Corner Deli: Borat Wrote A Thesis On USA? Niiiice!

Borat Wrote A Thesis On USA? Niiiice!

CAMBRIDGE, England, Nov. 21, 2006

Brendan O'Neill.

Borat, the unspeakably uncouth Kazakh TV presenter
dreamed up by British comedian Sacha Baron Cohen, is
raising a stink - along with box office revenues - in
cinemas. An anti-Semite and misogynist, seriously
unversed in the politically correct, Borat journeys
around the "U, S and A" and shines a spotlight on
America's own underlying tensions and prejudices.
Wandering in a dirty, Soviet-era suit - with only a
live chicken in his suitcase, an overweight producer,
and dreams of "Pamela Andersons" to keep him company -
Borat travels to the heart of America in "Cultural
Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation
of Kazakhstan." He finds that not everything is
"niiice!"

But this isn't the first time Baron Cohen has visited
the U.S. for "cultural learnings" and wrestled with
issues of race and identity. (Though let's hope it is
the last time he wrestles with his naked producer.)

In 1992, when he was a history student at Cambridge
University, he did it for real. He visited Atlanta and
interviewed Jewish and black activists for his
undergraduate dissertation on the "Black-Jewish
alliance" in the civil rights movement of the 1960s.
Think of it as a first take: "Cultural Learnings of
America for Make Benefit the Dissertation."

What did Baron Cohen see in that first work trip to
the U.S.? Is there an early whiff of a "Baron Cohen
philosophy" in his dissertation? And might Borat and
Baron Cohen's other characters - Ali G, the white guy
who walks and talks black, and Bruno, the camp
Austrian TV presenter who gets fashionistas to put
their Jimmy Choo-ed feet in their mouths - have been
born in the cloistered halls of Cambridge?

We go to Cambridge in the U and K to find out. You
read.

Seeley Library at Cambridge University is a million
mental leaps away from Borat's fictional village,
where owning a clock radio is the height of
sophistication and women win trophies for
prostitution. This august repository of knowledge is
set in a modernist, red-brick building with a
pyramid-shaped glimmering glass roof. Wawaweewa!

Whispering so as not to disturb students with their
noses buried in dusty tomes, a librarian requests a
signature for the dissertation. It has been signed out
only a handful of times before.

Instantly striking in the 45-page, plastic-bound
document is the title - "The 'Black-Jewish Alliance:'
A Case of Mistaking Identities." It sounds like a
description of Ali G. That character is an alliance of
blackness and Jewishness, in which Baron Cohen - a
devout Jew who eats kosher and observes the Sabbath -
adopts the mannerisms of a blinged-up black Briton
from the "Staines ghetto." (Staines is a middle-class
suburb in leafy Surrey.) And Ali G is a major "case of
mistaking identities," with his interviewees (or
rather, victims) unable to figure out if he's black,
white, or "for real."

Baron Cohen's dissertation, written in remarkably
crisp (for British academe) prose with a number of
studentlike typos, suggests that at 20 he was
fascinated by America and its "melting pot" of
identities long before Borat drove the U.S. from coast
to coast in an ice-cream truck.

He focused on links between blacks and Jews in 1960s
America, arguing that claims of a "Black-Jewish
alliance" have been exaggerated. Yes, Jewish
organizations supported desegregation, but they didn't
officially promote mass action or civil disobedience
in the South. It was Jewish students, of their own
volition, Baron Cohen wrote, who took part in marches,
freedom rides, and voter registration projects.

Borat might disagree, but, in parts, the dissertation
reads like the intellectual foundation of Baron
Cohen's comic creations. He argues that Jews' own
history of suffering "played a vital role in
predisposing them to identify with oppressed Blacks."

The Jewish activist Irving Levine told Baron Cohen
that some young Jews aligned themselves with "the
Black struggle" as a way of considering "their own
identity issues." They were effectively embracing
"movements ... for otherness," Levine told the
student.

