely. She wears angel wings in some, not in others.

There are vibrant yellows and deep blues, and the canvases have more white space — all part of the way that the light and air of Los Angeles have seeped into Kitaj’s work. The drawings, too, seem to have a freedom not present in his earlier work. But a question hangs over the show: What sort of love is this?

At one point, I suggested to Kitaj that the Jewish mourning process has a set form, stages and that according to Jewish tradition to mourn too much is itself a sin. Kitaj’s response: “Since I don’t follow all the rules, I don’t follow this one either.” Kitaj must do it his way.

When I visited Kitaj at his home in Los Angeles, I was led on a very proscribed guided tour — the rooms, the books, the studio — there was even a set place for us to sit and for the interview take place. He told me about his daily schedule, which is similarly regimented. Kitaj is obsessive, ritualistic, monomaniacal and his art reflects the breadth, but also the specifics, of his interests, from Aby Warburg to W.C. Fields and Weegee. Kitaj gave me some insight into what drives his critics crazy.

At the infamous Tate show, Kitaj posted text explanations next to many of the paintings, offering his own exegesis. In the reviews, the critics seemed to take particular umbrage at these passages.

For the Los Angeles show, Kitaj has offered the same key to his references, even offering the exact images that his paintings are based on. However, this time, Kitaj has left the commentary in the catalogue, rather than on the walls.

When Kitaj talks about painting in general and his paintings in specific, he talks about artists such as Giotto, Cezanne, Matisse, Munch, etc. Some critics see it as unseemly or arrogant for Kitaj to suggest he is even in the same league as these artists.

Kitaj’s work exists very much in the context of his references. It is fair to ask if an art so dependent on sources is itself original.

We are used to looking at a painting, both as viewers and critics, and having a visceral and cerebral response that determines what the work means to us. Kitaj’s literal references can appear to undermine, rather than enhance that experience.

There is another way that Kitaj’s work is different. Often, an artist’s work can be seen as a conversation he is having with his predecessors, his contemporaries, sometimes even his critics. Kitaj’s work is more one-sided.

Even as I interviewed him, it wasn’t exactly a conversation. I was on the tour. My questions were anticipated, his answers were already formed. Like many an accomplished autodidact, he can no more resist being the docent of his own home than the art lecturer for his own exhibitions.

To me, the work stands on its own. However, as I struggled with what to make of Kitaj’s own very specific commentaries, I seized upon Kitaj’s “Jewish art.” The answer was offered — no surprise — by Kitaj himself, who suggested his textual accompaniments are in the tradition of Talmudic commentaries. This begs the question: Is Kitaj the Rashi of painters?

Rabbi Joseph Telushkin in “Jewish Literacy” calls Rashi Judaism’s “greatest teacher.” As Telushkin explains, what so distinguished Rashi’s commentaries is that when explaining the Bible or the Talmud, he wrote both about the peshat (the literal meaning) and the derash (the sermonic or allegorical meaning).

Kitaj gives us the literal by way of his references. He would like to give us the sermonic as well — but here he has a blind spot. It’s his paintings themselves that are the allegory. In this department, his words carry little weight. It is our own commentaries that matter.

To the extent that Kitaj’s references and commentaries overwhelm us, the work is frustrating. However, viewed on its own merit, it engages and challenges us, like a good text or even a good commentary should.

Kitaj, the Diasporist, now calls Los Angeles home. His books, his Cezannes, his Sandra surround him. So why is Los Angeles the best possible home for a Diaporist?

I think the answer can be found in a comment by the French semiotician Tsvetan Todorov, who considered California “the America of the Americas.” He explained that immigrants from all over the world come to the United States, and then people from all over the states move to California. In other words, a perfect place for a Diasporist to live.