In Mao II, his novel of terrorism and art, Don DeLillo writes, “Nothing happens until it’s consumed.”

DeLillo could have easily said “processed” or “accepted,” but he uses the language of consumption because he knows how our post-terrorism media accounts are as much consumer products as healing narratives crafted for a traumatized culture. Meticulous reconstructions of the days before an attack sell papers; they also impart a sense of reality, making the once-surreal resolve into something real, albeit horrifying.

And so, in the two weeks since the Boston Marathon bombings, we’ve come to know an array of characters—boxers, teachers, estranged relatives, friends, a smoking companion or two—whose reminiscences and testimonies cohere into a story. The principal role is played by the Tsarnaevs of far-off Dagestan, who are asked, How could your children do this? The response is a tempest of denial, disgust, bafflement, a crosswind of parental furor. Anzor Tsarnaev says that his children couldn’t have committed such crimes, but he issues a tearful plea to his surviving son, “Tell police everything. Everything. Just be honest.” Zubeidat Tsarnaev is outraged, fists shaking, and says that her children have been framed. She tells the New York Times that she’ll never believe that her sons are guilty.

The Attack, the latest film from Lebanese director Ziad Doueiri, also enacts this macabre ritual. Based on the novel of the same name by Yasmina Khadra (the pen name of Algerian writer Mohammed Moulessehoul), the film examines the aftermath of a suicide bombing that kills 17 people in Tel Aviv. The bomber, it turns out, was Sihem Jaafari (Reymonde Amsellem), the wife of Amin Jaafari (Ali Suliman), a celebrated Arab-Israeli doctor living peaceably, and sumptuously, in Herzliya.

At once, Amin’s life is turned over. A secular Muslim married to a Christian Nazarene, his identity once represented a triumph of progressive coexistence; now it’s suspicious, with a Shin Bet agent saying, almost admiringly, “Fake seculars. Perfect cover.” Amin faints upon seeing his wife’s body, and when he awakes, he insists that she’s a victim, not the killer. His co-workers knowotherwise and no longer want much to do with him. He’s taken in for questioning, knocked around by the Shin Bet agent (played by a fearsome Uri Gavriel), and thrown into a dirty cell, klieg lights and metal records sending him (by design, of course) halfway to madness. Finally, he’s let out and eventually returns to his home—it’s been ransacked, a stroke of Hebrew graffiti declaring him a murderer.

As the film unfolds, one can only think that Amin will eventually come to accept his wife’s guilt. The remaining questions concern the form this realization will take—What will prompt it? Who will he blame? Will it be himself? Can he go on?

The second half of the film finds Amin in Nablus, where he probes relatives for answers and tries to confront a radical sheikh. A letter—enigmatic but its message clear enough; post-marked in Nablus, before the bombing, signed by Sihem—sends him there. Oscillating between grief and righteous anger, he finds his relatives pleased to see him but wary of his presence. He’s become prosperous but only by throwing his lot in with the oppressor. “Must be strange for you to live among them,” his teenage niece observes. (She can’t wait to emigrate.) Some wonder if he’s being followed by the Shin Bet, or even working for them.

Studying a terrorist’s radicalization—the disturbing how, the mysterious why—begins as reverse engineering and concludes as cryptography. The letter Sihem sends to Amin offers some clues; their discussions about having children awakened a political awareness in her, and she didn’t like what she saw in the country around her. But one of Amin’s relatives offers another answer, and a video of Sihem tearfully preparing for the attack still another. None of it is comprehensive or conclusive, least of all to Amin, who sinks deeper into grief and a vigilante’s anger. Even, perhaps especially, in death, his wife has become a stranger to him; her picture is distributed around Nablus on postcards, her face an emblem of someone else’s martyrdom. In one extraordinary nighttime scene, Amin stamps around Nablus and pulls down posters celebrating Sihem. His fingers scrape against plaster, and his rage is all the more palpable because it rides on the back of love.

The Tsarnaev brothers now exist mostly as media artifacts, part of an extended digital afterlife (Dzhokar will likely die in prison). Already they have their posters celebrating them—Tumblrs actually, run by an ersatz truth commission of teenagers who refuse to accept their guilt. Their social media accounts have become like Sihem’s letter, pregnant with symbolism and amenable to a spectrum of interpretation. But despite all this data, we return to some old verities: people are mysterious and contradictory; understanding is relative; horrific violence remains, in the end, maddeningly inscrutable. David Bernstein, a Russian emigre who sometimes took his car to Anzor Tsarnaev’s bodyshop, summarized it well. Speaking to The New Yorker’s David Remnick, he asked, “But who can say they know him, really?”

Perhaps Anzor and Zubeidat Tsarnaev will come to think the same about their own sons: that love doesn’t crowd out secrets; that, in some fundamental way, they didn’t know their own children.(Or, that they knew them quite well.) By the end of The Attack, Amin Jaafari ends up much in the same place. His story, however, has the consolation of being fiction.

Previous columns: Philip Roth’s Victory Lap
Israel at the Oscars
Beyond Nepotism

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Philip Roth has been dying for a long time. I don’t mean this in the sense that we begin dying as soon as we enter this world—one of those rare dorm-room epiphanies that has some staying power. No, it’s more that Roth has been considering, and even choreographing, his death in a way few writers have. For decades he’s been writing and speaking about death, especially his own, with anger and bafflement, sure, but also with wonder and mystery, as if it were some esoteric math problem, theorized centuries ago by some mad monk-turned-philosopher. Perhaps, with some heroic effort, a Large Hadron Collider of metaphysics, it could be figured out, if not staved off.

Talking to Der Spiegel in 2006, Roth offered some idea of his relationship with the subject:

Most of my older friends say more or less what I say, which is that I think about dying less now than I did when I was an adolescent. The first discovery was so shocking. Death seemed so unfair. That’s what you think when you’re 14—that it’s so unfair, and ridiculous. I think the closer death comes the more people try to just not think about it.

There’s something peculiar in Roth’s saying he thinks about death less now. It becomes truly weird if you look at his 21st century output—novels about polio, the end of Zuckerman, an expired everyman (“Old age isn’t a battle, it’s a massacre”), an actor’s senescence, a young soldier killed in Korea. And that’s just the last decade or so; from the doddering last days of E.I. Lonoff (The Ghost Writer) to a novelist’s ruminations on his father’s terminal cancer (Patrimony) to “The Day It Snowed,” Roth’s first published short story, which is about a young boy’s confusion over the “disappearance” of some family members (when each dies, he’s left home alone while his family heads to the funerals)—death becomes Roth. It’s the paper he writes on, the ink in his pen.

And here comes the opening of Philip Roth: Unmasked, a new documentary set to air March 29 on PBS, in which Roth says he has two things to look forward to: his biography and his death. He hopes the latter comes first, he says, his expression sly and even happy.

But who’s to say that it will? Maybe the great cosmic joke won’t be that Roth will die, only that the end will come later than he expects. As he writes in The Facts, “the aged know everything about their dying except exactly when.”