Now, years later, Ali G. - this white guy from Surrey,
played by a Jew from well-off West London - takes on
the extreme otherness of young black Brits with the
chunky jewelry, the big, baggy yellow sweat shirts,
the wannabe-gangsta street slang.

Even Borat seems to "identify with oppressed Blacks"
and wishes to embrace their "otherness." Approaching a
group of young blacks in his movie, he declares: "I
like you peoples. How can I be like you?" They teach
him urban-speak and how to hike up his underwear to
show above his trousers. ("What's up wit it, vanilla
face?" Borat later asks a hotel receptionist.)

Might Baron Cohen's portrayal of affinity with black
"others," in Britain and the U.S., stem from his
studies of Jews who lined up with blacks in the '60s?
Maybe that's why only blacks are depicted
sympathetically in "Borat." Where the pseudo-Kazakh
mocks stuffy, uptight whites, he learns from urban
blacks. And don't forget that Luenell, a black
prostitute, is the heroine of the movie.

Elsewhere in the dissertation, Baron Cohen muses that
Jews may have taken up the black struggle because it
is part of the Jewish ethic to "know the stranger," to
defend those cast out. He quotes the Passover command
"Know the stranger, for thou wert strangers in Egypt,"
and cites Jewish activists who believe you can judge a
man by the way he treats those who are "strange."

Baron Cohen pretty much has turned this ancient Jewish
ethic into a guerrilla comedy tactic designed to
expose prejudice. His characters are archetypal
"strangers:" the weirdly foreign Borat, the
self-ghettoized Ali G, the over-the-top-gay Bruno. And
their aim is to provoke reactions to their
strangeness. The "good guys" are generally tolerant
(even as Borat is giving them sloppy kisses), and the
bad guys get hot under the collar (like the pastor who
storms out of a dinner party with Borat).

Who'd have guessed? Borat the anti-Semite may be built
on firmly Jewish ethical foundations. But what about
the meat of Baron Cohen's dissertation? Is it
convincing?

"It sounds interesting," says David Garrow, the
Pulitzer prize-winning American author of "Bearing the
Cross," an exhaustive study of the life and times of
Martin Luther King, Jr.

Garrow, currently a senior research fellow at
Cambridge, says he's seen "probably three films in the
past 10 years;" Borat's saga isn't one of them. But
he's read about Borat everywhere and is intrigued by
the dissertation's parallels to the movie. Told about
Baron Cohen's dissertation arguments on the rupture in
the "Black-Jewish alliance" in 1967, Garrow says they
sound "a little simplistic." Baron Cohen put it down
to the Six-Day War in the Middle East, when many black
radicals sided with Arabs while Jewish radicals sided
with Israel. "That was part of it," says Garrow. "But
there were also economic and social tensions."

Charney Bromberg, a former civil rights field-worker
in Mississippi and now executive director of the
progressive Zionist organization Meretz in New York,
is shocked to hear he was interviewed by Baron Cohen
back in 1992.

"I was?" He laughs, in a phone interview. "Well, he
must have been far less conspicuous than this Borat
character, because I don't remember him." Bromberg
hasn't seen the movie ("though you could talk to my
children about it endlessly," he notes). But he sounds
pleased at Baron Cohen's dissertation theme: "It
sounds like he got a lot out of what I was trying to
say."

Larry Rubin, a former director of the Jewish Council
for Public Affairs who was also interviewed by Baron
Cohen for the dissertation, doesn't remember him
either. "I guess he was just an earnest young student,
and I see a lot of them." He saw the Borat movie, and
says he's "agnostic on its helpfulness in combating
prejudice. I can see that it's supposed to skewer
anti-Semitism, but satire is a lofty form of comedy,
and some people don't get it."

But Baron Cohen's "heart is in the right place," Rubin
says via phone from New York. "And maybe I had some
small part in that, if I helped him with his studies
on equality back then."

It's strange, as the whispering librarian takes back
the dissertation, to think that Borat - the laughed-at
ignoramus - may have been born here, in the bookish
halls of a lofty seat of learning.

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