The Pollard Affair: Was it dual loyalty?

The Pollard Affair: Was it dual loyalty?

Feb. 11, 2009
ELI KAVON , THE JERUSALEM POST

I am proud to be an American. One hundred years ago the United States provided a safe haven for my ancestors who were escaping pogroms and poverty in czarist Russia. My father fought in the US Army as an infantry sergeant against the Nazi peril. I studied comparative religion and history at Columbia University in New York, an Ivy League school that would not have accepted me in the 1920s due to quotas against Jewish enrollment . My country affords me the right to express my Jewish identity and faith, giving me the freedom to stand up for who I am. The US is the leader of the free world. Why shouldn't I be proud of being an American?

Watching the inauguration of President Barack Obama, I was of course impressed with the American system of government that gives the son of an immigrant the opportunity to lead one of the world's great and diverse nations. It always amazes me how the transition of power is carried out here - democratically and peacefully. The system set in place by America's founding fathers more than 200 years ago has assured the vitality and relevance of US democracy into the 21st century.

Yet, while America is a land of opportunity and justice, there is not always justice for all Americans. I am thinking specifically of Jonathan Pollard. I was disappointed that outgoing president George W. Bush did not pardon Pollard for his treasonous acts of more than two decades ago. The FBI arrested Pollard in November 1985. A 31-year-old American Jew, Pollard was a civilian employee of US Naval Intelligence who provided Israeli spies with classified American satellite data on the location of Syrian antiaircraft batteries and of Iraqi nuclear test sites.

The Reagan administration, reeling from other espionage scandals, came down hard on Pollard and, in March 1987, an American court sentenced him to life in prison. It is not a question of Pollard's guilt or innocence - Jonathan Pollard betrayed his country. But does he truly deserve to be imprisoned for life? Was the information he gave to Israel - a staunch American ally - as damaging as information that other American traitors handed over to our enemies?

MOST AMERICAN Jews, as loyal supporters as they are of Israel, would never have betrayed this great country like Pollard did. But the Pollard Affair raises many questions about the specter of dual loyalty among American Jews. It is obvious that Pollard did not truly believe he was betraying his country. As an American Jew, I have lived my whole life hearing the mantra that "the interests of America are the interests of Israel." Fortunately, we, as Jews in America, have been protected from charges of dual loyalty precisely because the American dream and the Zionist dream share so much in common.

Perhaps Pollard thought that by helping Israel fight its enemies, he was helping America fight its enemies. In the post-9/11 world, America and Israel are indeed fighting the common enemy of global terrorism and Islamic extremists. But let us imagine that a day will come in America when US and Israeli goals are not the same. I do not see that day coming soon, yet in theory all American Jews who love and support Israel are faced with the specter of dual allegiance. What would we do if in a future conflict our country was in direct opposition to the Jewish state?

PERHAPS POLLARD never read the wonderful letter of support that George Washington wrote to the Jews of Newport, Rhode Island after the first president's visit to the Touro Synagogue in August 1790. Washington wrote that all Americans "possess alike liberty of conscience and immunities of citizenship" - Jews would no longer be a tolerated "class of people." The American government would "give to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance."

Of course, this newfound freedom is not offered freely. If Jews are to be citizens with full equality under the law they must "demean [conduct] themselves as good citizens." Did not Jonathan Pollard realize this when he was committing acts of treason against America?

Legally, American Jews are Americans first. Their belief and identity as Jews is a private matter, one of free choice and volunteerism. The word "Jew" is not stamped on my passport. I have no legal status in America as a Jew. I am an American. As long as I remain an American citizen, my legal identity is that of my nation. If, for some reason, there were to be a conflict between my legal status as an American and my private status as a Jew and a Zionist, my loyalty as an American would come first. If I did not believe this, I might fall into Pollard's trap. Jonathan Pollard should have realized that as much as Israel and the US have in common in terms of long-term goals, the first allegiance of an American Jew is to America - not to the Jewish state.

