page_title: David J. Steiner
section_title: Education
hierarchical_section_title: David J. Steiner / Education
caption_attribution_description: English: David J. Steiner in about 1982, in a photo taken by a member of the Steiner family.
context_page_description: David J. Steiner was an American documentary filmmaker, educator, rabbi, real estate investor, mediator and political activist, best known for the documentary film Saving Barbara Sizemore.
context_section_description: 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.
caption: Steiner at the Hakfar Hayarok dairy (circa 1982)
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