‘Trading Torah for The New York Times’: Playwright David Mamet Discusses Jewish Assimilation during Israel Visit

The Pulitzer Prize winner also shared that he is considering writing a screenplay about Israel Aerospace Industries founder Al Schwimmer.

By Shula Rosen, United with Israel

Legendary US Jewish playwright David Mamet discussed Israel’s founders and the assimilation of US Jews spoke at a Q&A session at the Tel Aviv International Student Film Festival on Sunday.

The Pulitzer Prize winner, whose modern classics include “American Buffalo,” “Speed the Plow” and “Glengarry Glenross,” mentioned that he was born in 1947, a year before the founding of the Jewish State.

Mamet shared that he is considering writing a screenplay about Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI) founder Al Schwimmer.

Mentioning that he was born in 1947, a year before the founding of the Jewish State, Mamet said, “I’d say to myself, ‘My God, I’m meeting with Benjamin Franklin, I’m meeting with George Washington,” referring to his meeting with Al Schwimmer.

I wanted to write a movie about the guys who ran the guns and had to steal the airplanes [for Israel],” said Mamet.

He related that the FBI tried impounded a plane that was meant to go to Schwimmer, a World War II veteran, because they didn’t want him to bring it to Israel, and in response, Schwimmer stole it.

Mamet said, “He had to sneak onto the airfield and steal his plane back. I wrote this wonderful novella about it.”

Mamet also discussed the history of American Jewish assimilation and the form it’s taking now.

“When the Jews came over to the US they gave up the Torah for the ‘improved version,’ which is called The New York Times, and so we read The New York Times every day, and if The New York Times said it was true, it was true! Because they wanted to be Americans,” he said.

“There are Jews in the West who look at Jews in the East as the underclass… God forbid we should read the Torah, [or] we should support the State of Israel because that might lessen us in the eyes of people who — and here’s where the denial comes in — hate us anyway when they think about us,” he said.

Mamet explained, “Because we’ve been denied protection for 2,000 years, our only protection was to assimilate… so it’s very hard for these Jews who have this racial memory of being killed every time we raised our head, to say, ‘No, I’m a Jew.’ So we go around whispering, ‘I’m Jewish but I’m not that Jewish,’ and of course we have a sense of anxiety.”

The grandson of Polish-Jewish immigrants to the US, Mamet described the dynamic of US Jews embracing political movements that are unsympathetic to them and yet continuing to criticize Israel.

“Just like a child in the disruptive household, the child always runs to the abusive parent because we know that the other parent’s going to love us anyway, so that’s where American liberal Jews are coming from,” he said.