The letter, which begins, “Welcome to the El Al family—or as we say in Hebrew, Bruchim haba’im!” seeks to familiarize employees with their “new customer base.” Since it’s summer, and people are traveling (unless, you know, you fly private up to visiting day), we thought we’d revisit some of the lessons we learned last summer.

“Security lines: Passengers are instructed to arrive at the airport six hours before a flight. This may seem excessive, but Israel’s crack security service demands it on the theory that no terrorist would be dedicated enough to spend six hours in a crowd of Jews. Kidding! The six-hour time period allows our security team to ask essential questions of our passengers, including ‘Do you have family in Israel? Where do they live? What is the purpose of your visit?’ It also allows time for the person behind you in line to ask the very same questions, in even greater detail. What you might call ‘intrusive rudeness’ is merely what our people call ‘Jewish geography.’”

“Boarding: We board our flights for maximum efficiency, in the following order: Families with young children, families with six or more young children, families with eight or more young children, individuals with physical limitations, individuals with aches and pains that may be something but they won’t know until they see a specialist, individuals who cut in line, and gentiles.”

“Landing: Passengers will often burst into applause when the plane touches down in Israel. This is because a) they are deeply moved by the thought of arriving in the Land of their Ancestors; b) they are still surprised, even after 60 years, that a Jew can safely pilot an airplane; or c) they are relieved that they no longer have to listen to the guy in the middle seat complain about Obama.”

Fly the friendly skies—or go to Israel [NJ Jewish News]

The novelists take their dystopian visions in radically different directions—Shteyngart has written a fast-moving love story, while Cohen’s is more stream-of-Jewish-consciousness, dense with wordplay and religious and cultural references. Tablet Magazine Editor-in-Chief Alana Newhouse sat down with the two of them for a sometimes bookish, other times bawdy, conversation over drinks and smoked fish, on a sweltering summer day on the boardwalk of Brooklyn’s Brighton Beach.

First of all, it’s going to be a novel. No more of this short-story crap, or “memoirs.” Dirty laundry, you mean! I’m bigger than memoirs now. And it’s going to be a big novel, I don’t mind telling you that right off—and I don’t just mean in regard to page-count, though it will be that, too, it will definitely be that. I’m thinking 8, maybe 900 pages, not including the prologue and the epilogue (and there’ll be some maps in the front, too, those little black and white, poorly illustrated maps with the illegible town names, and a sea and maybe the journey of the protagonist marked with dotted line—you are going to need maps to follow this book, people!), divided not just into chapters, but into books—books! Book One, Book Two, Book Three—it takes three books of normal men to equal just one book of mine, that’s what I’m saying. I might even call them Book the First and Book the Second; it depends on whether I’m going to go for the whole Victorian thing, but I do like the way that sounds. Hey, maybe I’ll do volumes? Holy shit—volumes. Yes, I like that. “A three volume novel by the author of Foreskin’s Lament.” Hot damn! Make it four. It’s going to be a box set of four handsomely clothbound volumes. But it’s also going to be a big book culturally speaking, an important book. An important Book, actually, with a capital B. Maybe I’ll do that, too, capitalize things indiscriminately. Yes, I think I Will. But I want to be very clear about this before I commit even one word to paper: this novel is going to be an earthquake, a seismic shift in the history of American letters, a clarion call, or maybe a wake-up call, or maybe both of those types of calls. These are some of the subjects it is going to touch upon:

Faith
Family
Humanity
Global Warming
Hatred
Angst
Sexuality
Consciousness
War
Peace
Man’s inhumanity to man
Politics
The fall of the West
The rise of the East
Occidentalism
Orientalism
Homosexuality
Transgenderism
Mortality
Stem cell research
“Dolly,” that cloned goat or whatever she was
Wittgenstein (I’ll have to Google that one)
Hegel (Her, too)

That sounds like a lot, but I’ve got 1,000 pages to fill, and six volumes, so I think I can swing it. I know what you’re thinking: “But will it be an insightful, oftentimes humorous examination of contemporary culture and mores?” Yes. I don’t see how, with a list like that, it can fail to be anything else. A word here about style: lots! It will definitely be literary—no sense writing 1,200 pages without getting a little literary credibility—but it will also strike a balance between the elevated and the commonplace. Yes, it will “strike a balance,” I guarantee that. It’s going to strike the hell out of a balance. That sounds difficult, but it isn’t. It’s pretty easy. For example, I could have written, “That sounds hard.” But I used “difficult.” I was striking a balance. If I was really going all-out for elevated, I might have used “it is not” instead of “it’s not,” but you see there how I have managed to walk a fine line between the two by using (“Employing!” Ha!) the word “difficult” as well as the contraction “it’s.” Yes, I will “manage to walk a fine line.” Also, I’ll walk a fine line between comedy and tragedy. And pathos and something else, I’m not sure what yet. I’d like to add a few subjects to my previous list:

Africa
Child fighters
Gun control
Cultural imperialism
Absurdism
Realism
The failure of language
Memes (?)
The abuse of power
The poor
Violence
The inability to understand ourselves even as we struggle to understand each another

The most important thing, of course, is to put the reader first, and that’s exactly what I’m going to do. Here’s a list of everything I would like the reader to think about me:

1. “That Auslander, he is very clever.”
2. “All modern American literature comes from one book by Shalom Auslander named (TBD).”
3. “What a fantastic movie that book by Auslander will make.”
4. “I should forgive that Auslander for not being the son I wanted.”