Lately we’ve had a lot of time to consider the end of Philip Roth. This year he announced his retirement from writing, speaking as if he were unburdening himself of some awful weight, though it hasn’t been trying enough to stop him from putting together a few dozen books. That news inaugurated a round of encomiums and elegiac tributes that made it seem as if the great writer had died. (It’s also became a litmus test for parishioners in the Church of Roth whether you think that he has actually put down the pen. Count me among the unbelievers.)

But the old master is still vitally, crankily alive. Just last week Roth turned 80, and during a birthday celebration, he read from Sabbath’s Theater, the angriest and most death-obsessed of his books. As David Remnick cracked, “Happy birthday, indeed!”

This is how it goes and how it will probably continue until he passes and only those thousands of pages remain. You can’t have a valedictory celebration of Roth without talking about death, or about sex, Jewish identity, and the onanistic possibilities of liver. And Philip Roth: Unmasked provides a number of these opportunities, featuring interviews with Roth along with Nicole Krauss, Nathan Englander, Jonathan Franzen, Claudia Roth-Pierpont (no relation), and several others, including friends from Newark and Bucknell. Combining archival photographs with Roth’s personal reminiscences, the film is a leisurely and pleasing tour through his life and work.

Leaning on interviews with Roth, there are plenty of sparkling lines (“I had many opportunities to ruin my life”), as well as some excavations of darker periods. He talks about the breakdown he had during his first marriage and how he was tempted towards suicide, in the 1980s, when suffering from excruciating chronic back pain. But his marriages are still largely glossed over—the second, to British actress Claire Bloom, isn’t mentioned at all—and confessions are few. Viewers may wonder, for example, about his relationship with Mia Farrow, which seems quite close but doesn’t receive much examination. Blake Bailey’s forthcoming biography should answer as many of these questions as is possible.

Zooming out a bit, what emerges from this Roth jubilee is not his singular importance as a writer—though there is that—but how much the culture has shifted. A novelist would have to commit a crime today to appear on the evening news. Yet after its publication in 1969, Portnoy’s Complaint was not only a controversial work; it also sold 350,000 copies in a single month. That’s Harry Potter territory, unthinkable now for a serious literary novel. These days, to have public celebrations and bus tours about a major writer—or even to have one on the cover of Time magazine—feels like a collective act of irony, a deliberate throwback to a time when literature was an essential part of popular culture, rather than a private affair.

As Roth and a number of his peers (Cynthia Ozick, W.S. Merwin, John Ashbery, the recently retired Alice Munro) drift towards the exits, the question isn’t whether we’ll see their like again. It’s if, when they appear, we’ll care enough to honor them before it’s too late.

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Last we saw Yossi, he was in mourning. It was the end of Yossi & Jagger, Eytan Fox’s 2002 film about two young IDF soldiers in love—an affair that ended when Lior, called Jagger by Yossi, died in an infantry operation gone wrong. Their love was practically an open secret among their fellow soldiers but less so with Lior’s parents, who, in one of the film’s most bitterly sweet touches, are fooled by a female soldier’s claim that she and Lior were in love. The soldier, Yaeli, admits that she never got a chance to tell Lior her feelings, but she thinks that their affection was mutual all the same. The knowledge is some comfort to Lior’s mother, who admits that she never even knew her son’s favorite song. Yossi (Ohad Knoller), seething with repression and heartbreak, looks up and offers the answer: “Bo” by Rita. The film ends with his melancholic smile.

A decade later, the grieving young man has returned in Yossi, Fox’s minor-key sequel now premiering in the United States. By nearly all measures, we are a long ways away from the first film. Yossi & Jagger took place almost entirely on a snow-covered mountain in Israeli-occupied southern Lebanon. It appears to have been shot with a handheld, and the effect is less documentary than home movie—prone to jitters and unexpected close-ups, the colors washed out by sunlight bouncing off the snowscape. None of this is to the film’s detriment—although some viewers might find the aesthetic dated, even anachronistic for its time—as it creates a familial, informal atmosphere around the soldiers’ remote outpost. (The location, forbidding and snowbound, is not dissimilar from that of Beaufort, a glossier and more politically minded film that also starrs Knoller.)

Yossi, on the other hand, finds itself a world apart. Whereas our title character was once a confident, strong-willed, even dour commanding officer in the IDF, capable both in his duties and in his romantic life, Yossi has deteriorated in the years since. Now 33, he’s successful—a cardiologist at a Tel Aviv hospital—but he’s depressed, lonely, and without friends, save the garrulous Moti (Lior Ashkenazi), who is ecstatic about his impending divorce. Even more markedly, Yossi has added about 30 pounds, much of it to his belly and face, the latter now colonized by an ivy-like growth of scrub that, along with the premature crow’s feet and purple bags around his eyes, signals a man at his nadir.

Fox’s style has changed, too. Gone is the handheld camera, replaced by a smooth, shadowed approach that, particularly in the hospital’s antiseptic halls, highlights Yossi’s veritable lifelessness. When Yossi goes to the chic apartment of a man he’s met online—an Adonis living in the kind of brushed steel-and-glass enclosure that seems less like a living space than a habitable status symbol—he becomes nigh catatonic. Were you to encounter him on a beach, you’d have to poke him with a stick to find out if he were in fact animate. Or, as Moti tells him, “You look like an operating table.”

All this changes when Lior’s mother is admitted to the hospital and gets treated by Yossi. A reckoning with her and her husband follows. Yossi leaves town on an impromptu vacation (he’s never taken one) and, at a Negev rest stop, picks up some young soldiers on leave. He drives them the rest of the way to Eilat and falls in with them—or rather, falls for Tom (Oz Zehavi), a tanned, blue-eyed sylph. It seems improbable that Tom would be attracted to Yossi in return, but such unlikely unions, and the tangled emotional pathways that lead to them, are the basis of films like this one.

It’s easy to say that Yossi is about grief, depression, and repressed sexuality (there’s a pointed contrast with the far more liberated Tom). But in retrospect, I’m struck by how little the title character actually talks about these things, when he speaks at all. So much is communicated with a squelched remark or by the looks he gives Tom at a distance: pathetic and longing, but with some hope, secreted within like contraband. Such is the skill of Ohad Knoller, who adroitly inhabits both incarnations of Yossi. In fact, between this diptych, there are many Yossis: a clandestine but joyous lover, a brusque but respected soldier, an urban professional utterly adrift, and a man feebly searching for a way out of his own mind.

Both films show signs of the maudlin and the mannered, but they redeem themselves on the strength of Knoller’s acting. With Yossi, Eytan Fox has produced an unexpectedly moving sequel, one that doubles as a welcome entry to his filmography on gay life in Israel.

The post Culture Kvetch: The Many Sides of ‘Yossi,’ Eytan Fox’s New Film appeared first on Jewcy.

