Post by sciwriter on Nov 5, 2006 21:19:53 GMT -7
www.nytimes.com/2006/11/05/books/review/Margolick.t.html?_r=1&oref=slogin&ref=books&pagewanted=print
NY TIMES
November 5, 2006
Maybe I Am Chopped Liver
By DAVID MARGOLICK
THE WICKED SON
Anti-Semitism, Self-Hatred, and the Jews.
By David Mamet.
To anyone who takes Jewishness seriously,
David Mamet's 1991 film, "Homicide," was confusing. On the one hand, it was
refreshing, even exhilarating, to see how openly Mamet dealt with issues like
Jewish identity and anti-Semitism. Far from hiding his background, like so many
in his business, Mamet embraced it, then shoved it in everyone's face. His
Jewish characters were neither the celluloid conversos nor the neurotic
nebbishes that Hollywood (and all those Jews who run the place) so adore, but
uncloseted fighters. There wasn't a George Costanza or Jenny Cavallari or
Fielding Mellish in the bunch.
But there was a slight problem with Mamet's Jews: They were unrecognizable.
Their anxieties seemed from an earlier era. They belonged to no real place, just
one of Mamet's Hopperish lonely cities. They spoke Mamet-speak, which is to say,
a language so hyperreal that it sometimes sounded quite unreal. They were, in
fact, contrivances, created to highlight Mamet's hobgoblins and hobbyhorses.
One encounters the same schism, and the same ambivalence, in "The Wicked Son,"
Mamet's examination of the modern Jewish psyche. Like everything he does, it is
blunt and bracing, honest and provocative, original and gutsy. At the same time,
it's not exactly clear which Jews Mamet is talking about, what decade they live
in, how fairly he treats them or even how many of them there are.
The book's title refers to the character in the Passover Seder who distances
himself from his people. "What does this ritual mean to you?" he asks
tendentiously. For Mamet, he represents a disease among Jews, too many of whom
are negative, weak, defeatist, ignorant and ungrateful. They hate their own
history and traditions, loathe the state of Israel and are far too prone to
trade their precious birthright for the closest cause or cult.
Even if they find Mamet's other works bewildering or raw, many Jews,
particularly politically progressive types who are also observant or strongly
self-identified or devoted to Israel, will applaud him here. They've been to one
too many Upper West Side dinner parties in which they've been forced
single-handedly to take on a tableful of pro-Palestinian Jews or to admit to
praying periodically. They'll share his complaint about unremitting hostility of
many Jewish leftists to Israel, a place a large number of them have never even
visited, nor ever bothered learning very much about. They'll agree that Philip
Roth and Woody Allen trashed Ashkenazi immigrant culture. They'll share his
disgust at all those supposedly enlightened Jews who mock the tradition that
helped make them what they are, only to embrace the nearest "analgesic" -
materialism, Buddhism, yoga, self-help, agnosticism, sports, ethical culture -
instead.
The joke is on them, Mamet says, for wherever these fallen Jews land, they run
right into other, similarly disaffected Jews, and end up doing the very things
they supposedly abhor. Those who consider circumcision mutilation have their
breasts enlarged; those who'd never open up to rabbis go to shrinks or "life
coaches"; those who will not recite the Shema (Judaism's most important prayer)
intone "I am Jewish, but I do not practice" just as ritualistically.
"I've seen it, and, perhaps, you have, too - the self-proclaimed ex-Jew,
scoffing at the funeral, the wedding, the Seder, and leaving in dudgeon when his
behavior was not tolerated," Mamet declares. He's right. There was that Passover
I attended a few years back when one very well-educated Jewish woman was annoyed
by every turn of the text. People had honored that text for centuries, and
followed it even in Auschwitz, but for this spoiled sourpuss it was just too
much to bear.
But here as in "Homicide," something about Mamet's world seems artificial and
overdone. He has a peculiar knack for finding the most egregiously misbehaving
Jews: Jews who serve jumbo shrimp and cavort naked at bar mitzvahs, or tell
shockingly anti-Semitic jokes, or can't distinguish Rosh Hashana from Yom Kippur
or would see Israel wiped out without compunction.
Such self-loathing is, of course, nothing new. "Who hates the Jews more than the
Jew?" Henry Miller once asked. But Mamet has a ready answer for Miller: everyone
else. The world hates the Jews, he writes, always has, always will. Liberal Jews
who read The New York Times or listen to National Public Radio may not think so,
but they are naïve; when the pogrom comes, he predicts, even lapsed Jews will
search frantically for doorways with mezuzas. In fact, apart from various
Internet wackos, anti-Semitism, at least the American strain, has waned; how
else to explain the very assimilation Mamet so detests? But he writes as if
Father Coughlin is still on the radio, Henry Ford still hawks The Dearborn
Independent and Fritz Kuhn's German American Bundists still march through
Yorkville.