I’m pretty sure a 1,600-page, seven-volume set can accomplish all that and more—for the reader, I mean—assuming I have the right blurbs. DeLillo would be good, so would Pynchon. You’re not going to get me into an argument over the merits of Pynchon’s books, because I haven’t read any of them, but there’s no arguing that some of them are just incredibly big, as big as Tolstoy’s. He’s dead, unfortunately, but maybe I can get someone to mention him in the blurb. If you’re going to write a blurb for me, do me a favor and mention Tolstoy. You can also mention Dostoyevsky, and Kafka, but if you’re going to mention Kafka, please make it clear that what you’re noticing is the similarity of our prophetic visions of man’s struggle against forces that he can neither fathom nor control, and don’t mention the Jew thing, because if I’m going to write a 2,000-page, nine-volume novel, I don’t want people thinking it’s just for Jews. Not that there’s anything wrong with Jews, it’s just that there’s not that many of us. Let’s be honest, just between us Jews—how many of you have read novels about Muslims? The Lefties, maybe, and that’s mostly out of guilt, but not the rest of you. That’s all I’m saying. Two billion Muslims is a market I simply can’t afford to ignore, and there’s a bunch of Christians around, too, so let’s give the Jew thing a rest. Also, the whole “God” thing. I’ve written two books about God now, and I think it’s time to move on. Who knows how many novels Spinoza had inside him? I’d say a bunch, but he just couldn’t drop the God crap. Sad, really. Philosophy’s cool, but it doesn’t get you the respect a novel does. After all, as D.H. Lawrence once said, “The novel is the highest form of human expression so far attained.” And as Stendahl once said, “A novel is a mirror carried along a high road.” And as Robert Musil once said, “The novel is called upon like no other art form to incorporate the intellectual content of the age.” Novels are the shit, that’s my point, and you can tell because so many people say so many quotable things about them, and mine is going to be all these things—the highest form of human expression AND a mirror carried along a high road AND an art form that incorporates the intellectual content of the age—and, at 2,500 pages and 17 volumes, it’s going to be more of those things than any other book. Of course, Flannery O’Connor said, “Writing a novel is a terrible experience, during which the hair often falls out and the teeth decay”—but that was probably just the lupus talking. Don’t get me wrong—I have no illusions that writing this novel will be a trying experience. But I’ve got my How to Write a Damn Good Novel, my How to Write a Damn Good Novel 2, my Marshall Plan for Novel Writing, my On Writing, my The First Five Pages, my Plot and Structure, my Character, Emotion and Viewpoint, my Description and Setting, and my How to Write a Novel in 21 Days, so while it may be a difficult 21 days (make it 25, since it is going to be 3,000 pages and 22 volumes), at the end, I’ll have a novel. And a big one, too.

In 1964 Melville Shavelson set out to make a Hollywood epic about an American military man who helped establish the state of Israel. Though Cast a Giant Shadow had a generous budget, the full cooperation of the Israeli government, and a star-studded cast including Kirk Douglas, John Wayne, Frank Sinatra, Yul Brynner, Angie Dickinson, and Senta Berger, it flopped. But something great came out of it: Shavelson’s hilarious, groundbreaking 1971 book about the experience, How to Make a Jewish Movie. That his friends suggested a better title would have been “How Not to Make a Jewish Movie” gives a hint of what to expect.

By the 1960s Shavelson was well-known in Hollywood as a maker of comedies. He’d received Oscar nominations for co-writing two films he also directed: the Cary Grant-Sophia Loren romance Houseboat and the Bob Hope vehicle The Seven Little Foys. His association with Hope was his entry into the entertainment biz: Shavelson began writing for him in 1938, and didn’t quit for 20 years. How to Make a Jewish Movie reads like the work of an expert comedy writer. Practically every paragraph ends with a punch line; nearly every sentence has an ironic kick. Shavelson is talented enough to make the story of creating a flop irresistible, and humble enough to accept at least some of the blame. And while the pleasure of How to Make a Jewish Movie comes from the funny stories of difficult actors and shattered $40,000 camera lenses, the book is also a milestone: quite possibly the first book by a Hollywood director devoted entirely to the making of his own movie. Lillian Ross’s Picture and John Gregory Dunne’s The Studio had already given readers vivid behind-the-scenes accounts of Hollywood filmmaking, but Shavelson pulled the curtain back firsthand and revealed, humorously and memorably, the industry’s machinations, long before the public became well-versed in box office figures and books like You’ll Never Eat Lunch in This Town Again shot up the best-seller list.

How to Make a Jewish Movie is primarily a chronicle of everything that can go wrong in the creation of a big-budget film, from rights acquisition to the ad campaign. But Shavelson, who was born in Brooklyn, opens with a confession: “I have never entered a synagogue of my own free will, except for the ceremonies attendant on birth, death, or marriage.”

So how does a comedy writer—especially one who says he was “ashamed” of being Jewish—wind up making an earnest biopic about the founding of Israel? At the suggestion of a friend at MGM, he reads Ted Berkman’s book Cast a Giant Shadow: The Story of Mickey Marcus, Who Died to Save Jerusalem (MGM had just dropped its option on the book, so his friend called to say it was up for grabs), and something is awakened in him:

After reading Ted Berkman’s book I knew I had to make that movie if it killed me. . . . I literally ran to Paramount’s front office and pantingly laid this hot project on the desk of the head man. Would Paramount buy it for me? 

He was kindly, intelligent, shrewd, and went to Temple regularly every Rosh Hashonah. Who, he asked me, would want to see a picture about a Jewish general?

Since, at the moment—and ever since—I couldn’t think of an answer, I decided to buy the rights to the book myself.

The story of David “Mickey” Marcus is indeed awe-inspiring. He was a Brooklyn-born West Point graduate who served as an infantry lieutenant in the ’20s, then returned to New York City to become a gangbusting U.S. attorney and Commissioner of Correction. At the outbreak of World War II he rejoined the army. According to Shavelson’s screen treatment (which he prints in full in the book) Marcus wrote Army training manuals, made his first parachute jump into Normandy on D-Day, drafted the terms of surrender for Italy and Germany, and “was at Roosevelt’s side at Cairo, Teheran, Quebec, and Yalta.” In Germany, General Patton appointed him liaison officer with liberated concentration camp survivors. He was made second-in-command in occupied Berlin, and organized the Nuremberg trials and Japanese war crimes trials. In 1947, having returned to New York to work as a lawyer, Marcus was quietly asked to guide the untrained and ill-equipped Jewish troops of Palestine in their fight for independence. He did it under an assumed name, with the secret blessing of the Pentagon. Against all odds he led Israel’s army to victory upon the nation’s birth—and was mistakenly killed by an Israeli sentry just a few hours before a truce was declared.

