<p>The latest broadside from David Mamet</p>
<p>“The World hates the Jews. The world has always and will continue to do so.”</p>
<p>
<a href=“http://www.jewishjournal.com/home/preview.php?id=16759[/url]”>http://www.jewishjournal.com/home/preview.php?id=16759</a></p>
<p>interested to hear what others think…</p>
<p>He is right.</p>
<p>One more reason to embrace atheism.</p>
<p>Mamet is not a religious Jew nor is Judaism simply a religion, like Evangelicalism.</p>
<p>I found the article mostly offensive, but as a quite life-satisfied former Jewish person who is quite comfortable in his own skin, I can’t say that I actually care a heck of a lot.</p>
<p>Mamet’s final words are a little harsh, but he makes some good points.</p>
<p>Being entirely assimilated will not protect Jews from persecution–look at Germany in the 1930s. And sometimes Jews search for spirituality in other religions that already exists in Judaism–they just never knew about it. And often the grandchildren seek to recapture what the parents discarded in leaving the grandparents’ world.</p>
<p>And some Jews think it’s “quaint” for the Amish to retain the old ways, but can’t stand it when they see a Hasid in black hat and beard. </p>
<p>I’m all for free choice but sometimes people act out of ignorance–and that’s not truly free choice.</p>
<p>From the quotes in the article, I believe David Mamet is right on–but I fear the book will never be read by the “wicked sons” in our society who of course are the ones who NEED to read it.</p>
<p>Both from within and from without, Judaism is not the same kind of religion that Islam or any form of Christianity are. It is a mixture of religion and ethnicity. One is born a Jew (even if one is a convert – the legal basis for conversion in Jewish law more or less resembling the protocols for approving a sex-change operation: by accident, a Jewish soul was born in a non-Jewish family). I belong to a synagogue that seems to resemble Mamet’s in many respects. Most traditional Jews would be horrified at many of our practices, although they would recognize their derivation easily. But none of them would question whether Mamet or I are Jews, only whether we were doing an adequate job of following Biblical and halakhic commandments. Moreover, a completely nonobservant Jew is still a Jew, both under Jewish law and in the eyes of the vast majority of non-Jews worldwide. (Some day, I would love to hear how people in Iran regarded mini’s ex-Judaism.)</p>
<p>The “Self-Hating Jew” has been a commonplace of Jewish rhetoric as long as I have been able to read, and almost certainly longer. Different people mean different things by it. Lots of Orthodox or Hasidic Jews would apply it to Mamet (something I suspect he acknowledges, based on the quotes in the article), and mean something different than Mamet means when he applies it to unnamed others (me? Philip Roth? Larry Summers?). It always has a political function, and the argument is always “Your opposition to me on Issue X means you are a Self-Hating Jew, and you are playing into the hands of the anti-Semites.” </p>
<p>Of course, in modern American society, Issue X is usually Israel. It gets tiresome. For many years, I was regularly accused of being a Self-Hating Jew because I would argue for the necessity of a Palestinian state, and for negotiating with the PLO. Now those are mainstream, but certainly not universal, positions. Where my community probably differs from Mamet’s is that it includes some very observant, very Jewish-identified anti-Zionists – people who keep kosher, and davan daily, and observe festivals, and do not believe that there has to be a state where Judaism is the established religion and Jews are guaranteed majority status in the Holy Land. (I tend to disagree with them on that, but they are often thoughtful and passionate people, with a lot more time spent in that part of the world than I, and not in the least self-hating. I value them as friends and co-congregants.)</p>
<p>I suspect that Mamet’s book is about that, and I suspect that I would find it pretty trite and annoying, if provocatively written.</p>
<p>This seems to be a big theme in LA, maybe bigger than elsewhere because almost everyone has come from somewhere else, and there are not a lot of extended biological family networks in place, or old Jewish neighborhoods where all the Jews grew up. My uncle who lived there was always going on in this vein, and always upbraiding my mother and me for the way I was raised to think critically about my relationship to the Jewish People. His children, my cousins, were raised on a steady program of mainstream Jewish activities with an emphasis on positive Jewish identity. The result? None of those cousins married Jews. Only one of my uncle’s five grandchildren is being raised as a Jew. One of my cousins accepted baptism after his children told him that they didn’t want to be in Heaven without him when they died (his wife is a wonderful, loving person who is a very committed evangelical Christian). Meanwhile, my kids consider themselves Jews, albeit uneasy, questioning Jews, just as I was and am. I don’t think about it that much, but I believe my mother’s approach did more to preserve the Jewish People than my uncle’s, or perhaps Mamet’s.</p>
<p>…well said.</p>
<p>JHS, didn’t your cousins stop to think that they might be contributing to genocide, since they were raised with such a strong positive Jewish identity?</p>
<p>Well, obviously it wasn’t exactly the sort of “strong positive Jewish identity” that their parents and teachers intended.</p>
