David J. Steiner (February 2, 1965 – December 26, 2016) was an American documentary filmmaker, educator, rabbi, real estate investor, mediator and political activist, best known for the documentary film Saving Barbara Sizemore (2016).
Early life
David Jay Steiner was born in Chicago, Illinois to a Jewish family, and was raised in nearby Lincolnwood, Illinois. His parents, Robinn Schulman, a nurse whose family owned the company that manufactured Shane Toothpaste (now known as AloeSense), and Joseph Steiner, a figurative painter and art instructor, divorced when he was young, but maintained an amicable relationship. As a youth, he began a lifelong affiliation with Habonim Dror, the labor Zionist youth movement.
Education
Steiner was educated in Lincolnwood, Illinois area public schools until his sophomore year of high school, when unaccompanied by his family, he moved to Israel. In accord with his socialist values, he lived in the kibbutz community of Hakfar Hayarok. On the kibbutz, Steiner was assigned to the dairy, and was put in charge of the artificial insemination and midwifery process for cows. For the rest of his life, Steiner would incorporate bovine imagery into his work; he really loved cows. Steiner served in the Israel Defense Forces and fought in the 1982 Lebanon conflict.
Steiner attended the University of Illinois-Chicago (UIC), and then the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) where he studied film, and, taking after his father, painting. As a painter, he was devoted to the styles of expressionist painters such as Alice Neel and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, as well as his father. He continued and further developed his political activism while living in Los Angeles and as a film student, took the actor and political activist Edward Asner as his mentor.
Steiner learned his style of filmmaking in film school at UCLA.
Steiner was drawn to film and comedy. He was strongly influenced by the comic tradition of Jews in America—the Marx Brothers, borscht belt stand-up comedians, Woody Allen and Lenny Bruce, to name a few. Of all things, Steiner was a non-conformist and an experimental visionary, like another one of his heroes, Frank Zappa. These influences would influence Steiner's later work—both his cinematic work and his writings.
As and adult and well in his late 40s, Steiner completed his doctorate in education at the National Louis University in Skokie, Illinois. Steiner undertook rabbinical studies at the Shalom Hartman Institute, the Hebrew Seminary of the Deaf and the International Institute for Secular Humanistic Judaism. On November 7, 2017, he was posthumously ordained a rabbi by the International Institute for Secular Humanistic Judaism at a ceremony in Farmington Hills, Michigan.
Career
After earning his art degree at UCLA, Steiner returned to Chicago and soon thereafter moved back to Israel, where he married and had three children. He continued his creative efforts in Israel, developing CD-ROM and video content for a multimedia company, Hed Arzi Music, and teaching. Steiner strongly believed that the best way to resolve the Israeli–Palestinian conflict was to find ways to get Israeli and Palestinian youth together to create art, play sports and have constructive dialog, so he started an organization that brought together Israeli and Palestinian youth. It was at this time that Steiner's son befriended some refugees from South Sudan, which formed the inspiration for the documentary Steiner was working on at the time of his death in Africa in 2016.
Upon his return from Israel, Steiner and his family settled in Skokie, Illinois, where Steiner tackled many projects simultaneously. He created educational software products, and invested in residential real estate. Several of his properties were located in the Humboldt Park neighborhood of Chicago, where Steiner started a book club for homeless individuals in that area. During this time, Steiner also served as director of the religious school at Congregation Solel in Highland Park, Illinois, and completed his doctoral degree in education at National Louis University. Steiner also wrote a number of screenplays at this time.
However, becoming a rabbi was important to Steiner, and he was given the opportunity to study at the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem, so the family returned to Israel. The return was short-lived, as the economic crisis of 2008–2009 resulted in the reduction of the endowment upon which Steiner's rabbinical program was funded. So the Steiners returned to the United States, this time to Tarzana, California, where Steiner assumed the position of director of education at Valley Beth Shalom in Encino, California.