Next week, Lena Dunham’s Girls will return to TV, and no writer in recent memory has been as talmudically dissected. Her work and her life tend to bleed into one another, with questions of Dunham’s privileged upbringing, her connections to the art world and Manhattan’s cultural elite, and her supposedly limited life experience seeming as consequential, to many commentators, as anything she produces in her fictional TV drama. Of course, Dunham has fueled this process by creating a show that’s very much about her peers, but the discussion surrounding her and Girls is also evidence of the hunger commentators have for sifting a creator’s life from the work and judging it accordingly. (Philip Roth has toyed with this phenomenon to great effect.)

Writers have the peculiar position of working in private for a public audience. This produces tension between the story a writer tells himself and the one he tells others. When the work is ready and it’s time for a writer to run the publicity gauntlet, a narrative is created ex post facto. How did this book come together? What motivated this or that choice? How’d you get your start as a writer? Who helped you? Suddenly the jumbled events and workaday struggles of months or years must be stitched together into something resembling a story, and sometimes the story isn’t always the full truth.

That this kind of close reading is ultimately circular and exhausting hasn’t stopped it from being the favored sport of the New York commentariat. And to some extent, I understand it. Rampant success, particularly at such a young age, attracts suspicion. There’s no doubt that Dunham has had some advantages in life. To expect her to own up to it in an interview, however, to think that she might flagellate herself or in some way apologize or refuse these perks—that strikes me as an unrealistic expectation. And by doing so, we overlook what should largely inform our judgment of a writer: the work itself.

Still, despite however much I may excuse Dunham, or at the very least tire of the moralistic debate over her upbringing, I’ve recently found myself submitting other writers to similar scrutiny. What aren’t they copping to, I ask myself. And if they won’t say it, why won’t the journalists covering them do it instead?

A new literary journal, The American Reader, has earned an inordinate amount of press coverage, much of it based on the perceived glamour of its founders, their Ivy League degrees, and their connections, much like Dunham, to Manhattan’s art scene. Few of the profiles of the magazine—in the Observer, in the Daily Beast, and in the New York Times—pay much attention to what is in the magazine. (When they do, they often find it lacking.) A glittering social world, one largely populated by a monochromatic cast of the rich and well-connected, is the unacknowledged subject.

Separately, the New York Times this week profiled Nathaniel and Simon Rich, brothers who, at 32 and 28 respectively, already have an enviable roster of accomplishments behind them. (Peer envy is part of the subtext of any Rich brothers profile.) The two are indeed talented, with Nathaniel about to publish his second novel and regularly writing smart features and criticism for The New York Times Magazine, the New York Review of Books, and elsewhere, and Simon, having left a job as the youngest staff writer in Saturday Night Live’s history, now a writer at Pixar and the author of several books. (Even that is an abridged version of their resumes.) What raises the specter of nepotism though—and it’s mentioned in the first sentence of the NYT profile—is that their father is Frank Rich, doyen of America’s liberal pundits, their mother is Gail Winston, executive editor at HarperCollins, and their step-mother is Alex Witchel, a staff writer for The New York Times Magazine. You couldn’t ask for better bloodlines or for an easier entree into the New York literary world.

After reading these stories and many like them, and perhaps more importantly, after living in New York, where in a short time I’ve encountered less successful (but similarly pedigreed) versions of some of the aforementioned characters, I’ve realized that expecting these people to prostrate themselves, to admit their advantages, is a self-defeating game. It doesn’t mean that it’s wrong to ask these questions—journalists and critics should always push for uncomfortable truths; we should be trying to make journalism and publishing open to any socioeconomic class—but in the case of a young writer, by asking him to cop to nepotism, you are essentially asking him to admit that he’s a fake.

Again, that doesn’t mean that these questions shouldn’t be asked—a denial might reveal something interesting. But it means that we shouldn’t be outraged when we don’t get the full-throated confessions we want. This conclusion is best expressed by Simon Rich himself. In a thoughtful but overlong profile, which appeared in the New York Press in 2008, journalist Kimberly Thorpe spends a while meditating on the brothers’ background. At the time, Rich told Thorpe:

“It’s just not our job to talk about it. It’s your job to talk about it, if you want to. I feel like it’s not our responsibility to talk about that subject. We’re not the ones getting paid to do it.”

I reluctantly agree. Our outrage is better directed at the journalists who carry water for their gifted subjects, who dismiss these matters with a rhetorical wave of the hand. For example, when the New York Times’ Laura M. Holson writes that Nathaniel Rich “was slower to find his way, working for nearly two years as an assistant at The New York Review of Books before moving to San Francisco to write a nonfiction book about film noir,” it’s time to cry foul. For young writers, a gig at the NYRB, particularly straight out of college, is a dream job (even more so in this economy). It’s hardly a deviation from the path to literary success; rather, it’s a valuable waypoint.

If you’re looking for writers to reveal the benefits they reaped from being born in the right zip code, or attending the right school, look to older generations. Read their memoirs, where there’s less risk in sharing these revelations, where age often leads to wisdom and self-examination. Or listen to the Longform Podcast, where successful, mid-career magazine journalists talk candidly about the help (or lack of) they’ve had in their careers. Don’t look for this in young writers, even fabulously successful ones, who are still in the formative stages of their careers and still may be unable to recognize the boon of their privilege. And if you’re a journalist covering one of these bright young things, keep probing; but don’t patronize your readers by acting like these issues don’t exist.

Previous Kvetches: Holiday Movies As History Books
My Sheldon Adelson Complex

Art by Margarita Korol

The post Culture Kvetch: Beyond Nepotism appeared first on Jewcy.

In the opening scene of Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained, text flashes onto the screen: “1858. Two years before the Civil War.” Tarantino has not only given us the year, but also added its relation to an monumentally important event in American history. He assumed, perhaps correctly, that this chronological hand-holding was necessary to adequately situate the film for viewers. Of course, it’s appropriate that it’s Tarantino, whose fidelity to history is nonexistent, who offers this curiously didactic moment.

This week—after celebrating a holiday that often displays only a dim relationship to its historical inspiration—many American families will go to the movies. And many of them will, in turn, see a movie that dramatizes a particular moment in American history—Lincoln, Django Unchained, or Zero Dark Thirty. Ever since Lincoln’s debut in early October, much ink has been spilled about the film’s purported accuracy and whether it appropriately dramatizes the effort to end slavery. Similar debates have followed the release of Django and Zero Dark Thirty, each of which, to varying degrees, relies on the audience’s built-in historical knowledge to tell a particular kind of story.

A great deal seems to be at stake in these arguments, not least because, for many Americans, big-budget cinema is one of the primary ways to absorb history. How many holiday movie-goers will have read Mark Owen’s No Easy Day—an account of the bin Laden raid from one of the members of the SEAL team involved—or Mark Bowden’s The Finish? Or Doris Kearns Godwin’s Team of Rivals, which Steven Spielberg drew on for his Lincoln biopic? All of these books are bestsellers and claim some expertise in their field (though you can find worthy critics of each), but none will ever have the reach, the low barrier to entry, or the hold on the public imagination that these two-hour, forty-foot high entertainments do. Despite whatever challenges mainstream Hollywood filmmaking may face, it still remains the greatest force for distributing this kind of content, and indeed these versions of our national history, to the public.