Shavelson’s own story of putting together Cast a Giant Shadow is heroic, too, in its way: he’s a mensch in the face of disaster. He makes the film sound like the most troubled shoot since Cleopatra, but does it in an avuncular, anecdotal way that anticipates Sidney Lumet’s 1995 book, Making Movies. Needing the involvement of a star—preferably a non-Jewish one—to make his project viable, whom does Shavelson go to first? The least Jewish man in Hollywood, John Wayne. Shavelson had co-written a movie for Wayne in the past, but they had squabbled on the set. Undeterred, he pitches Marcus’s story, ending by reading a eulogistic telegram to Marcus’s widow from David Ben Gurion. Wayne (known to all as Duke) lights a cigarette and says:

“That’s the most American story I ever heard.” 

I wasn’t sure I understood him correctly. Ben Gurion had signed that telegram—not Ben Franklin.

“Everybody’s knockin’ the United States today,” Duke said, pacing the floor and covering half an acre of carpet with each stride. “Claiming we’re sendin’ in troops all over the world to knock over some little country where we’ve got no right to be. They’ve forgotten who were are and what we’ve done. At a time like this, we need to remind them of how we helped the littlest country of all get its independence. How an American army officer gave his life to do it.”

“Mickey was Jewish,” I insisted on reminding him.

“Don’t gimme that crap,” said Duke, “Jesus Christ was Jewish, too, and he didn’t even go to West Point.”

So, in a gesture of grand patriotism, Wayne agreed to appear in the picture. Not as Marcus—that role would go to Douglas, an actual Jew—but as a Patton-like general whom Shavelson would insert into his as-yet-unwritten script. Shavelson then took his pitch to the Mirisch brothers, Harold, Walter, and Marvin, “collectively the world’s largest independent producer of films,” and a deal was made. Soon after, in a location scouting trip to Israel, Shavelson got an early warning of the difficulties to come: The army’s commander-in-chief—none other than Yitzhak Rabin—demanded script approval. And, “in the event that the script should be approved, he went on to say, all film shot in Israel would have to be reviewed by the military authorities before being shipped out of the country.”

Luther Adler and Kirk Douglas in Cast a Giant Shadow

In 1965 filming got under way in Tel Aviv with 125 crew members, 800 Israeli soldiers, and a thousand extras. The problems began immediately: During a shot, Israeli tanks left abruptly when the army learned that Syria had invaded; nearly all the trucks in another shot stalled when the desert temperature hit 126 degrees; the two technical advisors provided by the army clashed over key details; Israel’s Communist Party dropped leaflets from a roof into the middle of a crowd scene. Along the way, Brynner went unrecognized by Ben Gurion (“The King and I. . . which one were you?”), and Shavelson and Douglas bickered repeatedly over the script. On the last day of filming in Israel, 200 extras shot half of a scene, disappeared while the next shot was set up, and sent in a representative to proclaim that they had united as the Israel Screen Extras Guild and would not return until their salaries were tripled. After examining the footage, the Israeli Defense Forces sent a detailed critique, which included: “In Scene 327, the girl with a flowery skirt doing the Hora is completely out of step. Change this.”

When Cast a Giant Shadow was released in 1966 the question “Who would want to see a picture about a Jewish general?” loomed over the national advertising campaign, which lacked, Shavelson writes, “all mention of the nation of Israel, the War of Liberation, the Jews, or Colonel Mickey Marcus.” Relating this fact, he seems understandably peeved. What he doesn’t say (perhaps it was a sore point) is that Otto Preminger’s Exodus, which also concerned the founding of Israel, was the fourth-biggest box-office draw of 1960. Cast a Giant Shadow didn’t earn back the cost of its negative.

So, how’s the movie? Kitschy. Its dialogue sounds, not coincidentally, like the work of a comedy writer. When Marcus tells Ben Gurion (played by Luther Adler, in a ridiculous white wig that makes him look more like Martin Van Buren) that Jerusalem has no strategic value, and that trying to save it doesn’t make sense, Ben Gurion says, “Did it make sense for a fellow with a nice, steady job building pyramids to march his friends into the Red Sea?” When it’s serious, it’s worse. A didactic argument between Marcus and Wayne’s American general about Israel’s future ends with Wayne—John Wayne!—raising his glass and declaring, “L’chaim.” (He pronounces it “la kime.”) Sinatra is amusing as a New Jersey pilot who drops seltzer bottles on the Arabs when the Israelis run out of bombs. Douglas is suitably rugged, and Brynner pontificates impressively. But Shavelson himself calls it “a not-very-good movie.” Pauline Kael’s assessment was more blunt: “Even those willing to accept the hours of incoherence and banality may recoil at the obscenity of being asked to experience the horrors of Dachau as reflected in John Wayne’s bleary eyes.”

In his 1988 autobiography, The Ragman’s Son, Kirk Douglas still sounds disappointed when he writes of Shavelson: “Though Mel was Jewish, he was not Jewish enough. The movie needed to be done by someone with deep conviction.” If he didn’t have conviction when he started the picture, Shavelson says he did by the end. Like his film’s protagonist, he comes to find Israel’s stubborn citizens exasperating but admirable, and his months among them turn him into something of a Zionist. Halfway through the book, at a seder, he has an epiphany: “The escape had taken place, not in some mythical land with an impossible alphabet no one could ever learn, but only a few miles from here, across the desert where tanks had recently rumbled out of that same land of Egypt, only to be turned back in defeat by the descendants of those who had written the very songs the children were singing.” He’s finally proud to be Jewish, proud to have made a movie about Jewish pride. The fun of the best making-of movie books, such as Final Cut (about Heaven’s Gate) and The Devil’s Candy (about The Bonfire of the Vanities), often comes from schadenfreude—the pleasure of witnessing the payback for megalomania and excess. But you feel for Shavelson, because his intentions are so pure, and because he seems like such a nice guy. He also seems to have learned, as an entertainer, that the story of a nice Jewish filmmaker who finds himself while shooting a $5 million flop has more potential in the hands of a comedy writer than the story of a Jewish general who gets killed.