With equal fervor, Mamet depicts lapsed Jews as figures from Dante, full of pain
and guilt and "anomie," languishing in an ethnic limbo, scorned by Jew and
gentile alike. Pathetic, self-lacerating losers, he calls them (sort of like gay
Republicans). Naturally, no one's fooled: to both themselves and those who hate
them, they'll always be Jews. Mamet subscribes to what an old Jew from Chicago -
one a generation older than he - once told me: "You can change your noses, but
not your Moses."
But as near as I can tell, few wayward Jews feel such angst. We are no longer in
the age of "The Jazz Singer," where children steeped in Jewish learning break
their poor pious fathers' hearts by trading pulpits for prosceniums. They may
feel a pang or two around their Christmas trees, but as assimilated children of
assimilated parents, their Jewish ties were pretty attenuated already. Here,
too, Mamet seems a generation or two too late. Given his prodigious talent and
insight, one wonders why. Maybe it's a bizarre form of nostalgia, for a time
when, thanks largely to their enemies, Jews felt more fraternal, and many were
shtarkers - tough guys - rather than the deracinated wimps he thinks we've
become, people whose favorite Jew, as he puts it, is Anne Frank.
On Israel, Mamet's problem isn't timing but oversimplification. That Israel
represents so much of what he admires in contemporary Jewish life, that he has
become the lineal descendant of another Hollywood figure - Ben Hecht - should
not blind him to its faults, nor lead him to caricature its critics. Not all
Jewish criticism of Israel is self-hatred, and not all gentile criticism is
anti-Semitic. Jews who sympathize with the Palestinians are not necessarily
neurotic. Few Jews consider Zionism "criminal," and are there any who condone
suicide bombing? And, by the way, not all Israeli crimes are "imaginary."
As a cure for all this dissonance, Mamet offers, to use a notion out of
"Glengarry Glen Ross," a surprising "lead," one beyond the ken of Shelley "The
Machine" Levene and the other real estate hustlers in the play: faith. Jews
should stop trying to answer the unanswerable and yield to Jewish ritual and
wisdom. After all, he asks, how could all those sages have had it so wrong all
these years? Jews should force themselves to go to shul, and sit there until the
spirit penetrates and soothes them.
More than almost anyone else of his generation, David Mamet would subscribe to
the old Yiddish aphorism "S'iz shver tsu zayn a yid": It's hard to be a Jew. But
in this day and age, it's also easy: one gets little if any flak for it, and
there are many, many ways to honor Jewish tradition, every bit as lovingly as
Mamet does. Open-mindedness and tolerance are two. Even that whiny Seder-going
girl, after all, married a nice Jewish boy - maybe even under a huppah.
David Margolick is a contributing editor at Vanity Fair and the author of
"Beyond Glory: Joe Louis vs. Max Schmeling, and a World on the Brink."
NY TIMES
November 5, 2006
Maybe I Am Chopped Liver
By DAVID MARGOLICK
THE WICKED SON
Anti-Semitism, Self-Hatred, and the Jews.
By David Mamet.
To anyone who takes Jewishness seriously,
David Mamet's 1991 film, "Homicide," was confusing. On the one hand, it was
refreshing, even exhilarating, to see how openly Mamet dealt with issues like
Jewish identity and anti-Semitism. Far from hiding his background, like so many
in his business, Mamet embraced it, then shoved it in everyone's face. His
Jewish characters were neither the celluloid conversos nor the neurotic
nebbishes that Hollywood (and all those Jews who run the place) so adore, but
uncloseted fighters. There wasn't a George Costanza or Jenny Cavallari or
Fielding Mellish in the bunch.
But there was a slight problem with Mamet's Jews: They were unrecognizable.
Their anxieties seemed from an earlier era. They belonged to no real place, just
one of Mamet's Hopperish lonely cities. They spoke Mamet-speak, which is to say,
a language so hyperreal that it sometimes sounded quite unreal. They were, in
fact, contrivances, created to highlight Mamet's hobgoblins and hobbyhorses.
One encounters the same schism, and the same ambivalence, in "The Wicked Son,"
Mamet's examination of the modern Jewish psyche. Like everything he does, it is
blunt and bracing, honest and provocative, original and gutsy. At the same time,
it's not exactly clear which Jews Mamet is talking about, what decade they live
in, how fairly he treats them or even how many of them there are.
The book's title refers to the character in the Passover Seder who distances
himself from his people. "What does this ritual mean to you?" he asks
tendentiously. For Mamet, he represents a disease among Jews, too many of whom
are negative, weak, defeatist, ignorant and ungrateful. They hate their own
history and traditions, loathe the state of Israel and are far too prone to
trade their precious birthright for the closest cause or cult.
Even if they find Mamet's other works bewildering or raw, many Jews,
particularly politically progressive types who are also observant or strongly
self-identified or devoted to Israel, will applaud him here. They've been to one
too many Upper West Side dinner parties in which they've been forced
single-handedly to take on a tableful of pro-Palestinian Jews or to admit to
praying periodically. They'll share his complaint about unremitting hostility of
many Jewish leftists to Israel, a place a large number of them have never even
visited, nor ever bothered learning very much about. They'll agree that Philip
Roth and Woody Allen trashed Ashkenazi immigrant culture. They'll share his
disgust at all those supposedly enlightened Jews who mock the tradition that
helped make them what they are, only to embrace the nearest "analgesic" -
materialism, Buddhism, yoga, self-help, agnosticism, sports, ethical culture -
instead.
