David Mamet (of Glengarry, Glen Rossfame) tackles ’anti-semitism and self-hatred’ of Jews in The Wicked Son.  

Since I am not Jewish, nor do I hate Jews or myself, the topic choice may seem odd.  However, I loved Mamet’s dialogue in Glengarry Glen Rossand figured he might provide an interesting take on anti-semitism (as well as ’self-hatred’, which I hadn’t heard of before).  Plus, I’ve been to plenty of bar-mitzahs and wanted to learn a bit more about Judaism in America.

While Mamet’s agile writing is certainly present, compelling underlying content isn’t.  The Publisher’s Weekly Review aptly says: “[Mamet’s] 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.”

As I try to write a criticism of the book I find myself trying to think of something that Mamet might understand, that we could discuss rationally - but it seems impossible.  I am sure he would consider me an at-best subsconsciously anti-semite and coward. Perhaps the problem is somewhat fundamental in our views?

At the core of my disagreement is the unnerving ‘wicked son’ parable, about sons being told about a ritual during the Passover Seder:

The wise child asks for information [and] he receives information, humor, which is to say, welcome to his tradition. His desire to learn and participate is rewarded with love… 

The wicked child, asks “What does this ritual mean to you? He is wicked in that his question is rhetorical - it is not even a request for information; it is an assualt. The wicked Jewesh child removes himself from his tradition, and sets up as a rationalist and judge of those who would study, learn and belong. [Foreward x]

I read the Wikipedia entry on the four sonsto try and better appreciate the traditional understanding of this story … but I still don’t agree with the assessment of the ‘wicked child’ as ‘wicked.’  The Wicked Child sounds more like an anthroplogist, a skeptic, a scientist; yes, he is seperating himself by his question, but he is asking an important question nonetheless.  I find it unsettling that the “wise child” has a “desire to learn and participate,” and is “rewarded with love,” but the child that needs further information before participating is berated as Wicked. [Foreward x]

The core of Mamet and my disagreements probably relates to our opinions of the sentence ”faith is a virtue.”  The wicked son does not have faith to participate, he does not ‘honor thy parents’ in the Christian sense; he questions.  In my book, there are many times when questioning your leaders is a good and virtous thing.

Oddly, I’ve always thought as Judaism as one of the most ‘questioning’ religions out there, and credited their open-mindedness and adaptability with their culture’s continued prosperity. I found it surprising to read Mamet’s fairly fundamentalist style approach towards accepting tradition.

Much of Mamet’s The Wicked Son berates apostate [lapsed] Jews that have, like the Wicked Son, seperated themselves from Judaism.  He also spends some time on Anti-Semitism, beginning quite strongly with:

As you have taken the time to read and I to write this book, I believe we should be frank: The world hates the Jews. The world has always and will continue to do so. [4]

I was immediately soured by that provacative sentence, since it seems to assume I hate the Jews and always will.  Well, if the future is written, what’s the point in reading your book?

Of course the sentence is just a hook, since it doesn’t hold up at all.  Mamet attributes the worldwide hatred of Jews to a”psychotic prejudice,” like that against Blacks or gays, though he doesn’t point out that hatred and prejudice against those cultures has disappated, and could potentially for Jews as well.

The next chapter starts with a letter from a Christian women visiting Israel in the 50s and praising “her love for the Jew, of our national courage, humor, solidarity, invention, and hardiness.” Where is the hatred that started the last chapter?  Somehow, Mamet uses that to launch into a diatribe against implicit hatred of Jews through such terrible words like “charming” - “an application of the epithet of savagery to that group by which one does not currently feel threatened.”  He makes some valid points about media using different words like “reprisals” rather than “defense” … but I simply found myself underwhelmed by his facts and overwhelmed by his conspirary theory of hatred.  For example:

Imagine the anti-Israeli propaganda currently engaged in on college campuses and other institutions of englightenment - directed against Canada - not that Canadians are misguided, wrong, but that they are “bad” - devoid of the capacity for goodwill, duplicitous, inspired by some nefarious and implacable power to wrong those around them; possessed of a power so diabolical it induces their neighbors to strap bombs on their young and send them into the marketplace to slaughter women and their babies.