The critics of these films are more often right than they are wrong (Eric Foner’s letter to the New York Times is a particular treat), but they also proceed from a flawed premise. It seems misguided, if not naïve, that we should continue, year after year, to expect fine-grained accuracy on the big screen, that Hollywood will subordinate dramatic possibility (or the opinions of focus groups) to picayune details of the historical record. These are spectacles, mass culture on the largest scale, and we are long past the point where even the manipulative possibilities of documentaries—and reality television, for that matter—are widely understood. We should know better and adjust our outrage-meters accordingly.

Instead, what is most revealing about these films is our practically carnal appetite to see history writ large and to arbitrate the film’s treatment of this history. (Every movie-going group has at least one person whose first post-film response is to point out some inaccuracy.) Filmmakers play off of this desire as well. They buy into the discourse of authenticity and accuracy. They make heavy use of academics and expert sources, they pay homage to their source materials. In interviews, they speak of the historical personages in the present tense, as if they know them deeply. They talk about the hardships and sacrifices of their subjects.

In the case of Zero Dark Thirty director Kathryn Bigelow and screenwriter Mark Boal, they trumpet access to members of the intelligence community and the Obama administration (access which has proven controversial). With an event like the bin Laden raid, initially so highly secretive, with the dissemination of information cleverly stage-managed, the filmmakers can claim an authority that perhaps surpasses that of former SEAL Mark Owen, with his ground-level view. And given that this is a recent affair, the first books on the subject having appeared in the last few months, there’s a fresh-off-the-presses air to this film. Commentators and Kathryn Bigelow herself have compared the film to a piece of journalism. If journalism is the first draft of history, then Zero Dark Thirty is positioning itself as the work of a reporter embedded at the most covert levels; this film is the exclusive.

It’s in the interest of these movies to never quite settle the question over their accuracy. They’re better off when adhering closely to the historical record but also leaving some wiggle room. Otherwise, we would have little to debate; controversy surrounding a new movie generates easy copy. But whether Zero Dark Thirty promotes the incorrect view that torture yielded intelligence that led to the discovery of bin Laden’s hideout is ultimately less important than what this argument reveals about how an “accepted” historical narrative is created. (And as a friend of mine commented, it’s odd that Bigelow is seemingly receiving more flack for her dramatization of torture than the Bush administration did for actually ordering and countenancing torture.)

No, what these films reveal most are our fears about our society’s historical literacy, that these mass entertainments must be counted on to give us a true vision of who we are. Salon critic Andrew O’Hehir may have said it best when he remarked, “for Tarantino, history is just another movie to strip for parts.” With Django, it’s easy to conclude that the antebellum South just provides a useful thematic backdrop and moral structure for a particular kind of revenge-driven gore-fest. The movie is a fantasy from first to last, with anachronisms and disturbing liberties taken throughout (mandingo fighting). In this sense, Tarantino isn’t the greatest violator of the historical record. Among this season’s directors, he’s simply the most honest.

Previous Kvetches: My Sheldon Adelson Complex
Retweet This War

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The cartoonishly evil Sheldon Adelson is a Jewish conspiracy theory incarnated. Which is why, no matter how much I despise his politics, election season bankrolling, and ethically dubious gambling empire, I can’t shake a creeping sense of tribal defensiveness when he’s depicted at his worst.

Perhaps my mixed feelings result in a traditional Jewish desire to circle the wagons when faced with outside criticism. Adelson deserves derision, to be sure, but the critiques attract some ugly fellow-travelers spilling anti-Semitic bilge, using Adelson’s love of Israel to brand all of us Israel Firsters.

It’s also hard at times to take Adelson seriously—he seems so ethically bankrupt and misguided that he must have been constructed for our deliberate provocation, a troll out of central casting. After all, the largesse he’s showered on the GOP is almost comical in its lack of discrimination. That Adelson chose to support Newt Gingrich—fatuous, bloviating Newt Gingrich, he of the moon bases and Dynasty-like personal life—makes one wonder if this isn’t an elaborate performance. The uber-rich can’t hunt humans for sport (not yet), so perhaps this game of GOP monopoly is the next best thing.

But maybe I should step back and offer a primer for the uninitiated and some explanation for the extraordinary amount of time I’ve spent wondering about a man who could drown me in his change purse.

An elderly, massively rich, transnational Jew who loudly declaims his love for Israel, Adelson is famous for donating tens of millions of dollars to GOP Super PACs—and for being unapologetic about a single thing he does. Adelson gave at least $105 million to Republican organizations in the 2012 election, and while nearly all of the candidates he supported lost, he recently said he plans to double his donations in 2016.

He can afford much more. Adelson’s fortune now clocks in around $21.5 billion, most of it from his gambling interests. His Las Vegas Sands Corporation operates a number of casinos in Vegas, Pennsylvania, and Singapore, but now makes a majority of its money in Macau, the biggest gambling market in the world. The Department of Justice is investigating whether Las Vegas Sands committed money-laundering, which is in addition to a DoJ bribery investigation and one by Macau authorities looking into possible violations of privacy laws. Working in one of the most corrupt industries in some of the world’s most corrupt cities brings risks, I suppose.

In Israel, Adelson is a great booster of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. He owns Yisrael HaYom, a right-wing newspaper that, after Barack Obama won re-election, featured the headline, “The US Voted Socialism.” Jingoistic and freely distributed, Yisrael HaYom has become the country’s leading newspaper, devastating the business of competitor papers like Maariv and Ha’aretz (a poor media economy hasn’t helped).

So in sum: right wing, obscenely rich, an aggressive player in a business full of shady operators, mired in legal investigations, throws money around with the enthusiasm of a zayde treating his grandkids to lunch at the deli (except he deals in $10 million checks). If he visited the Upper West Side, one suspects he’d melt on arrival.

I thought a lot—too much—about Adelson during the election season, a numbingly long period that hasn’t so much ended as oozed into its next iteration. And as much as I found him a tempting object of fixation and a disruptive political force—one who, it should be noted, hasn’t been convicted of any crimes—a sour note of sympathy sometimes creeps in. For one thing, Adelson freely admits that it’s his money that makes him a popular GOP figure; speaking to the Wall Street Journal, he referred to his “pocket personality.” There’s a schoolyard sadness to this kind of relationship—a boyish desire to just be liked. But Adelson is rich and powerful and presumably has built up a thick carapace over the years. (His cash-for-loyalty model reminds me of a feudal lord.)

No, what furthers jumbles my view of Adelson are the cartoons of him, particularly when he’s depicted as the most powerful man in the world—this elderly, money-grasping, hook-nosed Jew, a sybaritic smile on his face as he plays with his presidential marionettes. A certain tribal insecurity sets in.

