Wicked Son: Anti-Semitism, Self-Hatred, and the Jews

This wonderful book is full of small polemics and arguments aimed at encouraging secular Jews to re-embrace their tribe and faith. Beyond that it is a timely and important and harsh critiqu of the large number of Jewish voices in the U.S who are vehemently anti-Israel and anti-Semitic in thier attitudes towards their own religion. Mamet takes to task all those who make fun of the Passover Seder but sit reverently at mosque in the aim of 'open mindedness'. This is a scathing assault on the way in which Jewish Americans have forgotten their religion and their diversity and thier own beauty, it is an indichtment of the generation born after the Second World War and its extreme views. A fascinating view with many important and profound observations. Seth J. Frantzman

I came across this book after seeing a positive review in Library Journal and decided to give it a try through interlibrary loan. I am now planning to buy several copies for friends and family. As readers of the reviews may notice, this book has generated a nasty discussion about the Holocaust, started by Holocaust deniers. I got drawn into the debate before I ever read the book, and this shaped my view of it once I finally read it. If I had read it without the shocking realization that anti-Semitism was still around and persistent, it might not have rung so true. Many people writing reviews on here mention "liberals" and the "New York Times", and Mamet mentions them as well. I make no excuse for my liberalism or my reading of the New York Times when I can get a copy of it. Yet Mamet makes the point that all this American life, American Jewry is but a fragile thing. Philip Roth and his generation smirked at the refugees from Europe and pursued lives of assimalation. We like to think these things are secure, but Mamet makes the inexorable case that we cannot be sure. Inexorable cases can be frustrating, but it is well worth it in his style of writing. Much of the book comes from his perspective and his generation. I come from a different perspective and a later generation, but I appreciate what he says. In many ways he apologizes for what many in my generation find hideous hypocrisy-- I laugh while cringing at Philip Roth, and Mamet does as well. For the anti-Semites who have not read this book and persist in their "arguments" it will do nothing. Mamet addresses all the fallacies and makes all the same counter-arguments that those in these reviews have made. For someone who is interested in understanding the issues, know that Mamet is angry, and that may be distasteful to many, but it will perhaps also be disarming. I have found in the week or so since I've read this book that several of his points keep appearing in my daily life in a way I'd never imagined. He is not wrong, and that is the scary thing, and the thing that will make me grapple with this book again.

David Mamet is one of America's most respected playwrights. In this autobiographical essay on the Jewish situation he writes with wild passion and outrage at the hatred Jews have been and are unjustly subject to, and of the flight in shame from their own Jewish identity on a good part of American Jewry. He starts out with a cry,'The world hates the Jews' and this becomes a kind of rhythmic chant all through his opening chapter, and in a sense throughout the work as a whole. And with that is revealed the first shortcoming of this work. For while it is true that the Jews have suffered historically from hatred and persecution in the most horrible ways, and it is true that at this very time historically the Jewish state of Israel is subject to continuous barrage of hatred from many sources it is not true that each and every person and nation hates the Jews and Israel. And here I fault Mamet for allowing his rhetoric to get the best of him and unknowingly insulting not simply the great share of his fellow countrymen who actually sympathize with and are allied to Israel but so many remarkable human beings who have been 'friends' to the Jews throughout history. Moreover Mamet does not seem to realize that when one makes such a claim one really does the work of one's enemies, one distances by implication, friends and seems to invite others to hatred of Jews. This qualification made I come to what I regard as the strongest point of Mamet's work, that is his pointing out the biased and discriminatory treatment of the state of Israel not only by the haters, the Islamists, the neo- Nazis, the radical Left Chomskyians, but by a great share of the world's nations and media who continually show bias, and discrimination towards the Jewish state. Mamet here provides a few recent pieces of evidence to back up his claim, but perhaps would have done better had he focused on the present Iranian regime's talk of 'wiping ' Israel from the map- and stressed too the point that this kind of unprecedented declaration of one U.N. state upon another has not been met with worldwide outrage and sanction of the Iranian mullah-regime. Mamet's second major subject is assimilated, self- denying apologetic American Jews , the wicked son of his title, who not simply resist Jewish belonging but often to curry favor with others even join in the chorus of hatred against the Jewish religion, the Jewish community, and the state of Israel. Mamet I sense criticizes many of what he somewhat misleadingly calls ' apikorsim' for their detachment from Jewish life, and one senses it is almost as if he is trying to shame them back to Jewish belonging. It is almost as if the whole book is a kind of 'teshuvah riff' in which he is reaching out to assimilated Jews and urging them to abandon their 'inauthenticity' and courageously take new interest and pride in their Jewish identities. Mamet celebrates the importance of 'belonging' and talks about how it can give the greatest pleasure in life

An angry collection of essays about anti-semitism, The Wicked Son, Mamet admits, relies on shock to rattle those self-loathing Jews who cannot be reasoned with. My favorite essay is his tirade against the venerated (and infuriating) "intellectual" Noam Chomsky who justifies violence against Israel while rationalizing Jihadists as "victims." This essay was particularly fascinating in light of at David Mamet CBS TV show "The Unit" in which a Chosmky-like pseudo intellectual professor teaches the "sins" of the United States "imperialists" in the face of 9/11. This is not an easy book to read. The voice is full of rage, often rant-like, but Mamet has good reason to be angry as we live in a world in denial about anti-semitism.

I normally underline particularly good passages of any book before i send it to my kids, but i gave up after reading less than half of this book. This book should be mandatory reading for everyone who lives in New York or Hollywood. As someone who has lived for many years in many countries over the years, it always amazed me as to how delusional most Jews in the USA are about how much they live in an alternate universe that is totally detached from the rest of the world. Mamet is totally correct when he states that this is a very binary equation; you either accept or reject the fact that over many millennia, the Jews are the most hated tribe on the planet. Mamet's treatment of this fact is nothing short of brilliant. I suspect that many of the self-delusional will not wake up to this fact until New York disappears under a mushroom cloud instead of the minor and temporary reduction of the World Trade Center to a heap of rubble. Whether it is a golf club in Washington, a dinner party in Paris, Berlin, or Moscow, the dialog is always the same if there are no Jews in the room; Israel is a mistake, and if Iran wipes it off the face of the earth, well, that is the price you have to pay for "peace in our time" as we did in Munich or in pulling out of Vietnam. This book is so totally and completely politically incorrect that it will never hit the best seller list, not to mention the fact that it would take many readers of the New York Times into cardiac arrest if they fully understood that most of the world would applaud watching a mushroom cloud eradicate Tel Aviv or New York, just as they did when the World Trade Center fell. I don't know if Mamet and Horowitz spent much time talking about this premise of this book, but it is yet another wake up call for millions who sleep while those who view them in the same category as pigs and monkeys go about finding a new and improved oven called the Islamic atom bomb. The irony is that their own denial of this truth will probably reduce the Jewish population on the planet by more than half in an instant in a few short years. But they will continue to vote for fellow delusionists as they renew their subscription to the New York Times. Mamet is somewhat overblown in some of his condemnation of everyone hating the Jews, but I suspect his intended audience; his fellow Jews will hate this book.