What is this power? It must be the Devil; indeed, it is the Devil, and the Jews will not stop until they have ruined the world. [12]

The book was published in 2006 and I graduated from college in 2004 … and I don’t remember any such propaganda on my campus.  Granted, I’ve always gone to school with Jewish kids, so I suppose I may not be experiencing the xenophobic hatred at colleges where there are fewer Jews … but I still read the above passage feeling like Mamet was drumming up a greater hatred for Jews than there actually is.  Of course I am probably underestimating since I only use my experience … but I am part of the “World” that Mamet claims hates the Jews universally, so my exception may be a trend.  [Unknowing hatred seems like such a wasteful emotion that I can barely believe it exists at all … but of course my individual sample size of 1 probably doesn’t represent the world very well. ]

The rest of the book is sometimes thoughtful, more often scarily dogmatic.  Mamet has an impressive grasp of language but (and I am thankful for this) it could not rescue his ideas.

I’m going to have to withhold comment on most of the quotes I’ve dog-eared because I’ll never finish this post if I respond to each.  Here we go…

• The Jewish State has offered the Arab world peace since 1948; it has received war, and slaughter, and the rhetoric of annihilation. After fifty-six years of war this tiny fingernail of a country, the size of Vermont, continues to exist and to practice democracy in spite of the proclaimed implacable hatred of an Arab world rich, vast, and populous. [13]
• The “crimes” of Israel, as those of the African-American man, are imaginary, existing in the mind of the accuser and engendered both by his guilt at his oppressive behavior and by his attempt to license his own criminal passions. [15]
• The illness, racism, cannot be perceived by the sufferer. Racism and love make such perfect sense to those affected that the entire world is redefined in their light. [22]
• “Jewish Guilt” and “Jewish anxiety” are not Jewish at all but universal - a universal desire to revert to paganism. It is not the Christians the Jews try to ape with their Chanukah bush but the pagans.  The cure for the Jew is neither assimilation nor conversion, but religion. [29]
• Religion came into being to supplant the anomie and excess of paganism.  Humans individually, and all religions they create, are always in a dynamic struggle between the desire to revert to, and the desire to supersede, the pagan. [29]
• What if, then, the Jews were a secret society, similar in the public imagination to the Rosicrucians, the Knights Templar, the Masons and so on? What if admission to this secret society depended upon a profession a of faith - not that that faith here must be, to a certain extent, blind - for the true benefits of membership in a secret society must be apparent only to the initiated members. … The next step would be, as with any secret society, a study toward master of its rituals and language. …The first language and practice would be that of the prayer service.  The language would be prayer-book Hebrew, the language of the Torah.  A mastery of the same might reveal, to the novice, further avenues of study. …Having mastered sufficient biblical Hebrew, the devotee of this secret world might be inspired to pursue those advanced texts and those systems that devolved from it. He might study Aramaic in order to read the Talmud; these studies might lead toward the Kabbalah the mystical tradition …

  His zeal for further progress … might lead to the study of Yiddish and the sociology of one thousand years of European diaspora civilization. … [and] confirm in the student an awe of the civilization that gave him life, and a deep longing for further knowledge.

  Most secret society have, at their core, the final mystery of “the secret knowledge,” which is that there is no secret knowledge.  Judaism, as a spiritual, ethical, or social practice, has at its core a mystery so deep that not only is its existence hidden from the uninitiated but its very practitioners are hated and scorned, reviled and murdered as necromancers.  What is the fear the Jew engenders and that manifests itself as hatred?  Perhaps it is caused by his historical, absolute, terrifying certainty that there is a God. [58-60]