In truth, if anyone deserves the label “bad for the Jews,” it’s Adelson. By proclaiming Israel to be his core concern (that and those dastardly unions of low-paid casino employees), he defiantly refuses to assimilate. He’s vocal and proud about his political machinations in a way that even the Koch brothers, his closest counterparts, aren’t. In this sense, Adelson’s a post-modern figure (the strutting, un-neurotic Jew) who somehow attracts modernist-era prejudice (garish cartoons straight out of Nazi propaganda). I want to defend his right to act within the law, but I also want to take him aside and say, “Don’t you understand how difficult you make things for us?”

In considering Adelson, I’m also reminded of George Soros, another billionaire whose biography resembles that of an anti-Semitic caricature. I find Soros infinitely more respectable—his Open Society Institute does valuable work funding democracy-building initiatives around the world, and he supports socially useful efforts like drug policy reform. But Soros is also infamous for reaping huge profits by speculating on the British pound during a currency crisis and has an insider trading conviction (in France) on his record. He also seems more interested in using his vast wealth to game the political system to his advantage than lobbying for structural change.

Revisiting some of Soros’ past comments about George W. Bush—in 2004, he said he’d donate his whole fortune if it would ensure Bush’s defeat, which was “the central focus of [his] life”—an uncomfortable resemblance develops. It’s not quite symmetry—America’s bifurcated politics too often creates false equivalences—and in Soros’ position, I would’ve said something similar. Even so, I better understand the right-wing paranoia that has long surrounded Soros, with Glenn Beck’s vatic histrionics being the most infamous example.

I’m comfortable with neither Adelson nor Soros being the avatar of America’s broken campaign finance system and, by extension, its entire political system. Of course, as long as this system exists, there’ll be men like them. But there’s an undeniable way in which their Jewishness resurrects ugly stereotypes from earlier generations. In many ways, though, our political culture is equally retrograde—built upon stunning inequality, greased by untraceable cash, dependent on patronage. It just so happens that the most easily locatable villains, in recent years, are Jewish (the Kochs rarely speak to the media).

So is Adelson a great antagonist or just a projection of my (our) anxieties about how the culture has gone astray? Do I resent him because of his politics or because of the uncomfortable spotlight he directs on Jewish politics? I can’t quite answer the question, in part because Adelson is simply operating on a level—of influence, of cashflow—that I can’t comprehend. Instead, I think of Sholom Aleichem, who said that life was a game for the fool and a comedy for the rich. When I hear Adelson brag about how much money he’ll spend in 2016, I realize that he must be both.

(Image credit: ABC News)

Previously: Culture Kvetch: Retweet This War
Culture Kvetch: Women Aren’t Funny? Really?

The post Culture Kvetch: My Sheldon Adelson Complex appeared first on Jewcy.

War has always been something of a spectator affair, if not downright voyeuristic. On July 21, 1861, during the First Battle of Bull Run, some well-to-do Washingtonians brought their families to picnic near the battle site, anticipating a Union rout of Confederate forces. The battle turned calamitous, and the picnickers were forced to flee, along with the Union army.

During the Civil War, the invention of photography created a sense of immediacy previously unseen in war. Ordinary civilians were offered a vivid record of what war was like and the devastation it wrought. From then onwards, each new technological development—the telegraph, wireless radio, television, satellite broadcasting, the Internet—expanded the range, speed, and quality of media accounts of war. By the first Gulf War, Americans could watch a battle thousands of miles away unfold in real-time.

The latest, ongoing conflict between Israel and Hamas isn’t marking a revolutionary shift in media coverage of war, but it certainly feels like an important iteration, bringing outsiders closer than they’ve ever been—perhaps closer than they’d like to be—to a war zone. Much digital ink has been spilled in recent days about the ways in which Israel and Hamas are using social media, although recent antagonists elsewhere, such as the ISAF and the Taliban, as well as al-Shabab and the Kenyan government, have done verbal battle over Twitter and used social networks to disseminate propaganda. Israel, with its dedicated social media team and use of gamification on its IDF blog, has only refined and amplified recent practices.

No, what I think is truly new here is how Twitter and other forms of social media—along with the heavy use of cell phone video and the fact that Gaza is one of the most densely populated and most heavily reported on places in the world—have brought outsiders to the veritable limit of spectatorship. Now you can not only see Anderson Cooper react to a bomb exploding behind him; you can read tweets and see photos as soon as the event happens—perhaps, with a network’s broadcast delay, even before it happens. In fact, the IDF may be the one doing the tweeting, providing video footage from the drone that fired the missile. In sum: there is little, if any, meaningful lag between the event and our ability to witness it.

Arguably this shift began during the Arab Spring, but even then the events were unfolding on a longer timeline and across larger geographic areas, with far less smartphone and media penetration. And there are other notable iterative changes in the coverage of this conflict. The BBC’s Jon Donnison, reporting from Gaza, has taken to using the service Soundcloud to post brief recordings of anything from Hamas militants firing a rocket to the sound of an Israeli missile hitting a building. This practice only heightens the sense of immediacy, granting a kind of multi-mediated, vicarious participation to his Twitter followers. It seems only a matter of time before we’re able to smell the smoke.

Are we now brushing up to the barrier between spectatorship and some form of participation? War journalists, always at risk of becoming too involved in the events around them, are now responding to their critics on Twitter, while they’re still in theater. And consider that the Israeli government asked citizens to stop using social media to broadcast Hamas rocket attacks. The government warned that Hamas could use geotagged tweets or Facebook status updates to refine its targeting. Again, this isn’t an entirely new concern—it’s a kind of updated version of the World War II-era warning that “loose lips sink ships”—but it is once more distinguished by the speed and breadth of its reach.

For those of us not in Israel or Gaza, the question then becomes how much do we want to watch and what our engagement means. Is there a limit to how much firsthand testimony and shaky cell phone footage we can digest? Can we be made to feel like we’re taking sides by sifting through the feeds of Gazans more than those of Israelis? Is retweeting something from an IDF spokesperson a moral act? If you repost a geotagged photo from an Israeli friend, are you an accomplice in their supposed recklessness?

My own dominant feelings are of helplessness and mental fatigue. To log onto Twitter now is to uncork an unending torrent of human misery, confusion, frantic rumor, cynical despair, and hemorrhagic violence. The flow can’t be turned off; it can only be tamped down, assuming you choose to unfollow some people. But to do so seems like an abdication, a way of saying that I can’t tolerate observing someone’s very real suffering.

Amidst all this, there is the usual flow of tweets about U.S. politics, basketball, books, and whatever else usually appears in my feed—Twitter, as always, makes strange bedfellows. The appearance of this more trivial material is a reminder of the inherent solipsism of social media, which allow each of us to overrate his influence, to think that being immediately informed of every development is a good in and of itself. If I don’t retweet the latest news about a potential ceasefire or a rocket landing in Ashkelon, it doesn’t mean it didn’t happen, nor will it affect the course of events. It will still be reported on; it will still be in the newspaper tomorrow. But there is still that feeling of inadequacy that results from being passive in an interactive medium.