Shavelson continued making movies into the 1970s—comedies, mostly. In 1990, more than 50 years after he began writing for Bob Hope, they wrote a bestselling book together, Don’t Shoot, It’s Only Me. Now 90, Shavelson is finishing up a memoir, which he’s calling How to Succeed in Hollywood Without Really Trying—P.S., You Can’t. Asked over email about How to Make a Jewish Movie, he pooh-poohed the idea of it being a literary milestone: “I wrote it in part to counter all the negative reviews the film inspired, and to show how a bad film can be explained by circumstances, as well as lack of talent….My old friend Julius Epstein, co-writer of Casablanca, always said the Academy should stop restoring old negatives and start destroying a few. Cast A Giant Shadow might be a candidate.”

Cast a Giant Shadow is available on DVD. How to Make a Jewish Movie is long out of print.

“Maybe he’ll be a restaurant critic,” my wife suggests, trying to dispel the heavy cloud hanging over us.

“A restaurant critic?” I say disdainfully. “Do you remember what he said after he took a sip of ink from the printer cartridge? ‘Yummy.’ The kid is no gourmet.”

Israel’s next president?

But my wife refuses to lose hope. “Maybe he can be a quality controller of mattresses for dwarves?” she asks excitedly. “After all, he really does love to sleep.”

“That is a very, very specific field,” I say, trying to cool her enthusiasm. “Without connections in bedroom-furniture-for-the-height-challenged circles—which I’m sorry to say neither of us actually has—it’ll be hard for him to break into the business.”

A depressing silence fills our dark living room, broken only by the phony “Bye-byes!” little Lev is calling out to the passersby on the street. My wife is on the verge of crying, and if my military past hadn’t toughened me, I would shed a tear too. What could a pair of brave parents hope for after discovering at such an early stage that their baby is a good-for-nothing?

Suddenly, out of nowhere, a ray of sun breaks through the clouds, bringing with it an epiphany. “President,” I shout happily to my wife, “our Lev will be president.” She hesitates for a moment, but I don’t let that deflate me. “It’s crystal clear,” I explain to her. “With all the investigations of Katsav and the coming impeachment, they’ll be starting to look for a new president in a few weeks, and our Lev has everything it takes to do the job: he looks like a statesman; he loves to wave to people; he doesn’t have a left-wing past that could raise right-wing opposition; and he barely knows how to talk, so there’s almost no chance he’ll make politically incorrect remarks. He’s the perfect candidate, just think about it: my parents are from Poland, your grandmother’s from Syria. If we play our cards right, the little guy’ll get wall-to-wall support.”

“But,” my wife notes skeptically, “he doesn’t know English. How will he make speeches or talk to other world leaders?”

“With waves and smiles,” I reply to calm her down, “just like Katsav.”

“But he still shits in his diapers,” my wife says, still doubtful.

“So what?” I ask, waving my hand dismissively. “No one’s perfect. Compared to his predecessors, his virtues—and there are many—definitely outweigh his vices. Our Lev is as straight as an arrow and he doesn’t have a criminal record or skeletons in the closet…”

“He touches his peenie,” my wife blurts out. “You leave him alone naked for a minute and he’s touching his peenie . . .”

“Better a president who touches himself and not others,” I say, quick to see the half-full glass.

“I’m still not convinced,” my wife persists.

“Shira,” I take her hand and look hard into her eyes, “Face it. Either president or quality controller of mattresses for dwarves. There is no third option. Now you tell me—where do you think Lev has a better chance?”

“President,” she says with a nod after a second’s hesitation. “‘Lev Keret’ definitely sounds like a president’s name.”

Since that conversation, my wife and I have been working constantly on Lev’s presidential campaign. We already have one good slogan: “The People Love Lev.” And “Small Countries Need Compact Presidents” might work pretty well as a bumper sticker. We’re not complacent; we’re well aware that a few other people in the country know how to say “Bye-bye” and wave to passersby from the window. So it’s going to be a tough battle, but in the end, when the smoke clears, the last man standing will be the shortest and the chubbiest. And if you, like us, want Israel to have a president with a clean past and a dirty behind, don’t hesitate to send in your endorsements. All moral support and offers to baby-sit the president-elect will be gratefully accepted.

I tried that Airborne stuff, but it’s not helping. Pot makes it worse, and booze just adds self-loathing and a headache to the equation. One evening, over dinner, I told my wife.

“I…” I said.

She looked at me, worried.

“What is it?” she asked.

I took a deep breath. It would have been easier for me to admit I’m a pedophile. “I’m giving a shit,” I mumbled.

“You’re what?”

“I’m giving a shit.”

She gave me a look and went back to her menu.

“About what?” she asked.

I tore a slice of bread from the loaf, put it in my mouth and bit its head off.

“Everything,” I said.

“Oooh,” she said as she leaned forward with a smile. “Lobster bisque!”

I am in that dark pit of narcissistic writer’s despair known as “between books.” The memoir is mostly done—all over now but the fighting and finger-pointing and squabbling and accusations of self-hatred and lawsuits and denials and recriminations and guilt and self-doubt—and I am trying to get started on something else. But I’m giving a shit, and that’s deadly. Every idea, every thought is subjected to a thousand comments, a thousand voices, none of them my own and all of them critical. It’s as if a literary Goldilocks has found her way into my head: this idea’s too short, this one’s too long, this one’s too serious, this one’s too funny. Or too shallow, or too self-important, or too Jewish, or too obvious, or too boring, or too desperate, or too clever, or too ordinary, or too traditional, or too experimental. Too everything and not enough everything else. I picture the bears coming home and tearing her little head off.

Too Palahniuk, says Goldilocks.

What if they feel guilty about it?

Too Dostoyevsky.

What if I tell it from the point of view of the bed?

Too Tibor Fisher.

What if they arrest her and because of her criminal record she can never find work and has to spend her days roaming the streets, homeless and starving and delusional, tortured by her own conflicting desires, mania, and existential dread?

Too Hamsun, say Goldilocks. Hang it up, Bro.