<p>I’m sure they’ve thought about it, but I’ve never discussed it with them. The circumstances were not uniform. </p>
<p>The oldest, my contemporary, met his wife in college. The only choice he made at the time was to fall in love, which isn’t that hard for a 21-year-old. He is a thoughtful guy, and I think he realized fairly early on that his Judaism and his wife’s Christianity were not going to be reconcilable, but by that point their lives were pretty well entwined. Also, as I said, she is a wonderful, loving person, who has always been respectful of his family’s Judaism, and who gave him all kinds of space on the baptism issue – decades’ worth. In contrast, his father could not have been a bigger jerk (something that came easy to him). If I had to choose between my cousin’s wife and my uncle, I probably wouldn’t think it was a close call, either. And if you buy the central notion of Christianity – that Jesus changed the rules, and offered the “chosen” status previously accorded Jews to all of humanity if they accepted Him – they you don’t worry about that particular form of “genocide”. I assume that in deciding to be baptized my cousin decided he agreed with that.</p>
<p>The other two married very late, and neither is particularly thoughtful about anything. They both wanted kids, and realized that time was running out on them. One, a woman, made it clear from the outset that she intended to raise her child as a Jew, so it wasn’t an issue for her, and her marriage only lasted a few years anyway. Her brother . . . I’m not sure I know what (or if) he thinks about anything, except real estate.</p>
<p>Interesting. It sounds like their Jewish identity was not that strong afterall.</p>
<p>I think its OK to criticize Israeli policies bc you feel they are poor policies, but to be consistantly agains Israel’s existance, set double standards, or not re evaluate your views on Israeli policies as events change is self-hatred.</p>
<p>To compare the IDF to the Nazis is self hatred</p>
<p>To say an IDF mission or operation will hurt policy and israel rather than help it is OK</p>
<p>Daddude:</p>
<p>I don’t want to get into a big debate about it here, but I don’t think it’s necessarily self-hatred for a Jew to say something like, “The vast bulk of Jewish law was developed to guide minority communities of Jews embedded within hostile majority cultures. Nothing in post-Torah Jewish law contemplates the consistent exercise of power by a majority Jewish population against a minority non-Jewish population, or by a minority Jewish population against a majority, or the means by which a Jewish majority would ensure that it would not become a minority. Ultimately, the Zionist ideal – a modern, liberal, democratic state in the historical location of the kingdoms of Israel and Judea that is a Jewish state – is impossible. Israel cannot be all of those things and still be ‘Jewish’. The ideal should be the American model – a modern, liberal, democratic secular state with strong protections for free exercise of religion by all groups and against ethnic discrimination.” </p>
<p>The fact that their ideal is not practically attainable in the near future does not completely vitiate the argument, depending on how much damage you believe the current structure is doing. I don’t agree with it, but I don’t dismiss it as self-hating. In fact, like many American Jews (and a fair number of Israeli Jews, too), whether they admit it or not, I am very glad I live here and not in Israel. For myself, I choose this model over Israel’s, and not out of self-hatred.</p>
<p>To be honest, I am not sure what you mean or what yo are trying to say</p>
<p>I was trying to explain how a Jew with a positive attitude towards his or her Jewish identity could be anti-Zionist, i.e., “consistently against Israel’s existence.”</p>
<p>I had pre-Rabbinical training, was a cantor, and was the head of a Hebrew school in a small town (which helped me pay my way through college.) I was fired because I wouldn’t teach Zionism in the classroom.</p>
<p>Now I rewrite old Yiddish stories, tell them at large gatherings of Jews and non-Jews alike. I am no longer Jewish, but I don’t have any problems with my identity.</p>
<p>I’m sorry Mamet has trouble with his, and takes it out by using lots of curse words in his plays. Maybe he should go see a shrink?</p>
<p>However assimilated they may be, every Jew who is conscious of his or her membership in the “family” of the Jewish people is aware that this membership is a complex phenomenon–not just a matter of attending a synagogue, being or not being kosher, believing or not believing in a set of theological assumptions-- it involves how a person identifies with his home country and nationality, his/her sense of humor, values, priorities, food preferences, musical and literary tastes, parenting styles–Jews differ from each other in all these respects and yet can recognize family resemblances among themselves – I think they all share a vision of reality that emerges from having not just one identity but engaging in simultaneous parallel realities that are not always reconcilable with each other. You can find this in the work of Steven Spielberg, Woody Allen, Philip Roth, Alan Dershowitz, Jon Stewart and also David Mamet (and Arthur Miller, Albert Einstein, Sigmund Freud, and so on and so on…)</p>
<p>and in mini’s sense of humor(and relentless questioning),…</p>
<p>Did anyone else but me notice how much, as quoted in the article, Mamet hates Jews? I mean he’s got a whole large catalogue of Jews he hates. :eek:</p>