“I’M FROM WOODMERE. I’M JEWISH. I’M GAY.”

Harvey Milk often carried a sign with those words on marches during his activist days in the 1970s, his nephew Stuart Milk says. The first openly gay man in the country to be elected to public office “was not religious or observant, but Harvey absolutely identified himself as a Jew,” he said.

The San Francisco County supervisor, who was murdered in his City Hall office in 1978, also enjoyed conversing in Yiddish with Sharyn Saslafsky, who would come into his camera store in San Francisco’s Castro district as a customer or just to shmooze.

“Although neither of us spoke it fluently,” Saslafsky recalls, “we had fun using Yiddish to tell stories, laugh and talk about different things. We would use it interchangeably with English, correctly or incorrectly. 

“We would also talk about Yiddishkayt, about what Judaism stresses,” she continues. “That was clearly very important to Harvey. I believe his concern for justice, fairness, equality and ethical behavior came from his Jewish background.”

The fact that he was Jewish is mentioned only briefly in the recently released biopic, “Milk,” which focuses instead on the personal and political events that occurred over the last eight years of Milk’s life. 

Prior to that period, Milk, born in 1930, had played high school football, served in the Navy, worked on Wall Street, dabbled in the theater, been a Republican and led an essentially closeted life until he settled in San Francisco. There he transformed himself into a progressive gay activist at a time when violence and discrimination against gays were commonplace. 

Many Hollywood filmmakers, including Oliver Stone, have contemplated making a movie about Milk. However, it wasn’t until a young writer named Dustin Lance Black finished a spec script based on extensive research that the project began to move forward. 

Cleve Jones, one of Milk’s protégés, sent the script to Gus Van Sant, who enthusiastically agreed to direct the film and who brought the screenplay to Bruce Cohen and Dan Jinks, the team that produced the Oscar-winning film, “American Beauty.” Jinks, like Milk, is gay and Jewish and says they were on board immediately.

“I thought the idea of this ordinary man who was not raised to be a politician, and who was not a particularly good politician initially, becoming a tremendous leader at a time when leadership was so necessary was a spectacular story. I found it powerful and so moving. As soon as I read it, I knew I had to be part of it, and as I was going through the script, I started thinking about actors who could do it, and I kept going back in my mind to Sean Penn. Fortunately, he said ‘yes’ pretty quickly, in about three weeks.”

The movie is already creating Oscar buzz, particularly for Penn’s extraordinary performance in the title role. Filmmaker Rob Epstein, whose documentary, “The Times of Harvey Milk,” won an Oscar in 1984, particularly admires what he calls the tenderness of Penn’s portrayal.   See ‘Milk’ captures doomed life of gay, Jewish politician
The Jewish Journal of greater L.A, CA