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Why do Jewish cartoonists get away with it?
When Woody Allen exposes his neuroses, he's a self-hating Jew; When Art Spiegelman does it, he's a genius. BY ERIC ALTERMAN | I spent a year researching a never-written dissertation on American Jewish history, so my bookshelves groan with the weight of scholarly works on all aspects of the subject. Many of the books are interesting, influential and "important." But aside from an occasional title on American Jewish writers, comics and movie producers, few are any fun. Fascinating, perhaps, or surprising to the uninitiated, but Jewish history is almost always depressing. Unlike most of what my Bubbe and Zeyda said about America, the stories they told me about the old country are true. Relentless persecution was a fact of Jewish life in Europe and much of the Middle East. And oppression was neatly reproduced within Jewish communities, where totalitarian elders met signs of free thinking with powerful retribution. In America, Jews have reproduced much of this history in a psychological sense, despite the absence of most of the unhappy circumstances that gave rise to it. Antisemitism remained a serious problem in this country through World War II, with tragic results for the Jewish refugees trying to gain entry, but it has pretty much disappeared from mainstream society since. However, among the official spokespeople for American Jewry, this is supposed to be a secret. The same standard holds for discussions of Israel. Israel has long been the most powerful nation in its region by a considerable margin. While the safety of its citizens has been threatened by terrorist bombs, the survival of the nation has hardly been in question for more than three decades. The psychological strain of finding one's identity in defending oneself against the ghosts of former threats has created a strange sort of neurosis regarding dialogue among American Jews. The wealthiest, most politically powerful minority is constantly congratulating itself for its courage in protecting its own interests. The American Israel Public Affairs Committee throws its weight around Washington with a degree of nastiness that would impress the National Rifle Association, and yet its members talk as if their cause were the embattled one, as if Israel were David and the Palestinians were Goliath. Because so much of this remains unsayable in respectable American Jewish circles, it comes out in marginal, often funny ways. Norman Podhoretz once wrote an essay about his fear of the black kids in his neighborhood, as if the power to beat him up were the only kind of real power in his world. Lenny Bruce took on many of these same Jewish paranoias and received little support from the Jewish establishment when the state decided it had had enough of Bruce's form of free speech. And Woody Allen, like the young Philip Roth before him, has become synonymous with the term "self-hating Jew," because both insist that Jewish neuroses are funny, rather than noble. At the same time, Allen fails to understand -- and says so publicly -- why these neuroses should give Jews the right to beat up Palestinians who want only the same rights that Jews have in the country that used to be theirs. He may as well stop shaving and wear a kfiah and sunglasses to work, so diligently is he doing the work of the PLO. (If you don't believe me, check out the weighty new tome "Jews: The Essence and Character of a People," by Rabbi Arthur Hertzberg and Aron Hirt-Manheimer, where Allen, like Kafka, Heine and Freud before him, stands accused of "presenting the discomfort of his Jewishness with stark clarity.") Weirdly, one of the only places where it has become acceptable to portray Jewish paranoia and the unhappy results it produces is in the relatively new literary form of the extended comic book. Art Spiegelman's two-volume "Maus" somehow did justice to the unspeakable horror of the Shoah as it portrayed Spiegelman's father, a heroic survivor, as an insufferable egotist who considered all blacks to be thieves and drove his son mad with self-pity for all the wrong reasons. Perhaps because Spiegelman works in a form that isn't thought of as serious, he was embraced by the Jewish establishment, whereas any novelist who attempted the same would be burned at the stake. Recently, Villard has published another major contribution to this tiny field of literature, Stan Mack's "The Story of the Jews: A 4,000 Year Adventure." The book comes replete with endorsements from Matt Groening and Rabbi Lawrence Goldmark, president of the Board of Rabbis of Southern California. The neoconservative Jewish Forward, which usually plays policeman to guard against any drift from the lamentable orthodoxy on Israel or intermarriage, has also embraced Mack's book. But the text itself is wonderfully subversive. Mack deals with all the conflicts of class, sex and power that traditionally riven Jewish communities. He catches not only the important events of Jewish history, but also much of the endless mishegoss that surrounds them, for those with an interest in the subject but without the patience to read a thousand or so pages. Who could have imagined that 4,000 years of Jewish history could be fun to read about? While Mack is necessarily reductive, he doesn't sugarcoat for the sake of Sunday school sales. He credits the Jewish army along with those of the Arabs for kicking the Palestinians out of their homes in 1948, for instance, and speaks of Israel's "tough and bloody" response to the Palestinian Intifada. The overall tone is one of a much tougher kind of love than the fealty to Israel that respectable American Jewish authors have traditionally been expected to demonstrate. Why is it OK to tell the truth about Jews to a popular audience when it's done with funny drawings? That, I'm afraid, is one for the elders. And neither Philip Roth nor Woody Allen is answering his phone.
Eric Alterman is media columnist for the Nation and author of the forthcoming "Nobody Asked Me: The American People and American Power."
"THE STORY OF THE JEWS: A 4,000 YEAR ADVENTURE" |
BY STANLEY MACK |
RANDOM HOUSE
"MAUS" |
BY ART SPIEGELMAN |
PANTHEON
"JEWS: THE ESSENCE & CHARACTER OF A PEOPLE," |
BY RABBI ARTHUR HERTZBERG AND ARON HIRT-MANHEIMER |
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