“Well?” I ask my wife.

“Well what?

“Well what about the giving a shit? What about the voices? What about the comments?”

She waves me off.

“Fuck them,” she says.

Best writing advice ever.

* * * 

“I’m giving a shit lately,” I said to my friend Jack. “I’m not sure why.”

Jack is an accomplished illustrator whose work regularly appears in national magazines.

“Tell me about it,” he replied. Jack takes a sip from his gin and tonic, drops his voice and admits to me that he still stops by the art technique section at the local bookstore and flips through How To Draw books.

“Really?” I asked.

“Swear to God,” he said.

Just that afternoon, I was in the reference section of the same bookstore. I was looking for How to Not Give a Shit, but it wasn’t there. I considered checking with the bookseller.

Can you order it for me?

It’s not coming up in our computer.

Try it with “Damn.”

I almost bought How to Write a Novel in 21 Days, but didn’t, knowing that it would eventually—like No Plot, No Problem and every issue of The Believer I have ever bought—find its way, once I was feeling better, into the blazing wood stove in my living room (nothing against The Believer, but when you’re feeling insecure about your own writing, the last thing you want is a magazine full of positive reviews and glowing reports about the brilliance of every writer but yourself; give me The Unbeliever, where everyone gets crapped on and every book’s a failure—at least then I’ll feel as if I’ve got a fighting chance).

“That is so pathetic,” I say to Jack.

Jack nods.

“See?” he says. “You’re not so bad after all.”

The bartender stops by.

“Another,” says Jack.

“Two,” I add.

Three years ago, as I was finishing up the final edit on a book of short stories, I emailed my editor with some last-minute concerns. Did we need more stories? Were they too Jewish? Should I change the names of some of the characters? He was surprised.

“Now,” he replied, “is a bad time to start caring.”

Best writing advice ever.

* * * 

“I’m giving a shit lately,” I said to my shrink. “I’m not sure why.”

“But maybe I should give a shit,” I suggested. Maybe giving a shit is the fabric that holds society together, maybe everyone giving a shit about what everybody else thinks is vital to our survival as a species.

“Maybe,” said my shrink. “Or maybe the problem is that you don’t give enough of a shit.”

I silently wondered if all that psychiatrists do is take what you said, mix up the order of the words, add a few modifiers and throw it back:

I’m afraid I’m fucking my dog, Doc.

Or maybe you’re afraid your dog is fucking you?

I think I’m going to kill again, Doc.

Or maybe you think you’re going to be killed again?

Maybe, he continued, I was feeling—having finished the memoir—understandably drained. Emptied. That maybe my problem wasn’t that I was giving too much of a shit about what Goldilocks said, it was that I wasn’t, at the moment—having unloaded so much with my memoir—giving much of a shit about anything else. Soon, though, the well would refill, and there would be something I needed to write about. And then, he assured me, I would not give a shit what anybody said, I would just write.

“After all,” he said, “every hammer needs a nail.”

“What?”

“I mean some people need something to react to.”

“I know what you mean,” I said, “but I don’t think I like the way you said it.”

“So now I’m the nail.”

“So now I’m a hammer?”

“What’s wrong with being a hammer?”

“WHAT’S WRONG WITH BEING A HAMMER? I just need to bash things in, I just need to smash everything, there’s nothing wrong with that?”

We sat quietly for a while, hammer on one couch, nail on the other.

“Like it’s so great being a nail,” I said. “Like a nail never hurt anyone.”

He stood and went to his desk.

“Ever step on a nail?” I asked him. “Hurts. Hurts a lot. Yes, you’re the nail, okay? You’re the nail. AND I’M THE WOOD!”

I stood, pulled my jacket on, and headed for the door. I grabbed the knob, pulled it open and turned to face him.

“Next Monday at 1?” I asked.

He nodded.

I slammed the door behind me.

* * * 

Two weeks later, I traveled with my wife and two-year-old son to a warm, quiet island in the British West Indies. I was looking forward to spending the week with them, and hoping that the time away would help with my now-chronic case of shit-giving.

The first day, my son refused to go in the sand. My wife scooped some up in her hand and showed it to him.

“It’s just sand,” she said. “It doesn’t matter.”

The second day he went in the sand, but he wouldn’t go near the water. My wife stepped into the ocean and waved to him.

“It’s just water,” she said. “It doesn’t matter.”

The third day I was trying to sleep on a lounge chair when my son, still terrified of the ocean, decided he wanted to go for a run on the beach. He grabbed my hand and we raced across the hot sand to the water’s edge, where the sand was cooler. Hand in hand we ran down the beach, screaming “Yahoo!” as loudly as we could and disturbing the other guests. We reached the end of the beach, turned and started running back, and as we did, the water came up high under our feet.

“It’s splashing!” I shouted happily, trying to keep him from panicking.

But something came over him. Something switched on, or maybe switched off, and instead of panicking, caring, or worrying, he just held my hand tighter, ran even faster and raised his other fist in the air as we splashed through the surf.

“It doesn’t matter!” he shouted. “It doesn’t matter!”

“It doesn’t matter!” I shouted along with him, raising my own fist in the air.

“It! Doesn’t! Matter!” he replied, stamping and splashing and laughing through the surf. “It! Doesn’t! Matter!”

Best writing advice ever.

Falafel restaurant owners face off in West Bank Story

The short, which has played at more than 100 festivals including Sundance, reimagines Tony and Maria as David and Fatima, star-crossed lovers whose dueling families own neighboring falafel restaurants. The cast sing, dance, and snap their way through an allegory of the current political situation: After a Kosher Kitchen employee installs a falafel machine that crosses the property line, a Hummas Hut worker throws a rock into the gears. In response, the Kitchen owner decides to erect a wall between the two establishments. Threats and angry words are exchanged. Can David and Fatima’s love overcome their families’ mutual animosity? Does Maria feel pretty?