The joke is on them, Mamet says, for wherever these fallen Jews land, they run
right into other, similarly disaffected Jews, and end up doing the very things
they supposedly abhor. Those who consider circumcision mutilation have their
breasts enlarged; those who'd never open up to rabbis go to shrinks or "life
coaches"; those who will not recite the Shema (Judaism's most important prayer)
intone "I am Jewish, but I do not practice" just as ritualistically.
"I've seen it, and, perhaps, you have, too - the self-proclaimed ex-Jew,
scoffing at the funeral, the wedding, the Seder, and leaving in dudgeon when his
behavior was not tolerated," Mamet declares. He's right. There was that Passover
I attended a few years back when one very well-educated Jewish woman was annoyed
by every turn of the text. People had honored that text for centuries, and
followed it even in Auschwitz, but for this spoiled sourpuss it was just too
much to bear.
But here as in "Homicide," something about Mamet's world seems artificial and
overdone. He has a peculiar knack for finding the most egregiously misbehaving
Jews: Jews who serve jumbo shrimp and cavort naked at bar mitzvahs, or tell
shockingly anti-Semitic jokes, or can't distinguish Rosh Hashana from Yom Kippur
or would see Israel wiped out without compunction.
Such self-loathing is, of course, nothing new. "Who hates the Jews more than the
Jew?" Henry Miller once asked. But Mamet has a ready answer for Miller: everyone
else. The world hates the Jews, he writes, always has, always will. Liberal Jews
who read The New York Times or listen to National Public Radio may not think so,
but they are naïve; when the pogrom comes, he predicts, even lapsed Jews will
search frantically for doorways with mezuzas. In fact, apart from various
Internet wackos, anti-Semitism, at least the American strain, has waned; how
else to explain the very assimilation Mamet so detests? But he writes as if
Father Coughlin is still on the radio, Henry Ford still hawks The Dearborn
Independent and Fritz Kuhn's German American Bundists still march through
Yorkville.
With equal fervor, Mamet depicts lapsed Jews as figures from Dante, full of pain
and guilt and "anomie," languishing in an ethnic limbo, scorned by Jew and
gentile alike. Pathetic, self-lacerating losers, he calls them (sort of like gay
Republicans). Naturally, no one's fooled: to both themselves and those who hate
them, they'll always be Jews. Mamet subscribes to what an old Jew from Chicago -
one a generation older than he - once told me: "You can change your noses, but
not your Moses."
But as near as I can tell, few wayward Jews feel such angst. We are no longer in
the age of "The Jazz Singer," where children steeped in Jewish learning break
their poor pious fathers' hearts by trading pulpits for prosceniums. They may
feel a pang or two around their Christmas trees, but as assimilated children of
assimilated parents, their Jewish ties were pretty attenuated already. Here,
too, Mamet seems a generation or two too late. Given his prodigious talent and
insight, one wonders why. Maybe it's a bizarre form of nostalgia, for a time
when, thanks largely to their enemies, Jews felt more fraternal, and many were
shtarkers - tough guys - rather than the deracinated wimps he thinks we've
become, people whose favorite Jew, as he puts it, is Anne Frank.
On Israel, Mamet's problem isn't timing but oversimplification. That Israel
represents so much of what he admires in contemporary Jewish life, that he has
become the lineal descendant of another Hollywood figure - Ben Hecht - should
not blind him to its faults, nor lead him to caricature its critics. Not all
Jewish criticism of Israel is self-hatred, and not all gentile criticism is
anti-Semitic. Jews who sympathize with the Palestinians are not necessarily
neurotic. Few Jews consider Zionism "criminal," and are there any who condone
suicide bombing? And, by the way, not all Israeli crimes are "imaginary."
As a cure for all this dissonance, Mamet offers, to use a notion out of
"Glengarry Glen Ross," a surprising "lead," one beyond the ken of Shelley "The
Machine" Levene and the other real estate hustlers in the play: faith. Jews
should stop trying to answer the unanswerable and yield to Jewish ritual and
wisdom. After all, he asks, how could all those sages have had it so wrong all
these years? Jews should force themselves to go to shul, and sit there until the
spirit penetrates and soothes them.
More than almost anyone else of his generation, David Mamet would subscribe to
the old Yiddish aphorism "S'iz shver tsu zayn a yid": It's hard to be a Jew. But
in this day and age, it's also easy: one gets little if any flak for it, and
there are many, many ways to honor Jewish tradition, every bit as lovingly as
Mamet does. Open-mindedness and tolerance are two. Even that whiny Seder-going
girl, after all, married a nice Jewish boy - maybe even under a huppah.
David Margolick is a contributing editor at Vanity Fair and the author of
"Beyond Glory: Joe Louis vs. Max Schmeling, and a World on the Brink."
