Is Dave Winer’s new blog post more Jewish than the Coen brothers’ ostensibly Jewish movie, A Serious Man?
Yes, because assimilated American Jews — and by that I mean virtually all of us — express our Jewishness most fully when we talk and think as Americans.
That is, we express and reveal our deepest desires, inclinations, ideals, habits of mind, and world views when we express ourselves with the least self-consciousness and self-editing. And we are only able to do that when we speak as Americans about non-Jewish subjects.
When we try to speak about ourselves as Jews we frequently find ourselves in the predicament described by Saul Bellow as vowing to tell the truth, “but the truth hears us and runs away.”
No need to try
But to the extent that we still harbor inclinations and habits of mind that can be traced to Jewish historical experience, Jewish cultural experience, in-group biases, fears, pride and all the rest, then these elements are inevitably expressed when we express ourselves fully.
So Jews don’t have to try to be Jewish, as the Coen brothers did in their pretentious and leaden A Serious Man. It will out.
What got me going was a long-simmering dislike of A Serious Man clarified today by Winer’s blog post about Jaron Lanier’s new book, You Are Not A Gadget. Addressing the problems of the web Winer wrote,
“If you care about a subject, write a definitive piece on it that reflects your point of view. Don’t settle for a compromise, group-think sanitized version in the form of a Wikipedia page.”
And he wrote,
“We need diversity of opinion, not a mass of slurry that’s formed into corporate frankfurter meat.”
Jewish theme alert
Bzzzz! Those lines sent the pinball in my head ricocheting into this Bellow line from “Cousins,” where Ijah contemplates the dull expanse of Chicago’s six-flat residential neighborhoods,
“It’s because of places like this that I hate the evolutionism that tells us we must die in stages of boredom for the eventual perfection of our species.”
It’s the same thing. The same Jewish thing. That suspicion of and contempt for the crowd, that hatred of the leveling power of society and the dumbing-down instinct.
And the Jewish message got even clearer when I found this announcement about a reading by Lanier at Harvard,
“Lanier … warns that our financial markets and sites like Wikipedia, Facebook, and Twitter are elevating the “wisdom” of mobs and computer algorithms over the intelligence and judgment of individuals” (emphasis added).
At that point it was no surprise to see Lanier on a list of Jewish computer scientists. There is nothing more Jewish than contempt for the mob.
The academic citation
My go-to guy for dealing with Jewish-American culture is Brandeis’ Stephen Whitfield, and these lines of his from In Search of American Jewish Culture are just to the point here,
“Disproportionate expressions of certain interests are themselves signs of the animating power of a culture.”
O Brother, Where Art Thou?
And I would add that exceptions aside (Philip Roth, Woody Allen, Bellow, and a few others), Jewish American thinkers, writers, poets, songwriters, playwrights, photographers, and filmmakers make their greatest contributions to Jewish American culture when they do themselves the favor of not even trying.
That’s not only why the Coens’ Fargo and O Brother, Where Art Thou (my favorite. I love that movie) are infinitely better than A Serious Man.
It’s also why I’ll bet those movies will prove richer in Jewish themes to the future scholars who will write about the Coens’ body of work. In fact, they might even be as Jewish as Dave Winer’s blog post.
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