In a sense, we’re now all picnickers at Bull Run, our witnessing trending towards voyeurism, perhaps even vicarious longing. We might ask if we should retreat a little bit and regain the healthy perspective of distance.

Recent Kvetches: Women Aren’t Funny? Really?
Shani Boianjiu and the Problems of Youth

(Image credit: MENAHEM KAHANA/AFP/Getty Images)

The post Culture Kvetch: Retweet This War appeared first on Jewcy.

Yael Kohen’s first book, We Killed: The Rise of Women in American Comedy, is the sort of oral history that encapsulates the form’s pitfalls and its peculiar benefits. It contains the immediacy of lived experience vividly recollected, and it has the authenticity of testimony; it’s also a loose, rough-hewn work, too long in parts and stunted in others. Reading it, one learns much, for example, about what a revelation Phyllis Diller and Elaine May were in the buttoned-up 1950s, when stand-up comedy was still a relatively new art form and women comedians were practically unknown. But Kohen also lets her subjects drone on at times, spilling useless detail or failing to pinpoint what made a particular comedian great. Still, it’s the kind of history that breaks open an area of inquiry, so that future scholars and journalists can start digging.

To fill in some of these gaps, and to learn more about the book’s author, I met up with Kohen at her book release party at powerHouse Arena in Brooklyn. Kohen is in her early 30s and is a contributing editor for Marie Claire. At powerHouse, she wore a satiny blue blouse and cheetah-print heels, and though she confessed to being nervous, she carried herself with a kind of rehearsed confidence, like a young, well-trained lawyer about to try her first big case.

Recently Kohen wrote a profile of Kim Ng, a Major League Baseball executive who has long been seen as likely to become the first female general manager of an MLB team. In 2009, she wrote a widely discussed article, titled “Stiletto Stoners,” about working women who smoke pot.

“I think in general I’m interested in exploring ways in which conventional wisdom is wrong,” Kohen told me. We Killed was born, in part, out of a desire to overturn a hidebound belief. Christopher Hitchens’ notorious polemic, “Why Women Aren’t Funny,” which appeared in Vanity Fair in January 2007, counted Kohen among its many detractors. The article led Kohen to investigate the world of comedy—including for a 2009 Marie Claire story that presaged the book—and why many men are intimidated by female comedians, if not outright dismissive of them.

“Network television has always been a conservative medium,” Kohen claims, and her history backs that up, showing how TV has lagged behind other popular art forms, like music and film. The Mary Tyler Moore Show, which premiered in 1970, was the first TV program to have a protagonist who was divorced. The show’s co-creator, Allan Burns, recounted to Kohen a meeting with CBS personnel, in which one of the network’s researchers said, “We have found that there are four things that American television audiences won’t accept: men with mustaches, people who live in New York, Jews… and divorce.” Later, CBS tested the first episode and told the show’s staff that Rhoda, played by Valerie Harper, was “too Jewish and too abrasive.”

In addition to devoting sections to icons like Elaine May, Phyllis Diller, Mary Tyler Moore, and Carol Burnett, Kohen focuses on several other hinge figures. Lily Tomlin emerges as someone who, along with Richard Pryor, brought the counterculture into comedy. (Bette Midler said that Tomlin “gave women brand-new ways to be funny.”) Janeane Garofolo was not only the prototypical Gen-X slacker comedian; she also, apparently, provided opportunities for numerous people—men and women alike—and practically singlehandedly started the alt-comedy movement. Richard Belzer, now best known for his role on Law & Order: SVU (and for occasionally giving Nazi salutes), helped many young female comedians get work, including Roseanne Arnold and Susie Essman, while Del Close influenced practically every comedian who passed through Upright Citizens Brigade.

There are some marvelous anecdotes, such as the party where Gilda Radner punched Woody Allen in the stomach, as well as some choice lines, revealing in their bluntness. Take Treva Silverman, on comedy writers rooms in the 1970s: “everybody was always stoned.”

Few major industry figures seem to have been free of sexist behavior. Johnny Carson found many female comedians to be “a little aggressive”—he told Rolling Stone as much in a 1979 interview—and though he made Joan Rivers his primary substitute host, he never considered anointing her his successor. David Letterman had a habit of saying that some women were “funny like a guy.” The picture Kohen presents of Lorne Michaels is also complicated. He’s sometimes described as supporting women writers, while at other times he tolerated sexist behavior behind the scenes at SNL. Mitzi Shore, the legendary owner of The Comedy Store, was responsible for launching many careers, but some women found her cold and aloof, and they felt ghettoized when she set aside a small, dark room at the club for female performers.

Annie Beats, an early SNL writer, said that “John Belushi used to regularly ask for [the show’s female writers] to be fired” and refused to be in their sketches. (He also had a problem with Jews.) According to Marilyn Suzanne Miller, another original SNL writer, even noted that Al Franken—later liberal Democratic Senator Al Franken—would say that women weren’t funny.

There are, however, some undeveloped threads. For example, a number of interviewees talk about the preponderance of gay men among their fans, and there is some mention of gay men as a big part of early comedy club crowds (“The gay guys, they were chic,” Phyllis Diller said). But we’re never treated to any further analysis about why or how these two groups, women and gay men, made such natural cultural allies.

And there’s untapped drama as well. In a footnote that cries out for expansion, Kohen recounts the story of Joan Rivers, who after being passed over for inheriting The Tonight Show, got her own program, The Late Show Starring Joan Rivers. Fox canceled the show after Rivers refused to fire her husband, Edgar Rosenberg, who was executive producer. Rosenberg committed suicide months later, and “no woman has ever hosted a network late-night show since.” As for Rivers, she “didn’t appear on a late-night show for the next twenty years.” Yet there’s nothing on the subject from Rivers, who is interviewed in the book and who discussed the episode some in the documentary Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work. (The old talent agent Irvin Arthurs, on Rivers: “I think she would have killed somebody to make it.”)

Appearance has been one of the most difficult issues facing women in comedy, and the standards and expectations have shifted dramatically over the years. In the 1950s, Phyllis Diller hid her looks behind baggy clothes and outrageous wigs. The young Joan Rivers, attractive by most standards, chose to poke fun at herself, playing the character of the single girl who can never get a man. A generation later, Elayne Boosler was seen as threatening because her act included blue jokes about prostitution and sex. Now, many female comics attest that there’s an expectation to be attractive, to dress sexily, while others, pace Diller, wear hoodies and no makeup on stage, in hopes of being taken more seriously.

Many comedians in the book argue that male comedians are rewarded for their shlubbiness—think about Louis C.K. joking about his decrepit body. Women often aren’t allowed that chance. “I do think women, they’re judged a little bit differently for the way they approach their humor and their femininity,” Kohen told me. “I think the difference is that that doesn’t stop a guy from getting a sitcom, and it could stop a woman.”

