Maybe I Am Chopped Liver
By DAVID MARGOLICK
A Review of THE WICKED SON: Anti-Semitism, Self-Hatred, and the Jews by David Mamet. 189 pp. Nextbook/Schocken. $19.95.
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.”
A Review of THE WICKED SON: Anti-Semitism, Self-Hatred, and the Jews by David Mamet. 189 pp. Nextbook/Schocken. $19.95.
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.”
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