THE POLLARD AFFAIR should serve as a reminder to American Jews that, as Jews living in America, we are living lives not of dual loyalty but of dual identity. As far apart as is the chasm between Norman Podhoretz and Noam Chomsky in the realm of ideology, both men are legally Americans. The Satmar Hassid living in New Square and the Jewish atheist who eats bacon for breakfast on Yom Kippur in Los Angeles are each Americans. As an American, I have more in common with an American of African descent than I do with a Jew in Israel, even a Jew in Jerusalem who is from the same shtetl in Russia from whence my ancestors came.

I do not know if all American Jews realize this. If a Jew in America wants to have legal, national and public status as a Jew, he or she should make aliya. The Law of Return is a legal recognition that Jewish identity is a national identity. Identity in the Jewish state, usually for the good but sometime for the bad, is Jewish identity. The American and French revolutionaries of two centuries ago would not stand for a state within a state. The heavy price of citizenship is that Jews lost their national identity. Zionism was both a response to anti-Semitism and a response to that loss of public Jewish identity.

The Pollard Affair, unlike the infamous framing of Capt. Alfred Dreyfus in Paris more than a century ago, did not result in cries of "Death to the Jews." That difference is one of the things that makes America so great. But let us always remember, Jonathan Pollard's treachery may be an exception to the rule when it comes to American Jewry, but the psychology of this traitor - a psychology that denies the possibility of dual loyalty for American Jews who love and support Israel - is a mind-set that lurks behind us all, and will not go away as soon as we might like.

The specter of dual loyalty remains. Our divided identity is, today, a reality.

The writer is on the faculty of Nova Southeastern University's LifelongLearning Institute in Davie, Florida.

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Yesterday’s Hero

Yesterday’s Hero

Fifty years after the publication of Exodus, is it time to let Ari Ben Canaan go?

By Liel Leibovitz

1Earlier this year, as Israel celebrated its sixtieth anniversary, the country’s journalists, pundits, and bloggers amused themselves by nominating individuals for the title of the quintessential sabra2. Ariel Sharon, ur-warrior, was in the running, of course, as were Yitzhak Rabin, prince of peace and the nation’s first Israeli-born Prime Minister, and Ilan Ramon3, the first Israeli in space. No fewer than five leading cultural critics named a fictional character as Israel’s most representative son: Ari Ben Canaan, the protagonist of Leon Uris’s novel Exodus, immortalized on screen by a young, virile, and shirtless Paul Newman. The adoration of Ben Canaan culminated in a fiftieth-anniversary celebration of Exodus, held in June at Jerusalem’s prestigious Cinematheque.

That a fictional person—even one based on a real man, Yossi Harel, commander of the actual Exodus, the ship that carried 4,500 survivors of Nazi death camps toward Palestine in 1947—should exercise such a strong grasp on the collective imagination of a country never short on real heroes may seem strange. Ari, however, is just too good to resist: handsome and daring, defying the British and defeating the Arabs, romancing a beautiful American blonde even as he helps guide a ship full of illegal immigrants to shore and a country full of war-weary Jews into existence. A few years before inventing Ben Canaan, Uris, then making a living as a Hollywood screenwriter, wrote Gunfight at the O.K. Corral, depicting Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday with a mixture of myth and melodrama. Take away the Stetson, and it’s not hard to see Ari as a rugged Western hero transplanted to the Middle East.

But was Israel ready for such a character? Could a nation still busy being born sustain the tremendous impact of a larger-than-life, ready-made hero? And could that hero age gracefully alongside the country he’s come to personify? As Ari turns fifty, these questions are hard to avoid.