On this front, she admires Mindy Kaling, and her new show, The Mindy Project.

“She’s not thin. Fine,” Kohen said. “But there’s something very refreshing about the way she’s so confident.”

At powerHouse Arena, a panel of female comedians, moderated by Vulture’s Jesse David Fox, was both critical of the treatment many comediennes have received and in agreement that the situation has improved immensely. Emily Heller, a comedian and writer, said, “Being a woman has helped me greatly… People are really excited if you’re a woman and you’re good.” She added, “the demand now for female comics is high.”

But the industry is still shaking off the sexism that was nothing if not institutionalized and that discouraged women from entering the profession at all. Lizz Winstead, another panelist, recalled that when she created The Daily Show in 1996, she received resumes from 150 writers; two were women. (She noted that “Wake Up World,” her 2007-08 Off-Broadway show, had seven women among its 10 writers.)

And too often, sexism has been dressed up as an act of bawdy daring, an ironic method of subversion. In 1987, Winstead was on Women of the Night, a comedy showcase on HBO. The comics were made to perform in front of a backdrop decorated to look like an alley. “We were dressed up like hookers and got out of a limo,” Winstead said. The producers hoped to get footage of the comediennes being catty backstage, but it didn’t work: “We didn’t fight, and they were bummed.”

Kohen noted that sites like College Humor and Funny or Die, which along with YouTube serve as a kind of digital comedy farm system, a role once principally occupied by clubs in New York and Los Angeles, employ mostly male writers. Even so, Kohen indicated that the current sense among many women is one of possibility, as well as gratitude towards their comedienne forbears. Now, that freedom often takes the form of insouciance.

Or as the writer Julieanne Smolinski announced to the crowd at powerHouse: “If you don’t enjoy what we’re doing, then you can go fuck yourself.”

Recent Kvetches: Shani Boianjiu and the Problems of Youth
Stop Calling Porn Star James Deen a ‘Nice Jewish Boy’

The post Culture Kvetch: Women Aren’t Funny? Really? appeared first on Jewcy.

The People of Forever Are Not Afraid, the first novel by Shani Boianjiu, a 25-year-old Israeli who writes in English, has much to tell us about life in the Israeli military. The Israel Defense Forces is perhaps Israel’s most mythologized institution and, to outsiders, its most opaque. For young diaspora Jews, the IDF is often encountered through the sweatshirts purchased in a tourist shop—a popular method of vicarious identification—and by discussions with the occasional veteran, every one of whom, it can seem, has served in an elite unit. (The process of mythologizing, after all, also depends on non-Israeli Jews looking admiringly at a symbol of Jewish power.)

Boianjiu’s novel (some critics have referred to it as a collection of stories) digs beneath the hasbarista image of IDF service and offers a somber look at the depression and alienation that can arrive when one transitions from being an 18-year-old high school student to a soldier charged with securing your country’s periphery or enforcing its occupation of the West Bank.

The book is largely the story of three young women—Lea, Avishag, and Yael—friends from a small village near the Lebanese border. We get some impression of their life at home, where Avishag’s brother, Dan, committed suicide not long before she was drafted, but much of the novel is about their refracted, vastly different experiences. Lena joins the military police (she lobbied for a higher-status assignment, but her request was denied) and works at checkpoints in the West Bank. Avishag is sent to the Egyptian border, where she monitors surveillance feeds and does guard duty in an observation tower. Yael is a weapons instructor at a base near an Arab village, whose boys frequently sneak in to steal equipment.

It is a novel of contrasts, where the trivial and the tragic, gossip and gunplay, messily intermingle. One of the characters falls for a fellow soldier and they engage in furtive sex at their base; the next day, he’s sent to Lebanon and dies. Weeks of unending banality at the Egyptian border are interrupted by the sudden appearance of a car trafficking women, or of an African migrant shot while trying to cross into Israel.

Boredom, in fact, is the dominant theme—the book has this in common with the Gulf War memoir Jarhead—along with the ways in which it colonizes the mind, destabilizing these characters’ sense of self, making them long for some extreme sensation (love, terror, violence) to slice through the ennui. It’s that destabilization of the self, combined with the traditional insecurities of youth, which makes Yael, Avishag, and Lena blend together. They do have some individuating qualities—Lena is beautiful and cold; Avishag is scarred by the death of her brother, though Yael, who loved him, is as well—but in many ways are indistinguishable. It’s one of the novels deficits: the storylines may vary, but the characters peopling them do not.

All three women are suspended somewhere between adolescence and adulthood. IDF service is an interregnum in which they are supposed to find themselves, but for them the uniform promises a sense of purpose that it can’t deliver. This is reflected in the prose, a mashup between the lyrical and the chatty, blog-speak meeting finely tuned confessionalism. Consider the opening to a chapter narrated by Yael: “One day, thirteen days before the war, I turned beautiful. It was the best. Don’t let anyone tell you there is anything better that can happen to a woman.”

One day but also thirteen days—vague and then exact. Beautiful—an adult’s word. But “it was the best:” that’s how a teenager talks. Yet in the next sentence she reminds us she is a woman.

This miscegenated style is ultimately very effective for Boianjiu, as it reflects the kind of story we are being told. Boianjiu’s hybrid English—informed as much by American pop culture (Dawson’s Creek and Mean Girls get referenced) as by any formal instruction—produces some small, pleasurable dissonances, the kind that can only come from a non-native speaker. Avishag at one point remarks that “it is time to start caring about someone who is not myself,” which is a challenge for all three of these characters. An American would probably use the more conventional “other than myself,” a phrasing that would be digested without notice, like the chips at the bottom of the bag.

So why did Boianjiu write this novel in English, rather than her native Hebrew? In interviews, she’s explained that, following her IDF service, she studied English and social anthropology as an undergraduate at Harvard. The People of Forever Are Not Afraid, which began as her senior thesis, came together practically by accident. She was writing stories for class and a professor put her in touch with Andrew Wylie, one of publishing’s biggest agents.

Boianjiu’s career soon took off, well before this book was released. In 2011, she was selected for the National Book Award’s 5 under 35 prize, reportedly on the recommendation of Nicole Krauss, who has been a champion of Boianjiu’s work. It’s understandable why Krauss is a fan. Like her American admirer, Boianjiu leans towards direct, emotionally raw prose, she makes use of repetition, and the novel, even in its overall bleakness, is shot through with whimsy (like the sandwich shop in which customers can request any ingredients they can think of). There’s also an element of, if not outright surrealism, then a blurred vision, one that derives from the characters’ brokenness, their inability to fully engage with the world.

Early success has a tendency to attract both irrational criticism and unearned praise. It also makes for odd bedfellows. Some journalists have compared Boianjiu to Lena Dunham, a pairing that seems to have little merit except that both are female creatives in their mid-twenties. Perhaps Dunham is just too easily invoked—and too SEO-friendly—to resist. Recently, a rather cynical article in Haaretz called Boianjiu the “Cinderella of Kfar Vradim,” and deemed her the product of marketing hype (there really hasn’t been much).

