2006 United Jewish Campaign Opening Gala

Naomi Pefferman

Los Angeles Jewish Journal

When Joshua Malina arrived at his first Los Angeles Jewish community event, a 2001 pro-Israel rally, he received an unpleasant surprise. The boyish 39-year-old actor — a regular on NBC’s White House drama The West Wing — had a respectable career going.

“But I was appalled that bigger stars hadn’t turned out to support Israel,” he said, sounding as passionate as his West Wing character, White House deputy communications director Will Bailey.

“It just drives me nuts that there are so many high-profile Jews in Hollywood, yet we can’t get anybody to say, ‘Yes, I defend Israel,’” the actor said. “It’s not that I expect people to sign off on everything the Israeli government does. I just don’t think it should be considered a radical thing for celebrities to say that the Jewish state has a right to exist in peace. But I think the general feeling is, ‘God forbid I should associate myself with such a political firecracker.’”

Malina, who grew up in a traditional and Zionist household, doesn’t mind being a firecracker for Israel and other Jewish causes. He’s served on a young leadership committee of the New Israel Fund, which is devoted to enhancing democracy in Israel.

The actor has also read to children at a Los Angeles library for the local federation’s literacy initiative. And he’s served as a celebrity chair of federation fund-raising events to benefit programs for at-risk children.

On Sunday evening, Sept. 25, he’ll come to Dayton to open the 2006 United Jewish Campaign. Chairs of the gala, which is open to the entire community, are Amy and Dr. Mike Bloom and Dr. Heath Gilbert.

Mitzvah gedolah

Malina grew up in a kosher home in New Rochelle, N.Y., where philanthropic giving was de rigueur. One of his earliest memories was of dropping coins into his first-grade tzedakah box, savoring the “plunking” sound as his teacher, Mrs. Rosenblatt, encouraged him to recite the phrase “Mitzvah gedolah latet tzedakah (It’s a great mitzvah to give charity).”

Meanwhile, his parents, Robert and Fran, founding members of Young Israel of Scarsdale, N.Y., read to the blind, donated bags of food to the poor, and gave a significant amount of their income to charity.

“My father never walked past a panhandler without giving him something,” Malina recalled. “I remember once suggesting that a particular man might not make the best use of the money. My father quoted the Talmud, stating that if a person is reduced to asking for money, you don’t ask questions.”

Robert Malina, who has worked as an attorney, investment banker, and Broadway producer, said that his son was a quick study.

“Joshua was always sensitive to other people’s feelings,” he said. “I remember situations when he was at camp and he befriended children who were not befriended often. He very quickly took to the notion that Judaism is an action-oriented religion.”

During Joshua Malina’s childhood, his father’s best friend was Neil Simon’s producer, Manny Azenberg. Young Josh grew up attending his plays and dreaming of replacing Matthew Broderick as Jewish protagonist Eugene Morris Jerome in Brighton Beach Memoirs.

Closer to home, he starred in plays at his yeshiva, Westchester Day School, and watched his cousins perform with their Jewish pal Aaron Sorkin at Scarsdale High. His favorite Sorkin role: Jesus in Godspell.

After Malina graduated from Yale with a theater degree in 1988, it was his mother who suggested that he look up Sorkin, by then a 28-year-old wunderkind taking the New York theater scene by storm.

“It was the best advice I could have received,” said Malina, who soon became Sorkin’s good friend and poker buddy.

Poker appears to be a passion — Malina is an executive producer of Bravo’s Celebrity Poker Showdown, on which a group of his West Wing castmates have appeared as players.

He was surprised, however, when the writer-producer asked him to audition for his Broadway play A Few Good Men — and equally surprised when he got the part.

“Within a year of graduating college, I had achieved my dream of acting on Broadway,” he said.

Sorkin later cast Malina as a Jewish producer in his ABC series Sports Night, writing him a juicy Passover Seder scene and sequences in which his character got into arguments with a non-Jewish girlfriend.

Among his other credits, Malina appeared in Miramax’s dark comedy A View From the Top and the political satire Bulworth.

He also has a role in the short film Ray’s Ex-Vision, the directorial debut of Hank Azaria, with whom Malina served as a writing partner on the sitcom Imagine That. Among his other television credits: a recurring role on The Larry Sanders Show, the Tom Hanks HBO production of From the Earth to the Moon, and Tracey Ullman’s Tracey Takes On…

‘World-class comedy’

When Sorkin cast Malina in his West Wing role as Will Bailey, who started out as a California Democratic campaign manager, he braced the actor for some bad news. “He said, ‘Now your character is not going to be Jewish,’ as if I might object,” Malina recalled.

“Josh is the player you always want to pick for your team,” Sorkin said. “There’s never a false note and he has world-class comedy skills. And everybody likes him in the huddle. When you have an opportunity to cast Josh, you do.”

While The West Wing production schedule is hectic, Malina, a husband and father of two, makes time for Jewish life. He attends Temple Beth Am in Los Angeles and keeps a kosher home, a mitzvah he likes to observe because “it reminds me, three times a day, that I am Jewish.”

When his father nudged him to increase his charitable giving, he complied — but not out of guilt.

“I give because that’s how I was raised,” he said. “You don’t achieve this level of life style without sharing it. I’d feel guilty if I earned this kind of money without sharing it.”

He continues serving as a spokesperson when called upon for local Jewish federations and other groups and hopes to participate in a Hollywood mission to Israel.

“It’s rare that I wish I were more famous, because that’s never been a motivating factor for me,” he said, recalling that pro-Israel rally four years ago. “But to support Israel, I do wish I were a more recognizable face.”

During a June trip to Israel, he told The Jerusalem Post that if he were writing a West Wing script for next season, he would like to see “peace, a two-state solution, and I pray that the disengagement in Gaza is successful and is able to be carried out in a way that isn’t disastrous for the country.”

An Evening With Josh Malina, 2006 United Jewish Campaign Opening Gala, Sunday, Sept. 25, 7:30 p.m., Boonshoft CJCE, 525 Versailles Drive, Centerville. $18 per person. Student rate is $10. Dessert reception to follow. Tickets available at the door. Call 853-0372.

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