Stars of David by Abigail Pogrebin Page B

libraries. “I never would have imagined collecting the testimonies on videotape of survivors in sixty-four countries in thirty-seven languages—fifty-two thousand of them have already given their testimony—had it not been for some of the actual survivors depicted in
Schindler’s List
coming up to me when they came to visit Poland for the first time since 1945 to try to get me to listen to their
entire
life stories. These survivors wanted to tell me not just about the segment of their life experience that we were depicting on film, but about all of it.”
    Obviously he’s heard the sentiment that Jews shouldn’t hold themselves up as the only people to have suffered a genocide, that they should let it go a little. “The Jews are just the people who
can’t
let it go,” he says fervently. “Because everybody
else
wants to let it go. If the Jews let it go, the entire roof falls in.”

Kenneth Cole

    THE FOG AND DRIVING RAIN don’t detract from the majesty of Kenneth Cole’s estate in Westchester. As I drive through the electric security gate (which he’s left open for me), past wet green lawns and a tennis court, I can’t help thinking,
This Jewish boy from Great Neck made good
.
    He answers the front door himself—looking compact and younger than his forty-nine years—dressed in jeans and a gray cotton button-down shirt with a black T-shirt underneath. Very Kenneth Cole. I catch only a glimpse of the elegant foyer and sweeping staircase before he leads me into his office on the main floor—a cozy room with antiques, a mannequin torso, and a wall full of enlarged black and white photographs of his three photogenic daughters, products of his eighteen-year marriage to Maria Cuomo. (She is the daughter of former governor Mario Cuomo and chair of a national housing program for the indigent, HELP USA.)
    Cole and I sit on opposite sides of his desk, his hands folded in front of him on a leather blotter. He has jotted down some notes on a legal pad, and the fact that he has prepared for this interview should not surprise me: It’s clear early on in the conversation that Judaism is a subject to which he’s given a great deal of thought, especially lately. He begins haltingly, explaining that it’s a delicate time in terms of this issue. “Being Jewish was always something I was proud of, but it wasn’t until my father passed away about twelve years ago that I became much more committed to learning about why my Jewishness mattered so much to me.”
    His father, Charles Cole—formerly Cohen—was a shoe manufacturer whose profession Kenneth initially rejected in favor of law school plans, but ultimately chose and pursued with astounding success. (His company, Kenneth Cole Productions, which he founded in 1982, has one hundred thirty stores in twenty-five countries, annual worldwide sales of over one billion dollars, and was ranked among the top one hundred New York companies in June 2003 and for the five years prior.)
    Cole has often described his father as his greatest mentor, but Charles’s death jolted Kenneth into an emotional reexamination of his dad and his heritage. “I think that maybe I just needed to connect a little bit more to
him
and to get a sense of him,” Cole says now. “And through him, probably myself. I believe that we are all essentially the culmination of our life’s experiences and relationships. And that relationship—for me and probably for most people—was as important as any.”
    He says he wasn’t particularly curious about his religion growing up. “I didn’t have a real understanding of what it meant to be Jewish—what those four thousand years of history had entailed. I knew that it was something that many people had committed their lives to. I knew that, over the years, it was as defining a characteristic of who someone was (or wasn’t) as any. I also