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Friday January 19, 2007

Mamet’s eloquent prose tackles anti-Semitism

by dan pine
staff writer

Fans often cite David Mamet’s dialogue — in which sentences atomize at will, and conversation fires like high-caliber bullets — as the key to the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright’s aesthetic power. In his new book, “The Wicked Son,” Mamet may write in the most erudite of prose styles, but this indispensable look at anti-Semitism is as explosive as any of his street-wise stage characters.

Plays like “Glengarry Glen Ross,” “Oleanna” and “Sexual Perversity in Chicago” sealed Mamet’s reputation as a ferocious voice in the theater. A closer examination of his work and biography reveals a man deeply influenced by his Jewish cultural roots and more recent return to his religion.

Mamet could have expounded on the growth of anti-Semitism around the world, from France to Indonesia to the Middle East. Instead, in his new book he focuses on a subtle, yet no less insidious brand: Jews whose disdain for their own faith and culture strays into the realm of self-hatred.

Of course, the wicked sons of the world would never see it that way. Named for the child in the Haggadah who asks at the seder table “What does this mean to you?,” Mamet’s wicked son is very much a man of the world, ignorant or dismissive of his long-since-abandoned Jewish traditions.

Or, as Mamet writes, one of those “who weep at ‘Exodus,’ but jeer at the Israel Defense Forces … whose favorite Jew is Anne Frank and whose second favorite does not exist.”

Like Mamet’s plays, “The Wicked Son” peels back multiple layers of hypocrisy and rationalization. He holds nothing back. Those who enjoy “the quirks, customs, and observances of every race and culture but their own” are “a plague.”

Why so? In the opening pages Mamet states flat out that “the world hates Jews” and always will. He doesn’t delve deeply into the reasons for that, because he ultimately equates anti-Semitism with a kind of madness beyond explanation.

He also believes the post-Holocaust breather, in which Israel flourished and global anti-Semitism (at least in the West) receded, is only temporary and that, in time, the world will regress “to the mean.”

To Mamet, this should ring alarm bells for Jews of all stripes and observance levels. Therefore, he holds his harshest criticism for Jews who turn their back on their heritage in a vain effort to blend in with mainstream society.

Pro-Palestinian Jews, JuBus (Jewish Buddhists), militantly secular Jews — all come in for caustic criticism. They delude themselves, he argues, into believing that Christian society accepts them. It does not.

Mamet is equally tough on nominally religious Jews who use the synagogue as a social club or platform for pushing one’s financial weight around. Donor plaques on the walls of the shul and lavish b’nai mitzvah parties are particularly odious, in that they pervert the true purpose of the synagogue and, by extension, Judaism itself.

Not every word is golden. In one chapter, the author describes some sort of “race memory” of dinosaurs, as if man and T-Rex co-existed at some point (Jurassic Park went out of business some 60 million years before the first humans). It’s shocking that a man of Mamet’s erudition could make such a lame slip.

Whether or not one agrees with his premise, Mamet is a joy to read, his arguments elegantly offbeat, his passion palpable. The chapter “What Israel Means to Me,” a smackdown of Noam Chomsky, best exemplifies that passion. In it he excoriates the Jewish anti-Israel crusader, shredding Chomsky’s arguments against the Jewish state’s right to exist as easily as he would squash ants.

And of course, like a classic Mamet third-act zinger, he saves the best for the end of the essay. For all of Chomsky’s virtual incitement to murder Israelis (and, thus, his fellow Jews), Mamet notes that, were things to go bad for Jews in Chomsky’s comfy America, “Israel would offer him a home.”

In the book’s final chapters Mamet swaps his rancorous tone for one more rhapsodic, as he praises his faith, his culture and (in a word he uses often and unabashedly) his race. The Jews, he writes, exist “in truth, in learning, containing wisdom, solace, tradition and mutual support … It is a gift from God.”

Another word Mamet employs throughout “The Wicked Son” is “apikoros,” from the Greek, more commonly known in English as “epicure.” He uses it here to refer to those worldly-wise Jews who reject their faith.

While it is undeniable that Jews have made their mark in every aspect of modern society –– including Mamet’s world of the stage and screen –– the apikoros has that gift of faith ever at his or her fingertips. For those reluctant to take it up, one might consider: If a brilliant artist like Mamet, so well versed in the vernacular of modern life, could find solace in the “sayings of the fathers,” then so can any Jew.

“The Wicked Son: Anti-Semitism, Self-Hatred and the Jews” by David Mamet ($19.95, Shocken/Nextbook, 189 pages).

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