Some of the venom seems to stem from the fact that Boianjiu writes in English, thereby bypassing the smaller Israeli market, but like Aleksandar Hemon, her decision to write in a second language has proven an artistically sound one. Debating the commercial or ethical merits of that choice is a rather dull side pursuit. Instead, better to conclude that Boianjiu has produced an impressive first novel, flaws and all. That she has done it at a comparatively young age only means, I hope, that she will have more time to perform the same feat again.

Boianjiu will be participating in a Twitter Book Club with Jewcy and the Jewish Book Council November 20 from 1:30 to 2:10 p.m.

Recent Kvetches: Stop Calling Porn Star James Deen a ‘Nice Jewish Boy’
Watching the Anti-War Documentary ‘Tears of Gaza’
The Jews of HBO’s ‘Boardwalk Empire’

The post Culture Kvetch: Shani Boianjiu and the Problems of Youth appeared first on Jewcy.

Of all of his varied, sometimes conflicting identities—soldier, novelist, New Journalist, proto-hipster, brawler, politician, director—Norman Mailer could never settle into the persona of the “nice Jewish boy.” In fact, he detested it, once writing, “The last thing I want to be in life is the nice Jewish boy from Brooklyn.” Many figures from Mailer’s life have cited this phrase, along with Mailer’s fear of appearing weak, timid, or self-censoring, as a justification for his bombastic behavior and his taste for violence. Friends and colleagues have also argued that it’s this very image of the nice Jewish boy—so dominant among mid-century American Jews and those who observed them—that contributed to Mailer’s ambivalent, if not rejectionist, attitude toward Judaism.

Mailer’s biographer Mary V. Dearborn writes that, at a young age, Norman was inspired by his father Barney, who combined an elegant South African manner with a tendency toward drinking, philandering, and gambling. It wasn’t that the behaviors themselves were admirable but rather the sort of identity they reflected: “Barney’s small acts of rebellion mirrored his own desires, and Norman felt heartened that he could escape the fate of the “nice Jewish boy” he had so long feared was to be his.”

Of course, in his long, heady life, Mailer often went too far in the other direction, at times displaying a brutish, callous character, particularly toward women. (In 1960, locked in a drunken argument with his wife Adele Morales Mailer, he pulled out a pen-knife and stabbed her.) And he may never have fully escaped the shadow of the nice Jewish boy—he was, after all, an exemplary student—in part because he couldn’t escape Jewishness itself. “He’s the prisoner of Jewish history,” Alfred Kazin said of Mailer, “and no matter how gifted you are, how courageous, you always feel you’re under wraps.” Kazin added, “So I understand it when I see him break against that restraint, only there’s also a positive side to being Jewish, which he hasn’t begun to acknowledge.”

We’re a long way from the kind of torturous battles over identity fought by Mailer and by Philip Roth, who, in works like Portnoy’s Complaint, pits the nice Jewish boy against his natural counterpart: the libidinous lapsed Jew with the raging id. The “nice Jewish boy” has ossified into a commonplace, alongside its “girl” counterpart. A decade ago, they made for presumptuously clever T-shirt slogans. Now the phrase is infantilizing, if not distancing and derogatory; it may even not mean anything at all. (It’s also far from its Yiddish antecedent, which carried a more expansive range of associations than simply “nice.”)

If you read the press surrounding him, James Deen is a nice Jewish boy and comfortable with that. Deen is among the most popular male porn actors, and he also stars in Bret Easton Ellis’ upcoming film, The Canyons (here’s the new trailer). Deen is also the latest in a list of porn veterans (see: Sasha Grey, Jenna Jameson, Ron Jeremy) about to be marshalled into the mainstream. That is, if he isn’t there already: Deen’s distinct brand of stardom has been widely dissected, including in GQ, GOOD magazine, and ABC’s Nightline (which fretted about his following among teenage girls). He’s tremendously popular on Tumblr and Twitter and often tweets back at fans.

The rap on Deen is that he’s an unassumingly handsome (and well-endowed) guy, who cares that the girls he performs with enjoy themselves. He does a lot of BDSM but he doesn’t cross any lines. He’s approachable and funny, he loves his job, and he doesn’t have any perceivable hangups or history of trauma. He’s frighteningly normal, even modest and cool. It’s not just that (heterosexual) guys want to be him and girls want to do him; it’s that they all want to hang out with him.

For a lot of commentators, this set of characteristics has proved alternately thrilling and baffling. Some of it comes back to Deen’s regular-guy looks—he’s 5’8″ and has the body of someone who jogs often but doesn’t try too hard—but also his Jewishness. A New York Observer profile of Deen carried the subhed “In defense of the not-so-nice Jewish boy.” Nightline wondered, “So how did Deen make his transition from a young Jewish kid growing up in SoCal, to a teen internet porn sensation?” (You can almost see where the writer highlighted “nice” and replaced it with “young.”) Wells Tower, writing in GQ, noted that Deen lost his virginity at Jewish summer camp—a site notorious for sexual misadventure among erstwhile nice Jewish adolescents. The GOOD article quotes a fan who says that Deen appeals to “her interest in ‘nerdy Jewish dudes’” and reminds her of guys from Hebrew school.

Deen is active in this shaping of his image, using his Jewishness as a metonym for likeable and unthreatening. The GOOD writer also noted that Deen “cracks Jew jokes” (at one point he refers to “my skinny little Jewish ass”), and he’s mentioned to a couple reporters that he’s “an over-analytical Jew.” His very NSFW blog—which is frattishly funny and genial but not very analytical—recently featured a post in which he exulted in getting free beers at a Vegas club: “this totally appealed to the jew in me.”

I have no problem with porn or with presenting James Deen as its most palatable public face. And perhaps, as Ellis and some of Deen’s other ardent boosters claim, he’ll use his acting skills, which make him the Brando of his current industry, to impressive effect in The Canyons. But for now, there’s a troubling way in which Deen’s Jewishness—his “nice Jewish boy”-ness—is used as a gloss to make him acceptable for public consumption. There’s a strange justificatory tone in the desire to explain it all, as well as an element of surprise: who knew that nebbishy Jews could fuck better than steroidal goyim? (Ron Jeremy, himself a failed actor, is sometimes ironically praised for being the stereotypical hirsute, soft-bellied Jew—another kind of sympathetic everyman, save his enormous member.)

It may seem incongruous to circle back to Mailer here, but why not. There’s much to dislike about the man, and he never seemed to find a useful accommodation with his Jewish background. But in his rejection of being a nice Jewish boy, Mailer did find the courage to forge his own distinct identity and, as a Jewish celebrity, represented a necessary counter-example to popular conceptions of Jewish weakness. That can’t be said for Deen, who doesn’t seem to have given these issues much thought at all. But then, neither have his journalistic admirers, who have yet to ask any questions beyond the obvious.

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