• [The primitive man] perceived the work of the gods all around him, and in every thing.  Sociologists may have called this superstition, but it was religion.  It was a direct and constant connection to the Divine, and it is understood by every human being who has ever lived in extended, direct contact with the elements. [68]
• The shul, then, like the rabbi, has two choices: grow and die, or resist growth and die. Only in the latter, however, may be found the possibility of a continuation of the inspired rabbi’s teaching. [79]
• Anti-Semitism is a profoundly sexual fantasy - a sadomasochism founded on religious or pseudoreligious views…
  The Jew is not a victim but merely a human being, the sadomasochistic fantasy of murder- and (self-) forgiveness cannot be played out and the obscene pornographic drama of anti-Semitism is stifled before the final, ejaculatory moment.  The unwillingness of real Jews to die in cooperation with this sick, masturbatory fantasy of anti-Semitism further inflames the psychotic bigot as it brings his fantasy into relief. [84…86]
• Don’t let an instance of an anti-Semitism pass. Stand up for yourself, and stand up for your people.  It is possible to support the Palestinian cause without being an anti-Semite, and there are people of goodwill who do so.  But much of the pro-Palestinian feeling in the West is a protected example of anti-Semitism, and, when and as it is such, it should be opposed. [100]
• The [’half naked fans shivering in the subzero weather of the football stadium] perform a hieratic display of suffering that might not only sway the gods, but banish from the performers the terrible notion of their own worthlessness vis-a-vis the actual combatants. [103]
• Most cosmetic surgery, similarly, while presenting itself as the individual’s attempt to gain or retain membership in a group from which he or she is physically debarred (the young, the beautiful) is, actually, a proclamation of ordeal.  The patient, here, undergoes a physical alteration not in an attempt to “remain young” but in an attempt to conquer the shame of his or her exclusion.  “See,” the facelift testifies, “though I am no longer young, this painful procedure proves that I have not lost my devotion to the group. I am indeed, willing to be disfigured in respect for what, to me, are its now unobtainable ends.” [104]
• The conversos of Spain escaped the Inquisition by pretending to embrace Catholicism.  They acted, in all outward forms, as Catholics but secretly practiced Judaism in their homes.  The new converso, the assimilated Western Jew, in a curious inversion, practices no religion whatever, retaining only his self-identification as a Jew.  … The apostate Jew confesses what to him, as to the Inquisition, is a sin. [113]
• “I am Jewish but not too Jewish” can be understood as a statement of secularity and ingratitude, to wit: because my ancestors suffered persecution and prevailed, I will renounce their struggle and call my ingratitude enlightenment; my ignorant scorn of the Israelis and their struggle will be called championship of the oppressed, my ignorance of religion common sense; and my supercilious superiority to its practices a licensed diversion. [118]
• In a democracy, however, the electorate is unaware of the process, and the residual illusion of rational choice blinds the voter not only to his wish for monarchy but also to its essential nature, which is the acknowledgement that the role of the monarchy’s leader is symbolic.In the actual, contemporary monarchy, that is evident which in its supposedly democratic imitators is hidden: that the individual, and that a society must govern itself, as the monarch is a figurehead.

  Acknowledgement of the nonpotent nature of this figurehead diffuses the unconscious, unavowable, infantalizing wish to be ruled; after which the individual now-aware voter can get down to the business at hand: the unromantic, mundance and most necessary day-to-day government of and by fallible human beings - the schools, the sewars, the crumbling bridges, and the price of corn.

  Aware of the longing for monarchy, the conscious member of modern democracy is free to dispute, to embrace or reject, pronouncements of government without feelings either of self-aggrandizement or treason. …

  …This person, in the shame of his own self-knowledge, in the shame of his knowledge of his own self-sufficiency, must and will create false gods, as does the electorate.  Only the recognition of the actual sovereignty of Another will set him free to reason. [120-121]

• For Jews feel most comfortable in the community of Jews.  Who can deny it? Freed from either the scorn or the “understanding” of the non-Jewish world, the Jew can be himself. Are six thousand years of cultural and genetic and religious affinities to be abrogated by the brave individual embrace of secularity? Demonstrably not.  Examine the elective affinities of the apostate Jew - the communities, the clubs, the professions, the resorts - all the inhabitants of Jews. … But such affinity stops at the temple door [128]
• To me, real life consists in belonging.I’ve spent most of my life in show business, and I never have walked through the stage door or onto a movie set without the thrill of belonging.  On the stage or set, one is surrounding by like-minded people speaking a common language, having a common goal.  This group is not opposed to the world but a world-within-a-world - small, contained, cohesive, mutually responsable.

  … On the shoot, everything is taken away or is about to be taken away: sleep, health, family, comfort - everything except a sense of shared purpose. …

  … Show business people share a soft pity for those who would like to join but cannot or have not.  For we have, in the dream of a ten-year old, run away to the circus, and the poor wistful reasonable souls on the outside stayed home.

  …  Many seek in this or that confected enterprise: sports bar, sports rooting, paintball, “bonding” expeditions. The opposite of this tribal life is a life of anxiety, loneliness, and loss.