Sandel, a California native and USC film school graduate who has traveled extensively throughout the Middle East, says that he made a comedy about what many consider to be a categorically unfunny subject to “counteract the multitudes of negative documentaries and news reports that, while very informative, usually seem to be skewed to one side and always leave the viewer feeling like this conflict will go on forever.” He wanted his film to be a hopeful one. “I truly believe that peace between Israelis and Arabs will be achieved and don’t believe it is a hopeless endeavor,” he says. “We wanted to make a film that would convey that feeling.”

Over the years the Academy has honored many movies dealing with Jewish themes: Schindler’s List, The Pianist, and five of the last 11 best documentary winners, including One Day in September, about the killing of 11 Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics. The Academy also regularly rewards performances in such movies—as perennial nominee Kate Winslet, playing a fictional version of herself on Ricky Gervais’ show Extras, put it, “if you do a film about the Holocaust, guaranteed an Oscar.”

Dance scene in the Hummus Hut

Needless to say, none of these pictures have been musical comedies. Did the Academy think they were nominating your straightforward drama about the West Bank? How did a movie about a group of Israelis and Palestinians sporting hats shaped like kebabs and pitas score a shot at an Oscar?

Nominated shorts tend to be on the idiosyncratic side—this year’s crop, for example, includes films about a Mormon, a young African girl, an abandoned husband, and an old man who locks himself in an armoire—but increasingly the Academy has favored politically relevant subjects, just as it has for features: Best picture nominees in the last two years have included Babel, Letters from Iwo Jima, Crash, Good Night and Good Luck, and, of course, Munich. Compare that to the 1997 nominees: As Good As it Gets, The Full Monty, Good Will Hunting, L.A. Confidential, and Titanic—five perfectly good movies that don’t have anything more political between them than an iceberg.

Like many of the Jewish-themed films that have been nominated before, West Bank Story has a positive “message.” Schindler’s List and The Pianist, though devastating, ultimately gave viewers something to take heart in, a lesson about humanity’s capacity for good even in the most brutal, debased circumstances (a moral embodied most fully in Holocaust “comedy” Life is Beautiful, which, of course, snagged Roberto Benigni an Oscar in 2000). West Bank Story has a similarly upbeat message, advising us, it seems, “take heart, peace might be as easy as making falafel.”

But is making peace (or falafel, for that matter) so simple? At the end of West Bank Story, both the Hummus Hut and Kosher Kitchen have been destroyed, and the Israelis and Palestinians realize they must work together to stay in business and keep their customers fed. After screaming at each other for most of the film, each family dancing as the other’s storefront burns to the ground, the two sides reconcile in about a minute.

This warp-speed resolution has struck many viewers as overly simplistic, a criticism Sandel acknowledges is accurate. He says the film has to be simple—it’s a comedy, after all—and besides, it’s “not meant to be a learning tool for the situation in the Middle East. It is not an historical explanation, or a political solution on screen. It is a movie about hope and peace and that is it.”

For critics who find the film to be in poor taste, Sandel points out television shows such as Israel’s Wonderful Country, a kind of Daily Show-Saturday Night Live hybrid. “Palestinians and Israelis joke about this all the time. [They] are a little more comfortable with it because they’re in it and they’re close to it, whereas sometimes American Jews and Arabs feel an obligation to speak on behalf of.”

Still, it’s difficult to take heart in the film’s “hope,” when the situation it presents so faintly resembles the one unfolding in that “multitude of negative documentaries” we’ve all seen. By forgoing the complexities of the conflict, we’re being given hope about a problem we don’t have. It’s like having a mechanic fix your tire, when what you need is a whole new engine—it’s nice, but really not the point.

Despite this, and the fact that only a fraction of the jokes in West Bank Story actually land, the movie has an ineffable goofiness that makes it easy to dismiss but hard not to enjoy. As Sandel says, “In a world of hundreds and hundreds if not thousands of news reports, articles, and documentaries that are all very serious, surely there’s room for a comedy here and there.”

If Publishers Clearing House ever knocks on my door with an oversized check, it’ll make the worst Super Bowl commercial ever:

THEMMr. S. Auslander? 

MEYes. 

THEMYou’ve just won a million dollars! 

Hold on ME as I look at the check and think I’m undeserving. Others need it more than I. Like my mother. Oh, her endless suffering! And what about my sister and her congregation of children? You know how much they could use the money? Then there’s Darfur, and the Holocaust, of course. Didn’t the liberators find survivors eating worms? And here I am getting a million dollars while porno downloads upstairs and my wife and son are in the den watching Thomas the Tank Engine?

THEY hand ME the check.

I take a gun and blow my head off.

CUT TO: LOGO, TAGLINE:

VOICE-OVER:It’s all about winning! 

Then, back to the game.

No news is good news, but good news is bad news; my psychiatrist has always been far more concerned about my successes than he has been about my failures. I sat down in his office a few weeks ago, just after an unfortunate string of fortunate events. I had completed my manuscript, my editors, here and abroad, were pleased with the results, I had read essays on a number of national radio programs, I had a story published in a prominent magazine. I was a wreck.

“We’ve been through this before,” said my shrink.

“I know,” I said.

“Every time you’re happy…” he said, waiting for me to finish.

“I’m unhappy,” I said.

He nodded. I stared at my shoes.

“You could try failing more,” he said.

“Nah,” I said. “I went for pot instead.”

I haven’t smoked pot in a long time. My shrink pursed his lips, fought back a frown, took out his pen and wrote something on his chart.

Damn right, I thought.

If you’re going to go off the rails, you might as well go far enough off to warrant a troubled notation on your psychiatric chart.

* * * 

One Purim, a rabbi of mine got so drunk that another student and I had to help him stumble back home.

“Hashem created a beautiful world,” he said to us.

We nodded, trying to steer him away from the cliff at the edge of the road.

“But He made one mistake,” he continued. “One very, very bad mistake.”

I could name 20 without having to think too hard, so I wondered which one the rabbi had in mind.

“It’s not right,” he said, “that you can’t have a cigarette after cholent on Saturday afternoon.”

He shook his head sadly.

“It’s a real kasha,” he said.

A kasha is a difficult question.

