Something bit David Mamet in the butt

And I swear, it wasn't me.

David Mamet, perhaps best known for his body of "brilliant" (if you're a drama geek, or alternately, "excruciating", if you're me) plays and for once placing third in a "Wolf Blitzer face-stubble-look-alike-contest", is in the news. See, he's written a book about Jews and anti-Semitism. Wait, a Jewish celebrity has an opinion about Jews? And people who don't LIKE Jews? And why some Jews don't like themselves?

Why, that's positively Revo-freakin-lutionary!

Mamet's book is getting a fair amount of attention for the book, and much of it doesn't seem very complimentary. Apparently part of the controversy revolves around the fact that a lot of the people reading and critiquing it don't think Mamet is as brilliant or insightful as he does.

Mamet confronts what he sees as an insidious predilection among some Jews to seek truth and meaning anywhere–in other religions, in political movements, in mindless entertainment–but in Judaism itself.

An interesting premise, but what does Mamet actually do with this? A couple of editorial blurbs on Amazon seem to hint at some basic stylistic problems- first, Mamet doesn't seem very interested in using sources:

"[Mamet] sets his sights on both anti-Semites and apostate Jews, whom he refers to as "the Wicked Sons." Mamet marshals his passion and mastery of language to argue that only religious observance is an authentic, non-self-hating expression of Judaism. Organizing that argument coherently, however, doesn't seem to be a priority, as he moves from discussions of the State of Israel to excoriations of assimilated Jews and contemporary culture and back with no apparent order. The tone is that of the condescending expert: alternately Talmudic scholar, academic, psychoanalyst and anthropologist. But nowhere is Mamet's expertise proven; he provides no source materials to back up his pronouncements on everything from Santa Claus to gun control to religious observance. The implication of this bombastic text seems to be that anyone who disagrees is a coward, an anti-Semite or a self-hating Jew."-Publishers Weekly

Frankly, this just sounds downright obnoxious, and very much in keeping with the partisan polemic with which we've become familiar with in the past 20-plus years regarding political issues. Is Mamet trying to play the part of a counter-counter-culture, Jewish, Michael Moore?

Booklist is a little kinder-

[Mamet's] repeated allusions to the Bible and other literary sources are strained, and he paints with too broad a brush ("the world hates Jews"). If one can cut through the fog and tolerate his generalizations, it is evident that Mamet is on to something, particularly in his views on the apparent increase in Jewish disdain for and rejection of their own culture. He ties Jewish self-hatred to anti-Semitism, asserting that the victims eventually wonder if they somehow "deserve" the opprobrium heaped on them. So called "emancipated" Jews may try to cleanse themselves of racial taint by disparaging "Jewish" traits. Of course, Mamet finds the worst manifestations of this self-hatred in those Jews who seem to delight in attacking the very existence of Israel. In Mamet's view, they absurdly condemn Jewish passivity during the Holocaust and condemn Jewish aggressiveness in defending the State of Israel. This isn't an easy book to read, and it will likely outrage many Jews and non-Jews, but Mamet's blunt, passionate assertions have to be seriously considered."

Mamet may indeed have a point, but the development he's describing is nothing new- any student of Jewish history is already well-aware of it. Self-hatred is neither new, nor are studies of it as a phenomenon. I have to wonder how Mamet's analysis is supposed to be terribly innovative, particularly if it's primarily full of personal observations, generalizations, and polemics?

On the issue of observance, incidentally, Mamet belongs to a trans-denominational shul in LA, that, from its brochure, basically seems to lie somewhere between Reform and Conservative in practice, and Recon-ish in ideology (except on the God part). Mamet's rabbi has some thoughts on Wicked Son:

When [Mamet and I] talk in private conversation, he bursts out with a heart full of thoughts and feelings about what to do and what must be done. He is one of those too few non-Orthodox Jews who has seen into the palace: Torah channeling the divine mind, traditions as vessels for divine light, the people Israel together anchoring and being transformed by that light. He looks around at other parts of his life and sees people who are not superficial; they are deep and searching and questing, but their connection with Judaism is so painfully shallow. And some are smug that their connection to the transformative dimension is so shallow. They are so sure they don’t need it. He and I commiserate, plan, and hope.

... Faustus is the false, self-deluding penitent. The Magus asks question and makes comments—subtle, lacerating comments. In The Wicked Son, the spiritual voice of the Magus becomes the lacerating, barely disguised rage of a Chasidic Mussar teacher who knows that his student is just so full of shit but does not have to be. Okay, in both books Mamet is talking to himself. He is helping all of us talk to ourselves. Read the play and the book at your risk of being exposed to yourself.