  … Gun collectors, stamp collectors, aviation enthusiasts, gardeners, golfers, these know the meaning of zeal.

  …This love of community, this love of knowledge, this joy of immersion in history, this thirst for group approval, for moral perfection, this endless variety of vertical and horizontal connections, these are all open to the Jew, both his right and his responsability, and Judaism goes begging. [134-137]

• Various Muslim countries, including Syria and the Palestinians have, as a matter of both religious and political doctrine, repeatedly expressed their intention to destroy the Israeli Jews.  This intent is not an adjunct of a territorial dispute but an essential component of their polity - this hatred cannot be mitigated by concession, by negotiation, even by capitulation; it can only be assuaged through blood.

  Israel is a free society.  The rights of minority, of the oppressed, indeed, of the criminally foolish are protected.  Mr. Chomsky would be as free in Israel to pronounce this nonsense as he is in the United States.  Were he to find himself in the Arab World, he would be persecuted as a Jew (as, indeed, he might in France).  And were he, God forbid, persecuted, Israel would offer him a home, under the Right of Return.

  That is what Israel means to me.[142-144]

• This person, in ignorance, has chosen his own wisdom over that of millennia, has chosen to turn his back on the people who will, in times of trouble, accept and protect him, has renounced the beautiful observances of his ancestors. He is the gay Republican, an African-American secessionist - his delusion freezes his development, which now must coalesce around apology and denial. [160]
• The ancient joke has the Jewish castaway found, on a desert island he’s inhabited for thirty years.  “What are those three bamboo structures?” asks the sea captain.  “That over there is my house,” says the castway, “and that over there is my shul.” “And what’s that third one?” the captain asks.  “That,” says the Jew, “is the shul I wouldn’t be caught dead in.” [161]
• For it is written that just as it is forbidden to partake of the forbidden, it is forbidden not to partake of the permitted. … The Jew is not only made and instructed but also commanded to live in the world and to enjoy those things God has permitted him - among the chiefest joys: that of belonging. [169]
• Many recall, and many can still, sadly, witness the couple who write their own wedding ceremony, an essential feature of Epicureanism. 

  What, one may ask, is the problem with this?

  Here is the answer: traditionally, a couple getting married were, wisely, compelled to vow to do not only those things they wished to do but also those things the tribe, in its wisdom, had concluded, over time, best augured well for the health and continuation of marriage.

  It is all very well and faux poetic for the young to swear to “respect each other’s space” and so forth, but these vows were and are soon abrogated …

  … These epicurean vows carried neither the weight of tradition and reason, nor the compulsive power of poetry.

  “Consecrated to me according to the laws of Moses and the Traditions of the Jewish People,” a thousands-year-old formula, a beautiful formula, must awaken more awe in the pretender to the marriage state than writers-group, journal-keeping gibberish. [170-171]

• Speech awakens emotion in the actor. The mere uttering of the written words will involve the actor in the scene.

  The actor, involved in the scene, does not have the self-consciousness to differentiate between a dislike for the written words because they are inept and a dislike for them because they awaken in him feelings he would rather keep hidden.

  The only way to maintain the feeling of this self-control is by a self-removal from the scene, by the adoption of a role as a judge rather than participant. It is literally impossible for the actor to alter lines to suit and to be involved in the progress of the written scene. One may maintain the illusian of superiority to the scene but only at the cost of woodeness.

  The observant actor reasons thusly: since I cannot differentiate between a dislike of the line as written and a dislike of the emotions it creates, I will say the line as written and let the chips fall where they may.

  This is the beginning of wisdom in an actor.  He comes to realize that the well-written play does not need his help, and the badly written play cannot profit greater from his help than to enjoy his unjudgemental dedication to the text.

  Note that the actor was not forced to do the play; he accepted the commission of his own free will and was free to decline.  The congregant, the worshipper, similarly, has not been forced to accept the rite (marriage, Communion, brit milah, holiday observance), but, having done so, would be wise, which is to say rewarded, to devote himself to the rite per se.

  In doing so, he or she will be surprised, as is the actor, finding worth and beauty where none could be suspected.  He will be surprised to find himself blessed by the removal of that worthless burden he has, once wishfully, named to himself as “my free will.” [174-175]

That last allegory is a good embodiment of the entire book.

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