I feel the same way about pot. It grows from the ground, it’s cheap, it makes me laugh and, when I watch Telemundo stoned, I’m pretty sure I understand what they’re saying. But it’s not right that everything I write while stoned isn’t, the following morning, as brilliant as it seemed to be the night before. And it isn’t right that the following afternoon I can’t write at all.

It’s a real fucking kasha.

* * * 

I’ve been setting off alarms. Everywhere I go lately, I set off security alarms—pharmacies, bookstores, groceries. It doesn’t matter what I’m carrying—it happened again this morning and I wasn’t even carrying my wallet. Maybe it was something I ate. Maybe it’s some sort of bio-magnetic something or other inside me. Maybe I’m just bad.

* * * 

“I’m being self-destructive,” I told my wife. She’s not a smoker, but sometimes we like to get a little happy and go for long hikes. She knew I hadn’t been writing, and she knew I had been smoking, she just didn’t know why.

“I had some success,” I explained. “It hasn’t been easy.”

We spoke about it for a while. For me, I explained, it’s not so much why bad things happen to good people, but why good things happen to me at all. I feel guilty when they do, and do whatever I can to make sure that they stop. I wondered if this had to do with my parents or a larger narrative—the single narrative I spent my life learning, that of a people on the outside, suffering adversity after adversity, meeting enemy after enemy. “Why me?” I wonder when joy fills my heart. “Why not them?” Maybe three generations from now, if the killing in Darfur ever comes to end, the grandchildren of those who died today will similarly feel uncomfortable with their comfort. Someone heads over to the Best Buy in downtown Geneina, gets himself a 40-inch flat-screen and spends the rest of the week feeling like crap.

“Why me?” he’ll wonder.

“Why not them?”

“And why does my shrink always wait until just after I’ve bought an eighth to convince me I need to stop?”

It’s a kasha.

It’s not that these authors don’t mean to challenge or provoke readers. In the case of Eisner—the pioneering cartoonist who completed The Plot a month before his death in January at 87—the urge to fight hatred was strong from the start. Raised in New York City during the 1930s, he was shaped by the era’s radical politics, rampant anti-Semitism, and vogue for literary realism. While other artists created fantastical crime fighters with otherworldly powers, Eisner made his mark with The Spirit, a colorful but ordinary masked man (Eisner called him a “middle-class superhero”) who is not above the fray and tensions of everyday life. So it’s not entirely surprising that Eisner hoped The Plot would “drive yet another nail into the coffin of this terrifying vampire-like fraud,” as he explains soberly in the preface.

	The cover of a 1934 translation of The Protocols from The Plot
	A parody of The Protocols from The Big Book of Jewish Conspiracies

For their part, Neuman and Deutsch, co-editors of Heeb, obediently state their satiric intentions in The Big Book‘s introduction—one practically senses the nervous figures of the publisher’s legal team hovering just above—but otherwise avoid staking out any position that might infringe on their fun. Instead, they recycle Borscht Belt jokes and half-baked plotlines to concoct explanations for two millennia worth of conspiracy theories. Thus we get the conspiracy behind the Exodus story in “Let My People Go…On Longer Lunch Breaks,” while “Blood Brothers” depicts the baking accident behind the medieval blood libel. Like many gimmick books or Saturday Night Live spinoffs, The Big Book is long on clever concepts but short on execution. Much funnier are some of the Photoshop illustrations; one puts a pair of Groucho Marx glasses on the grotesque Jewish serpent from the English edition cover of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, purportedly the logo for a motorcycle gang.

That The Big Book‘s illustrations stand out above the text makes a lot of sense. Ever since its launch in 2002, Heeb‘s mix of lefty politics, hip-hop language, and DIY Judaism has found its most effective form in the magazine’s visual presentation. (I was a Heeb editor for two years.) The debut issue’s cover featured a round matzoh resting on a turntable, with a bejeweled black hand hovering over it. Whether or not such imagery actually evokes the sensibilities of more than a fraction of hipsters is beside the point. The photo hints at longstanding flashpoints—black-Jewish relations, money, Jewish ritual—even as it perfectly encapsulates the magazine’s madcap irreverence.

Meanwhile, The Plot charts the secret history behind the most infamous Jewish conspiracy of modern times. It begins in 1864, when a French pamphleteer named Maurice Joly attacked the reign of Napoleon III in a satire called A Dialogue in Hell between Machiavelli and Montesquieu. The book languished in obscurity until 1894, when Mathieu Golovinski, a talented forger for the Russian secret police, rediscovered it. While liberally plagiarizing whole passages, Golovinski altered the earlier work just enough to recast it as a master plan for Jewish world supremacy.

One of Eisner’s most enlightening—and tedious—devices is a side-by-side comparison of the Russian and French texts. In one bizarre twist, Golovinski’s “Jewish” plot includes a bizarre homage to the Hindu god Vishnu. Of course, the point here is that if we understand history, we won’t be condemned to repeat it. Sadly, this has been disproved again and again; Eisner himself observes that in 2002 Egyptian state television sponsored a series based on The Protocols.

In the amusing caricatures of Russian apparatchiks, there are flashes of the quiet impishness that marks Eisner’s vintage work. But the lack of more humorous touches in The Plot, along with the absence of any psychological nuance (as compared with, for example, the four stories in A Contract With God), suggests that Eisner was simply too driven by his agenda to be inspired. Rather, in his quest to pull back the curtain on a century’s worth of nefarious obfuscation, he creates an earnest, convoluted story that, for long stretches, drags.

Left: A Russian editor conspires with Mathieu Golovinski in The Plot; Right: An imagined World War II movie poster from The Big Book of Jewish Conspiracies

The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, purported to be notes stolen from the 1897 Zionist Congress, still manages to sway the naïve as well as the malicious. That fact alone sparks the sort of savage indignation which, effectively channeled, might have lifted The Big Book and The Plot beyond the pedestrian. Either way, the comparison to Swift is instructive. To the unsophisticated reader, the Protocols‘ phony backstory functions a lot like the “mask” in the satirist’s greatest works. After years of being unable to convince his fellow countrymen to be more responsible for their own welfare—Irish landlords were practically cannibalizing their own kind with their exorbitant rents—Swift stumbled upon a brilliantly simple solution: Assuming the mien of a perfectly reasonable gentleman, he outlined a ghoulish recipe for eating Irish babies.

