Published: timesofisrael.com, 18 August 2024
Iconoclastic writer-director David Mamet is the latest American celebrity to visit Israel during the Gaza war. Mamet, whose many credits include “The Untouchables,” “Glengarry Glen Ross,” “Wag The Dog” and “American Buffalo,” took part in a public Q&A on Saturday at the Tel Aviv Cinematheque as part of the Tel Aviv International Student Film Festival.
During the afternoon session, the Pulitzer Prize-winning writer weighed in on the state of assimilated American Jewry and missed professional opportunities.
He revealed to the crowded hall that he is hoping to write a movie about Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI) founder Al Schwimmer, and talked openly about his love of Israel as well as the dangers of anti-Semitism facing Jews around the world. His wife, actress Rebecca Pidgeon who starred in several of her husband’s films, was also in attendance.
Mamet noted that he was born in 1947, the year before Israel’s Declaration of Independence, and later came to know several of Israel’s founding fathers.
“And I’d say to myself, ‘My God, I’m meeting with Benjamin Franklin, I’m meeting with George Washington,’” related Mamet to the Tel Aviv crowd. He said that among the important foundational figures in Israel’s history he came across was Schwimmer.
“I wanted to write a movie about the guys who ran the guns and had to steal the airplanes [for Israel],” said Mamet. “Al Schwimmer told me the story that after World War II, American veterans who had been in the Air Force were allowed to buy warplanes very cheaply, but that if the Jews bought them, the FBI would impound them because they knew the Jews would fly them to Israel. So Schwimmer told me the story about how the FBI impounded his plane, and he had to sneak onto the airfield and steal his plane back. I wrote this wonderful novella about it.”
Mamet talked about how he has been trying to sell the project, including suggesting it to Keshet Films — which, he added, had asked him to write a 12-part television series about a famous rabbi — so far without success.
During the session, the audience was shown a trailer for his latest film, “Henry Johnson,” about the 1963 death of JFK. A new production of “Glengarry Glen Ross” — a play many consider to be Mamet’s masterpiece — is due on Broadway later this year, with a cast including Kieran Culkin, Bob Odenkirk and Bill Burr.
Asked about those Jews in the United States who express opposition to Israel, Mamet, who has been outspoken in recent years about his emergent conservative views, framed it in terms of Jewish assimilation and a simultaneous letting-go of basic education about Judaism.
“When the Jews came over to the US they gave up the Torah for the ‘improved version,’ which is called The New York Times, and so we read The New York Times every day, and if The New York Times said it was true, it was true! Because they wanted to be Americans…
“There are Jews in the West who look at Jews in the East as the underclass… God forbid we should read the Torah, [or] we should support the State of Israel because that might lessen us in the eyes of people who — and here’s where the denial comes in — hate us anyway when they think about us,” he said.
Mamet’s grandparents were Polish Jews who emigrated to the United States. He has included Jewish characters and themes in some of his works, notably including 1991’s “Homicide,” with Joe Mantegna playing a Jewish detective investigating the murder of a Jewish woman.
However, some American Jews are uneasy about showing their religious identity, according to Mamet. And the current climate in the US has some in the far-left eschewing their roots, he claims.
“Because we’ve been denied protection for 2,000 years, our only protection was to assimilate… so it’s very hard for these Jews who have this racial memory of being killed every time we raised our head, to say, ‘No, I’m a Jew.’ So we go around whispering, ‘I’m Jewish but I’m not that Jewish,’ and of course we have a sense of anxiety.
“But just like a child in the disruptive household, the child always runs to the abusive parent because we know that the other parent’s going to love us anyway, so that’s where American liberal Jews are coming from,” he said.
Mamet’s visit to Israel follows those of other American artists following Hamas’s October 7 massacre of 1,200 people and abduction of 251, which launched the ensuing war. Other celebrities who have come to Israel to show support include Jerry Seinfeld, Debra Messing and Mayim Bialik.