For the uninitiated, the story of Exodus is one best told with numbers. After reportedly reading three hundred books about Jewish and Israeli history and traveling more than twelve thousand miles within Israel and the Middle East, Uris (who was born in Baltimore in 1924) wrote a 626-page novel about the birth of Israel, from the struggles to overcome the British mandate’s restrictions on Jewish immigration to Palestine to the battles that followed the creation of the Jewish state. It was published by Doubleday in 1958, and spent nineteen weeks at the top of The New York Times’s best-seller list. The paperback quickly sold well over twenty million copies. In the annals of American publishing, this puts Uris just ahead of Margaret Mitchell: Exodus unseated Gone with the Wind as the fastest-selling American novel of all time, and held the record until the publication of Jacqueline Susann’s Valley of the Dolls in 1966.

By 1960, when Otto Preminger4 adapted the novel into a three-and-a-half-hour film and cast Newman as Ben Canaan, the book’s status as one of Zionism’s most sacred texts was secure, with some scholars arguing that Uris had written nothing less than Israel’s founding myth. George Washington University professor Melani McAlister, the author of Epic Encounters, a 2001 history of America’s cultural perceptions of the Middle East, claimed that when Exodus was published “most Americans still knew little about Zionism or Israel,” making Uris’s story “a foreshadowing of what Israel was to come to mean to Americans.”

But with all the attention paid to Exodus in America, little has been written about the impact Exodus has had on the society whose birth it sought to depict. 5

Israel has not, until recently, kept official book sales records. But growing up in Israel in the 1980s and ’90s, I was always aware of the book’s ubiquity. It was in my high school’s library, where works by Philip Roth and Saul Bellow were frowned upon for representing the wrong kind of Jew—the neurotic and vulnerable American. It was in my local scouts’ den, where as teenagers we would often spend rainy afternoons spellbound by Ari’s heroics. And it was on the shelves in the houses of all my friends, a staple of Israeli domesticity.

But it was television that solidified its standing. In Israel’s first five decades, with a single, state-run television station serving as the tribal campfire, the small screen was hailed as the most sacred of Israel’s cultural altars. Any program shown on Friday evenings was watched with a sense of duty, and any program shown on a national holiday was exalted.

Such was the status of Exodus. For years, the film’s oversaturated colors and expansive frames appeared on television sets across Israel each Passover. By regularly screening Exodus on the eve of Judaism’s celebration of freedom, the stewards of Israeli television sent a clear message to viewers: Ari is not just about Israel’s history; he’s about Jewish history. He’s a hero, and should be revered accordingly.

And revere him we did. Ari’s name—not Moshe Dayan’s, or Sharon’s, or Rabin’s—became an idiom for everything we Israelis admired about ourselves. His concluding plea for peace between Arabs and Jews, we imagined, was our very own; in fact, when Yitzhak Rabin addressed the U.S. Congress in 1994 with a similar speech6, commentators in Israel dubbed it an “Ari Ben Canaan moment.” They were not being ironic. We saw Ari’s face in each of the men and women of the Israel Defense Forces, which, we boasted, was the most ethical army in the world.

Around that time we began seeing another kind of Israeli soldier. The kind that allowed the slaughter of civilians at Sabra and Shatila7. The kind that fired rubber bullets—and sometimes, live ammunition—at Palestinian protestors during the first and second Intifadas.

And so Ari himself was trotted out to protest what many Israelis, especially on the left, considered a decline in the nation’s morality. I remember one afternoon, a decade or so ago, at Tzavta, a dank basement-turned-performance-space considered the Mecca of Tel Aviv’s intelligentsia. A well-known intellectual was holding court. His topic, as usual, was the immorality of Israel’s soldiers, and the destruction of Israeli society as a result of their behavior. As he spoke, an image quivered behind him on a makeshift screen: Newman, smirking, bathed by moonlight, a large Star of David dangling on his chest. Ari, he kept repeating, wouldn’t have recognized the Israeli soldiers of today.

Many Israeli historians disagree. Ari, they claim, is not so much a paragon of purity as a symbol of senseless sacrifice, an atavistic vessel designed to drain history of its contexts and complexities and recast it instead as a single-minded story of Jewish exceptionalism.

