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Friday December 8, 2006

Author urges area students to step up to the plate as future leaders

by stacey palevsky
staff writer

Gordon Zacks assumed he would have nothing in common with a 12-year-old.

After all, the 73-year-old businessman had worked with three U.S. presidents and five Israeli prime ministers and traveled to more than 100 countries, including more than 75 trips to Israel alone.

He wrote a book about all the remarkable people he met along the way, and on his book tour found himself sitting in front of a classroom full of middle-schoolers.

He listened to what they had to say. And he was shocked.

“The future of America looks much brighter than I thought when I first wrote the book,” Zacks said of his debut nonfiction work, “Defining Moments: Stories of Character, Courage and Leadership.”

Zacks wrote it hoping it would inspire a younger generation to take action in a positive way, since he initially thought young Americans were increasingly part of a “me” generation and not a “we” generation.

In the book, Zacks recalls how people with ethics and passion seized upon a “defining moment” to change the world or their own communities. Many stories are of Jewish men and women, or how non-Jews made a decision for the betterment of the Jewish community — for instance, how President George H.W. Bush helped support a mission to save Ethiopian Jews from a violent life in Sudan.

Each vignette ends with a brief explanation of what Zacks learned from the situation. In the case of Bush, he wrote: “Have the courage to do the right thing, because it’s the right thing to do.”

His first-person narratives range from Ronald Reagan to Menachem Begin to Danish fisherman and Bulgarian peasants.

“I think the trend became young people walking away from responsibility — I saw that as a huge threat to our way of life,” he said.

“But something different is happening with these kids,” he added of the 20 middle and high schools he’s visited on his book tour. “Jewish, non, white, black, red, pink kids — just kids — are different. They have a desire to make the world a better place.”

Zacks, who spoke to youthful audiences at Bay Area synagogues this week, was born in 1933 in the United States, “the year Hitler came to power,” he said. When Israel was created in 1948, he vowed that he would be a part of the rebirth of a Jewish state.

“I knew that would be the centerpiece of my life,” he said.

For many years, Zacks, of Columbus, Ohio, chaired the R.G. Barry Corporation, which gave him the wealth and political clout to actively volunteer for the United Jewish Appeal and American Israel Public Affairs Committee. He is currently the chairman of the Florence Melton Adult Mini-School.

He chaired the first President Bush’s National Jewish Campaign Committee, and under both Reagan and Bush served as an unofficial advisor on Middle East and Israeli politics, Soviet Jewry and Israeli-American relations.

He wants the book to strengthen the leadership corps in America’s Jewish community.

“One has to have the knowledge and the wisdom to know what to do, and the courage to do it,” he writes. “All the people profiled in this book inspired me … I hope their stories will have the same effect on you.

“My time for doing is over, my time for teaching is now. I need and want a new generation of doers to be more effective than my generation of doers. And this book is intended to help make that happen.”

The Jewish National Fund is sponsoring his book tour, and it was the director’s idea that Zacks meet with middle and high-schoolers and college-aged students. In San Francisco, he met with students at Hillel; he met with students at Temple Beth Jacob in Redwood City, and with high-schoolers at Peninsula Temple Beth-El in San Mateo.

“I want to make failure a legitimate and essential value for growth,” he said of one of his talking points. “You can never be a winner if you’ve never failed … Everything I’ve learned that’s worth knowing I learned by failure.”

Zacks is evangelical about his quest to build leaders out of America’s youth. He pounds on the table as he talks, and said he believes his big ideas are feasible.

“The world is broken and needs to be repaired. If we wait for the mashiach to do it for us, we’ll wait a long time. If each of us accepts our personal responsibility to impact that which we have a passion for, collectively, we’ll strengthen America.”

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