Mamet can’t stand complacent bull-shitters and Jews who content themselves with being superficial Jews. He would like to kick their asses as a way of bringing their souls to consciousness, but he wrote The Wicked Son instead.

OK, so he's passionate. I can understand that. But you can't ass-kick people into going to shul. And it really is a two-way street- Rabbi Finley, who was ordained by the Reform movement, had this to say in a 2003 panel, recorded for posterity on Luke Ford (it takes a bit of scrolling down to find)-

Why have American Jews left Judaism in such overwhelming numbers? Rabbi Finley (RF) says it is as though Hebrew schools were run by anti-Semittes. Jews go to them, get Bar Mitzvahed, and learned to hate Judaism. About 50% of American Jews intermarry and about 70% of them apostasize.
We need to rework the way we present Judaism. "Business as usual is not working."

RF: "I was Bar Mitvahed at the Compton Community Center and confirmed at Temple Beth Shalom in Long Beach. That was still a time when a Jew could be shamed into being Jewish. It was a shame if one intermarried.

"Starting in the 1970s, people began looking for meaning and relevance and the Judaism they saw did not meet their needs. Synagogues are not well-run. Things don't address them. Once the claim of continuity and tradition is gone, people are going to the place that will spiritually benefit them the most.

"I was asked to do a board retreat at a local Reform synagogue. I asked them, 'If someone walked into your synagogue Friday night, what would make them want to come back?' And they looked at each other and said, 'Absolutely nothing.'

"So much of my vision that has transformed me as a person comes from the fact that I've been around Orthodox Jews. I was a friend and student of Rabbi Danny Landes. I met Rabbi Yitz Greenberg. Yitzhok Adlerstein. I learned a love of Torah that I had never known growing up at a Conservative synagogue or at Reform rabbinical school. I met people who were ecstatically in love with Torah. They brought me into an ecstatic love of Torah.
"I went to the non-Orthodox institutions in which I was working and that wasn't there. When I was a student rabbi in Irvine, just before meeting my wife Meirav, it was hard for me to be in the yeshiva world [without wanting to join it]. I davened twice a day at the Library Minyan at Beth Am (C). I no longer wanted to be a Reform rabbi.

While I can appreciate Mamet's enthusiasm (though not his judgmental attitude), I really don't see how beating alienated Jews over the head (and trying to revert back to the "shame" model) has any real potential to be productive. There's a place to be critical and a place to issue challenges, but does Mamet offer the "Wicked Sons" any positive reason to be Jewish? Or does he simply attack them for descisions he disagrees with?

Some have taken Mamet to task for the book's incredible heavy-handedness. Sanford Pinsker notes,

David Mamet is a more-than-credible writer, but I can easily imagine the subjects of his withering criticism shouting back at him, “Who died and made you king (or perhaps God)?” One could remind them that Mamet belongs to a prophetic tradition given to launching exactly such jeremiads to backsliders. But that, of course, would require explaining who the prophets were and what a jeremiad is.

Pinsker also compares Mamet to his observant grandfather (somewhat predictably, not in a particularly kindly way):

I could have imagined many of this tome’s shrill paragraphs emanating from my very Orthodox grandfather, a man who never passed up the opportunity to lambaste anybody in the family who ate treyf, drove on Shabbos, or spoke too much English. And that was only the beginning, for Grandfather was aware, even if he could not have expressed it exactly this way, that America stood for freedom and Judaism stood for the fences of Law.

And ironically enough, Pinsker's zaydeh, I'm sure, would have lumped Mamet in with all the rest of us apikorisim as "Wicked Sons". Mamet can say what he wants, but personally, my ire-level always becomes a little more elevated when someone plays the holier-than-thou card- and they really aren't as great as they think they are. Mamet is observant, but certainly not frum. He doesn't seem to be advocating frumkeit as a matter of course, but the suggestion that he's become some sort of prophet or authority who can dictate with such certainty the myriad problems with American Jewry (and, conveniently, lay most of the blame at the feet of apathetic, or worse, self-hating, individuals rather than pointing out the many substantial organizational and leadership issues which ALSO contribute to this process) is just plain arrogant. Which, again, goes back to the earlier question- what does Mamet expect to accomplish with this? Does he actually believe that a whole generation of Jews who told Zaydeh to get bent is going to turn tail and run back to shul because the great HaRav Mamet, shlita, issued a proclamation from his holy pew? Get real.