Evidence for this is everywhere in Exodus, both book and film. In a scene in the movie, Ari loses his temper at a Cypriot businessman who is involved in the efforts to smuggle Jews into British-controlled Palestine. A fellow member of the Jewish resistance asks Ari to apologize to the man, and Ari, of course, refuses. “All over the world, they work for us and tell us how terrible it was that six million Jews went into the ovens,” Ari says. “But when the showdown comes, we always stand alone. . . . We have no friends, except ourselves. Remember that!” 8

In reality, the Exodus had all the friends it needed. After its 4,500 passengers were refused entry to Palestine by British authorities, the Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann persuaded his friend, former French Prime Minister Leon Blum, to shelter the refugees in France for as long as was necessary. But David Ben Gurion, the de facto leader of the Jewish community in Palestine, refused to endorse the deal: At the time, the UN’s Special Committee on Palestine was holding discussions on the future of the contested land, and Ben Gurion realized that few things would attract more international sympathy for the Jewish cause than a boatload of Holocaust survivors caught in a watery limbo. Ben Gurion torpedoed Weizmann’s efforts, thereby stranding the men, women, and children aboard the Exodus for more than seven months.

Most Israelis, however, never got to hear the true story. The one Uris wrote—haunted Holocaust survivors hunted by the British authorities as an apathetic world looks on, with no one to defend them but Ben Canaan—was simply too good to disrupt with facts.

Inconvenient, too, was the actual behavior of Harel, the ship’s real commander and a man every bit as sensitive and mild-mannered as Ari was brash and bold. When the British attacked the Exodus upon its arrival in the port of Haifa, Harel ordered his men to offer no resistance. He was severely criticized at the time by Jewish leaders, but there is little doubt that his decision to surrender saved thousands of lives.

Ari, of course, would never tolerate such level-headedness; his was the worldview of the martyr. In the novel, David Ben Ami, Ari’s brother-in-law, delivers a speech that captures this worldview precisely: “At Masada,” he says, “we held out against the Romans for four years and when they entered the fort they found us all dead. . . . We have not had much opportunity to fight as a nation for two thousand years. When we had that opportunity at the Warsaw ghetto we did honor to our tradition. I say if we leave this boat and willingly return to barbed-wire prisons then we will have broken faith with God.” At Ari’s command, the children aboard the Exodus begin a hunger strike, collapsing one after another on the ship’s deck, arranged in ghastly, lifeless piles. When this fails to move the British authorities, Ari threatens mass suicides.

Needless to say, any talk of suicide as politics strikes an uneasy chord with contemporary Israelis. And yet martyrdom remains an irresistible political elixir. Above the blackboard in my elementary school classroom hung a bright blue sign on which a teacher had written in green letters the alleged last words of Yosef Trumpeldor, a legendary Zionist hero who died in 1920 while defending a northern Jewish settlement from Arab combatants. “Never mind,” he reportedly said. “It is good to die for our country.” My classmates and I, like generations of Israeli children before and since, spent our days staring at this slogan. It’s only natural that many of us came to take its message of self-sacrifice at face value.

Such thinking still plagues Israel. In her 2005 book Death and the Nation, a stunning and irreverent study of Israel’s obsession with martyrdom, the historian Idith Zertal argues that this fixation has come to define the way Israelis understand themselves and their country. “Ancient graves,” she writes, “produce fresh graves.” As Israelis seek to move away from the deeply rooted complexes of a small nation surrounded by sworn enemies, we look in the mirror and, too often, still see Ben Canaan. Too many of us are still proudly convinced that the Jewish people should never trust anyone, that Israel’s only hope lies in its strength, and that certain death is a noble thing. And this dissonance may just be driving Israelis insane.