Golovinski’s pretense of stolen notes only reinforced vicious stereotypes, while Swift’s clever mimicry eventually led the intelligent reader toward some larger truth. It’s hard to imagine how “A Modest Proposal” would go over today. We live in an irony-drenched culture, yet are so fearful about giving offense that we avoid genuine satire, as The Big Book‘s introduction makes clear. Yet it’s useful to consider whether the clarifying force of Swiftian logic—rather than earnest entreaty or slapstick irony—may just be what we need to keep vampiric Jewish conspiracies from rising again.

COLBY: We had very little rations, no snacks.
SOLLY: Snacks, what are you talking snacks? We didn’t eat, sometimes for a week, for a month….
COLBY: Have you even seen the show?
SOLLY: Did you ever see our show? It was called the Holocaust!

With civility out the window, each of them shouts, “I’m a survivor!” “I’m a survivor!”

scene from ‘The Survivor,’ an episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm

It would be dangerous to dig too deeply into “The Survivor”—most of the show’s dialogue is improvised around a basic storyline—but the setup is perfectly timed. Given David’s talent for engineering scenarios as uncomfortable as they are improbable, there’s no telling whether he knew the episode would air the same week as the release of the Schindler’s List DVD, ten years after Steven Spielberg’s magnum opus won the Oscar. It’s a situation as twisted as Colby and Solly at the same dinner table, and not only because Spielberg and David approach the Holocaust from opposite ends of the artistic spectrum. A promo on the DVD touts the latest documentary project of the Shoah Foundation, established by Spielberg with proceeds from Schindler’s List, as “the ultimate reality TV.”

Larry David has a history with Schindler’s List. He cowrote a memorable 1994 episode of Seinfeld in which Jerry gets caught making out with a girlfriend during the movie. For all the outrage their behavior provokes, they might as well have made out at an actual concentration camp. “I for one will not allow my daughter to be involved with someone of such weak moral fiber,” her father tells Jerry. The joke rings true after ten years; Schindler’s List still feels less like a night at the movies than a moral obligation. It’s not just mothers like Helen Seinfeld—”You have to see it,” she tells Jerry—who made Schindler’s List a pseudo-sacred event: Spielberg frames the film in religious ritual, beginning with the lighting of the Sabbath candles and ending with the surviving Schindler Jews placing rocks on Oskar Schindler’s headstone.

Ben Kingsley in Schindler’s List

The new DVD also suggests that Schindler’s List is more important than most Hollywood films because it is more real. Spielberg took pains to make Schindler’s List seem authentic in every way, whether it meant shooting in black-and-white or filming at the gates of Auschwitz. “I tried to be as close to a journalist in recording this re-creation,” Spielberg writes in the accompanying pamphlet. A behind-the-scenes featurette would only destroy the illusion. Instead of the usual extras, we get a 10-minute commercial for the Shoah Foundation, and Voices From the List, a moving if unoriginal 70-minute compilation of testimonies from real Schindler Jews.

In the introduction to Voices, Spielberg presents the Shoah Foundation, which has collected 52,000 survivor testimonies and now works to educate young people, as a direct response to Schindler’s List. By gathering testimony, Spielberg wants to help them “to survive a second time, in a sense, to survive forever”—in a sense, outdoing Schindler. Yet Voices feels suspiciously like footnotes to Schindler’s List, substantiating the movie, detail by detail, while exposing its limitations; for all its verisimilitude, Schindler’s List represents the horrors of the Holocaust and the humanity of Schindler without trying to explain either.

Spielberg has shifted his attention from Schindler’s List to survivors, and so has David. Holocaust humor is hardly new to American culture or Curb Your Enthusiasm: the first episode found Larry calling his wife Cheryl “Hitler” to the outrage of his manager’s parents. The entire fourth season is built around Mel Brooks hiring Larry to play Max Bialystock in The Producers—a hit musical based on the movie about an intentionally awful musical about Hitler. As the real Producers continues to play to sold-out audiences, Holocaust humor hardly seems taboo, but mocking Hitler isn’t the same as satirizing survivors.

In the final episode of the third season, Larry hires and then hesitates to fire a Tourettic chef, mostly because he appears to have a number tattooed on his arm. Later Larry learns it had only been the chef’s lottery number, jotted down in pen and easily rubbed away. The joke is on Larry—along with the audience—for making an assumption about the chef and treating him differently because of it. Likewise, Solly in “The Survivor” may not be an especially likable character, but he is startlingly human. Paranoid, self-centered, angry, and inappropriate—all the things we love and hate about Larry. Solly may have suffered more than Colby or anyone else can know, but it doesn’t make him a saint.

Larry David isn’t just satirizing Holocaust survivors; he’s satirizing a culture of victimhood—a culture that reveres trauma and the traumatized at the same time it enjoys the schadenfreude expressed in “reality” contests like Survivor and mock-reality television like Curb Your Enthusiasm. The joke may be played to its extreme on Colby, who thinks suffering is life without sneakers, toilet paper, or a personal trainer, but there’s something recognizable in his ignorance. Earlier in the episode, Larry’s rabbi says his brother-in-law died on 9/11—in a run-in with a bike messenger on 57th Street. Suffering becomes so revered on the one hand and so trivalized on the other that victimhood becomes a kind of victory. How can a culture that knows survival as an elaborate game show possibly understand the true depths of the Holocaust?

Like David’s show, many sequences of Schindler’s List were shot with a handheld camera, in vérité style. Yet Spielberg’s reality is always more myth than history: Schindler, Amon Goeth, the Jews, and the Germans are not real people; they’re symbols, stand-ins for good and evil, innocence and guilt. Larry David may not provide any brilliant insights into the Holocaust or the minds of its victims, but at least he breaks down some of the walls surrounding its discussion. A decade after Schindler’s List, it is the cynical comedian, not the reverent dramatist, who has us thinking seriously about the Holocaust, even if it means disrupting dinner.