A few more responses:

- Cynthia Ozick really hated Mamet's book, and bashes him for not doing basic research (like finding out what an apikoros actually is, or using the "Jewish race" terms that Pinsker noted), though she gives him credit for identifying Jewish anti-Zionism that often is really a screen for something far more insidious and troubling.

Apostasy, Mamet is persuaded, can actually be cured. How? By diligent ritual observance and devotion to Torah learning, until the apostate finds that "the habit of investigation, of study, of curiosity, has supplanted what he will now be able to recognize was the habit of apostasy." The italics are touching. Does Mamet imagine that sending Noam Chomsky, say, or Norman Finkelstein or Judith Butler or Tony Judt to yeshiva will undo their practiced enmities?

Zing!

Novick concludes:

""The Wicked Son" is a weakly argued work in the service of a pair of powerful indictments. The first points to an intractability: the persistence of anti-Semitism from generation to generation, a kind of cross-gender mental hemophilia endemic to the brain that carries and transmits it. The second charge is lodged against anti-Semitism's Jewish accomplices, nowadays noisome with peace-and-justice sloganeering and often mistakenly accused of self-hate. But the craven motives that spur Mamet's inauspiciously named "race treason" are no different from Nicholas Donin's 13th century opportunism. All are equally rooted in self-promoting callousness, servile ingratiation and other stigmata of excessive self-love.""

In other words, Mamet may be somewhat accurate in describing what he's seeing, but that still doesn't mean he gets the causes or motivations right- which makes the problem all the harder to solve, particularly if your method of engaging with these already alienated people is to insult and abuse them.

- In the Forward, Lawrence Bush says Mamet is little more than a shrill malcontent (he says "heckler"), and accuses him of exhibiting some similar hatred and disgust for his "Wicked" subjects as he charges they show towards Judaism. "Weirdly, this most modern of playwrights and film directors writes like one of the pioneering Zionist theorists of the late 19th-century. He repeatedly describes Jews as a “race”; he romanticizes Judaism as a “six-thousand-year-old tradition”; he deplores his people’s attraction to “the Irresistible Other”; he is revolted by the very Jews whom he seeks to redeem." Bush also lambasts Mamet for having no real program or agenda, just a laundry-list of complaints, with plentiful straw-men and overgeneralizations to round it out :

"Mamet offers no distillations of Jewish philosophy or religious insight to spark the interest of assimilated Jews. Belonging, not believing or behaving, is the only aspect of Jewish identity to which Mamet truly testifies (“There’s no place like home”). Nor is there much Jewish worldliness in these essays. He says nothing about Jewish outreach-to-the-intermarried programs, about the upsurge of a new bohemian Jewish culture, about creative innovations in Jewish religious practice, about any of the numerous programs that have sought to release Jewish life from the forces of fossilization. Mamet simply does not believe in innovation: Jewish “self-loathing,” he writes, “will not be overcome by revelation…. Only habit will suffice.”"

Hmm, this doesn't seem to jive too well with Mamet's shul, which describes itself as incorporating and combining "Reform and Recon views of evolutionary halakha", "Conservative balance between tradition and change", "Orthodox love of God and Torah, devotion to study and observance," and even "a Chassidic feel". Question- since when has it been Reform habit to sing Hasidic songs and throw farbrengens? What is that, 1960s? Egad, the dust of time, it's so thick! My asthma!

- Jewlicious takes a middle-ground: "it strikes me as misguided to equate Jewish religious observance with feelings of Jewish national solidarity. Plenty of observant Jews are anti-Zionist or self-hating, and plenty of secular Jews (well, me, for one) reject nostalgic, shtetl Judaism, yet care deeply about the survival of the Jewish nation... But whenever I read about Jews who fit the general idea of what Mamet’s up against, I wonder, why bother? If many Jews, including some of the brighter among us, do not see Judaism as national, worth fighting for, and so on, why not just let it be?"

Which is basically where I fall in this discussion- People will ultimately vote with their feets and their hearts. The interested, even tangentially-interested, should be encouraged as much as possible, and the truly disinterested should still be loved and welcomed- the model should be the Thanksgiving dinner table (or Passover, if you like, to keep with Mamet's theme)- you don't have to agree with everyone or even do everything the exact same way, and maybe some people won't even show up- but the invitation should be there. You don't excoriate the Wicked Son, you teach him.

On Passover we open doors for guests, even invisible ones. I just don't see that what Mamet is doing here is going to encourage anyone to drop by.