The late Baruch Kimmerling, a professor of sociology at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, mused about this idea in a 2005 article9 in The Nation, devoted to, among other things, the Exodus myth and its omnipresence in Israel’s collective consciousness. “The obsessive commemoration of the Holocaust and of Jewish victimhood,” he wrote, “has blinded much of the Jewish community to Israel’s real position in the world and to the humanity of the Palestinian people. . . . To be sure, there are periods in the history of a nation when ultimate sacrifices are necessary, and a cult of death unavoidable. The question in Israel today is whether this heroic period has come to an end or whether the prevailing ideology of the 1948 war will last another hundred years.” To adopt the former worldview, he states, is “to grant priority to the lives of Israel’s citizens, Jewish and Arab. To adopt the latter is to remain a community of victims, joined in a mythical communion of Jewish sacrifice in an eternally hostile gentile world.”

By continuing to revere Ari, we Israelis concern ourselves less with reality as it unfolds around us and more as it unfolded for Uris half a century ago.10

Liel Leibovitz is a writer currently living in New York. His next book, Lili Marlene: The Soldiers' Song of World War II, will be published by W.W. Norton in November. Paul Newman poster: United Artists/Photofest.Copyright 2003-2008, Nextbook, Inc.

Links
1. http://www.nextbook.org/images/features/feature_891_story.jpg
2. http://www.answers.com/topic/sabra
3. http://www.science.co.il/ilan-ramon/
4. http://nextbook.org/cultural/feature.html?id=751
5. http://www.nextbook.org/images/features/feature_891_story2.jpg
6. http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1584/is_nSUPP-7_v5/ai_15903393/pg_6?tag=artBody;col1
7. http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/History/Sabra_&_Shatila.html
8. http://www.nextbook.org/images/features/feature_891_story3.jpg
9. http://www.thenation.com/doc/20050110/kimmerling
10. http://www.nextbook.org/images/endslug.gif

Stoned

Stoned
When it comes to Judd Apatow’s characters, what’s in a name?By Ben Greenman

Katherine Heigl and Seth Rogen in Knocked Up

A friend called one evening while we were both watching Knocked Up on HBO. It was during the scene in which Ben Stone (Seth Rogen) and Alison Scott (Katherine Heigl) are on their way to a doctor’s appointment, talking about the relationship between Alison’s sister Debbie (Leslie Mann) and her husband Pete (Paul Rudd). The fight escalates into a more general discussion about sacrifice and responsibility. Alison orders Ben to get out of the car, right there in the middle of the street. Ben, his defiance turning to resolve, gets out of the car. He walks the rest of the way to the doctor’s office. They continue their argument, loudly.

“This is my favorite scene,” my friend said, “because it’s so Jewish.”

My friend is also Jewish, but her comment struck me as odd: not anti-Semitic or pro-Semitic, but definitely Semitic. “What’s so Jewish about it?” I asked.

“The whole thing. It’s at a doctor’s office. He gets to complain about the weather before he rips into her. It’s aggressive whininess, or whiny aggression. And it has a moral component too.”

After a little while, I asked, “Are you sure that Ben’s Jewish?” This was not a rhetorical question, but it may have been a stupid one. Ben Stone is played by a Jewish man. He has conversations with his doting, sensitive father, who is played by a Jewish man (Harold Ramis). And, of course, he has a Jewish name: Ben Stone. So he seems identifiably Jewish. But is he remarkably Jewish? In other words, is his Jewishness worth remarking upon? Ben himself remarks upon it a number of times early in the movie. He tells his friends, “If any of us get laid tonight, it’s because of Eric Bana in Munich.” When he meets Alison and she asks him if he uses any hair product, he says “I use Jew.” But this dimension of the character falls away as Ben’s relationship with Alison comes to the fore, and by the time the movie gets to the fight in the doctor’s office that my friend identified as highly Jewish, Ben’s Jewishness has been suppressed, if not forgotten. As he moves forward in his life, he learns to cope with the consequences of sex, learns to leave the safety of his community (read: roommates), and learns to have a relationship with a non-Jewish woman.

