Jon Voight — Chabadnik at Heart

On a recent afternoon at Lenny’s Deli in Westwood, Jon Voight reached into a black satchel and pulled out a well-worn copy of Paul Johnson’s “A History of the Jews,” then began reading aloud from the text, his fingers carefully tracing the words.

Looking professorial, he glanced up from time to time to emphasize a point, his steely blue eyes peering from behind spectacles as he read with a quiet but fierce intensity of Johnson’s admiration for Judaism.

Voight, 74, remains tall and trim, his blond hair now silver and slicked back; he’s a familiar figure from his Oscar-winning turn in 1978’s “Coming Home” as well the film classics “Deliverance” and “Midnight Cowboy,” the latter earning him an Oscar nomination for his portrayal of a Texas hustler who befriends Dustin Hoffman’s “Ratso” Rizzo.

Voight also has become equally well known as the father of Angelina Jolie, with whom he is now reconciled after a decade-long falling out; and he’s a vehement spokesperson for conservative political causes. Meanwhile, he’s now starring in a hit Showtime series, “Ray Donovan” — the network renewed the show for a second season — in which he portrays the scheming patriarch of a fraught Irish-Catholic family.

But the most urgent topic of discussion during a recent 90-minute interview was his seemingly tireless support for Israel and the Jewish people — even while he remains a lifelong Catholic — as well as his ubiquitous presence on the annual “To Life” Chabad telethon, which he again co-hosted when the show aired on Aug. 25.

Voight is well aware of the incongruous spectacle of himself wearing a yarmulke and dancing with Chabad’s bearded rabbis on the show: “It’s just a funny image, and I see the humor and the irony in it,” he said.

So why is Voight so into Jews and Judaism?

It’s a love affair that hails back to his childhood in Yonkers, N.Y., when his father was the golf professional at a local German-Jewish country club. “He started caddying there when he was 8, and the membership took a shine to this young scamp and encouraged him; they were like magical aunts and uncles,” Voight said. “There’s no doubt they gave him a sophistication that his siblings didn’t have.

“In my raising, if there were enemies of the Jewish people, they were my enemies as well. And as I got older, I became interested in the roots that had created this great culture.”

Voight’s Jewish studies began in earnest in what he describes as a period of “spiritual seeking” in the 1980s: “I came to a crisis point about many things,” he said. “I had made some mistakes in my early life, and I needed to recover from them,” he wrote in an essay for Chabad.

Voight eventually immersed himself in the Hebrew Bible as well as the work of Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel and Elie Wiesel; in the course of our conversation, he discussed with ease scholars from Maimonides to the Maharal, whose grave he visited while in Prague shooting the film “Mission: Impossible.”

Voight met Rabbi Boruch Shlomo Cunin, Chabad’s West Coast director, when a telethon creator asked him to appear on the show in 1986. “When I showed up to Chabad’s drug rehabilitation center,” he recalled, “there was a long line of guys — tattooed and muscular — in front of a table where a hefty [rabbi] with a beard was arm-wrestling them, one by one, and he would just knock down their arms like they were flies.

“Later on, at his office, there was a couple sitting on a couch who needed some furniture, and Rabbi Cunin said, ‘What about this couch we’re sitting on? Jon, help me pick this up.’ And so we carried it down to my jeep and took it to this couple’s apartment. I was so deeply moved, because it was so spontaneous, from the heart, and a response to a human need. That sealed the deal with Chabad for me.”

Voight went on not only to become a fixture on the telethon, but a student of the work of Chabad Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, as well as a staunch advocate for Chabad charities on behalf of Chernobyl victims and other causes.

“I’m a Chabadnik at heart,” Voight said.