The confusion persists in the newest movie from the Apatow stable, Pineapple Express, which opens today. It’s a companion piece to last summer’s Superbad, in the sense that it’s a buddy movie cowritten by Rogen and Evan Goldberg. (Full disclosure: I have published a book titled Superbad, which is unrelated to the movie, and I once wrote a letter comically attacking Rogen and Apatow for the nontheft of my title. We are not actually feuding, though I did threaten to cut off Rogen’s fingers.)

James Franco and Seth Rogen in Pineapple Express

Here, Rogen costars with James Franco, who is best known as Harry Osborn/Green Goblin Jr. in the Spider-Man movies, but got his start playing the sensitive stoner Daniel Desario in Apatow’s Freaks and Geeks. Daniel Desario was probably Italian, as are other prominent roles Franco has played—Joey LaMarca in City by the Sea, Dan Carnelli in In the Valley of Elah. Franco, though his last name sounds Italian, is in fact a mix of Swedish and Portuguese (on his father’s side) and Jewish (on his mother’s). In Pineapple Express, his character is a sweet, somewhat hapless drug dealer named Saul Silver.

Saul Silver is a Jewish name, and, like Ben Stone, Saul Silver is Jewish in more than name. In fact, he is Jewish exactly like Ben Stone. In the early going, he makes a point of discussing his Bubbie, who is in a nursing home, and then there are a few stray jokes that use his Jewishness as a springboard. But at several other moments where it might surface (confrontations with cops, softer moments of reminiscence) it doesn’t; his Jewishness isn’t as pronounced as, say, Alvy Singer’s. There’s no scene where he imagines that non-Jews see him as a stereotypical Hasid, complete with sidelocks and a black coat.

Apatow’s population of slightly Jewish Jews raises a number of questions about ethnicity and genre. In certain American film genres, ethnic names are part of the equation: look at the long and complex relationship between Italian characters and crime movies. To some degree, this is the result of stereotyping. To some degree, it’s the result of history. And to some degree, it’s the result of a profitable interdependence between crime stories and the sensibilities of directors like Scorsese and Coppola and actors like De Niro and Pacino. Is it fair to look for an analogue in the work of Apatow and his associates?

Some of the work seems to suggest so. The protagonist of The 40-Year-Old Virgin, Andy Stitzer (Steve Carell), has a Jewish name, though not a Jewish actor portraying him; the protagonist of Superbad, Seth (Jonah Hill [born Feldstein]), has both. In You Don’t Mess with the Zohan, Jewishness is central to Adam Sandler’s character, though it’s a case of an American Jew playing (and lampooning) an Israeli Jew. In Pineapple Express, as I’ve said, Jewishness doesn’t figure so prominently in the film’s plot, and Franco isn’t read as a Jewish actor (no one I asked knew he was half-Jewish, and only some of them believed me when they were told). All that’s left is the name, and it sticks out like a sore Jewish thumb, all the more so as the film lifts away from its buddy-movie premise and heads into bloodier action-movie territory.

The fact is that Jewish names have certain connotations, and high-octane action isn’t among them. To get a sense of the oddness, it’s worth importing the same idea into other films. What if Tom Cruise’s character in Top Gun had been named Melvin Goldstein? What if Indiana Jones was Indiana Mandelbaum? That tension between Jewishness and physical power is one of the successful surface jokes of Zohan, and it ripples through our pop culture. The great Washington Post columnist Gene Weingarten raised a version of this issue a few years ago in a column about a man who wanted rock stardom and felt that to get it he needed to get rid of his Jewish name, à la Robert Zimmerman or Chaim Witz.

To recap: Franco, who is half-Jewish but has a name that doesn’t sound Jewish at all, is playing a lightly Jewish character with an explicitly Jewish name. So what, you ask? Well, so this: The practice of assigning actors who don’t seem Jewish to roles that do returns films to an earlier era. In the thirties, Sam Goldwyn discussed the complicated nature of onscreen ethnicity: “You can’t have a Jew playing a Jew,” he said. “It wouldn’t work on the screen.” Goldwyn’s remarks were made in connection with Counsellor at Law, a 1933 William Wyler film that is based on an Elmer Rice play about a Jewish New York attorney named George Simon. Goldwyn wanted his protagonist to be generic enough to appeal to the broad base of moviegoers. The non-Jewish actor hired to play the role, John Barrymore, tried to act extra-Jewish, despite explanations from the director and screenwriter than an assimilated Jew was indistinguishable from an assimilated Mexican or Baptist. In the 1931 melodrama Street Scene, also based on a Rice play, the main character, Sam Kaplan, was portrayed by the Irish actor William Collier, Jr. (To make things even stranger, his Irish girlfriend was played by a Jewish actress, Sylvia Sidney, a counterweight that is employed in Pineapple Express as well—Rogen’s character, more obviously Jewish in his looks and bearing, is given the highly un-Jewish name of Dale Denton.)

The practice may have been rooted in the thirties, but it wasn’t easily uprooted. Until fairly recently, the majority of explicitly Jewish roles went to non-Jewish actors, including Mickey Rooney (Lorenz Hart in Words and Music), Shirley McLaine (Gittel Moscowitz in Two for the Seesaw), Alan Bates (Yakov Bok in The Fixer), and Warren Beatty (Bugsy Siegel in Bugsy). John Turturro (not Jewish) played the Jewish Barton Fink (in Barton Fink) and Herb Stumpel (in Quiz Show), and Jeff Bridges,



Steve Buscemi, and John Goodman in The Big Lebowski

John Goodman (not Jewish) played the observant convert Walter Sobchak in The Big Lebowski. Meanwhile, Jewish actors, many of whom changed their real names to assimilate into American culture, were playing non-Jewish characters, which should come as no real surprise—that’s what actors do. Think of Elliott Gould in M*A*S*H, playing Trapper John McIntyre, or the flying synagogue that was the Starship Enterprise. It should be pointed out that many Jewish actors did play ethnic, just not Jewish ethnic—James Caan tended to play Italians, as did Peter Falk, while Sasha Baron-Cohen prefers Kazakhistanis. But was Benjamin Braddock Jewish? Was Mr. White? Was Chas Tenenbaum?

You can certainly find Jews playing Jewish. Just look at the work of Woody Allen, Barbra Streisand, and Mel Brooks. And there are other famous roles: Lenny Cantrow (Charles Grodin) in The Heartbreak Kid, Alexander Portnoy (Richard Benjamin) in Portnoy’s Complaint, Sheldon Kornpett (Alan Arkin) in The In-Laws. There are more, but the list doesn’t run on and on. In fact, even archetypal roles like Billy Crystal’s Harry in When Harry Met Sally aren’t as Jewish as they seem. Harry’s last name, believe it or not, is Burns, which is what, Scottish?

So what’s the rationale behind Apatow’s decision to give Franco’s laid-back, sleepily charismatic drug dealer a Jewish name? Was the character conceived as Jewish? Is it a comic move, because the combination is so unlikely? Or is it something more, a victory for the race or even a declaration that the race no longer needs to worry about victory? When people speak of Saul Silver, will any of them describe him by his religion? Is it one of his main characteristics, or merely incidental? Would its status be the same if he was a sidekick on a sitcom, or is there something about the big screen that simultaneously magnifies and levels ethnicity? Have we officially entered a period of post-Jewish identity, when Jewish names are as typical as Smith or McIntyre or Bush? Is “Saul Silver” as loaded a name as, say, “Barack Obama”? And what does Franco’s real Jewish grandmother think?

Ben Greenman is an editor at The New Yorker. He has published several books of fiction, including Superbad and A Circle Is a Balloon and Compass Both. Correspondences is forthcoming from Hotel St. George Press. He lives in Brooklyn.POSTED ON 08.06.08 IN: Film