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since Wed, 26 Dec 2007 20:04:17.
David Shasha offers a review of Zohan, which differs from my interpretation in Zohan Offends for One State. His analysis is remarkable, for it provides further evidence of the continuity of American Zionist Jewish and Soviet Jewish mentality as described in The Magnes Zionist: Kristol and the Shikse.
Shasha's conclusion has important implications for Jewish-dominated American society, politics and culture:
What Adam Sandler has done wittingly or unwittingly is to bring together Jewish paranoia and Jewish power by dwelling on the symbolic meaning of the sexual act and the way in which the orgasm can serve as a unifying marker of a new-found Jewish assertiveness and aggression that is literally embodied in the Zohan whose dual nature brings together the power of the phallic in both sexual and military terms.
Insert the Zionist Phallus to Achieve a Diaspora Orgasm: Adam Sandler’s ´Zohan¡ as the New Jewish Hero
Sigmund Freud related his own personal sense of Jewish pathology, a product of the powerlessness generated by the Diaspora (definitively symbolized by the recounting of an episode in The Interpretation of Dreams where Freud’s own father has his hat knocked off by a Gentile and cowers off to retrieve it), to the explosiveness of the sexual drive. Though he never really makes this bond explicit as far as Jewish identity goes, it has become clear enough over many decades of Freud studies that the father of psychoanalysis found sex and identity to be inextricably linked.
One of Freud’s many Jewish disciples, the novelist Philip Roth, took this sense of Diaspora pathology and made the link quite explicit. In his classic, and in some Jewish quarters still reviled, 1969 novel Portnoy’s Complaint, Roth brings his American Jewish protagonist into the bed of a real Israeli sabra, a girl named Naomi, who sexually emasculates him.
Then she said a kind thing, She could afford to, of course, way up there. ´You should go home.¡
´Sure, that’s what I need, back into the exile.¡
And way way up there, she grinned. That healthy, monumental Sabra! The work-molded legs, the utilitarian shorts, the battle-scarred buttonless blouse the beneficent, victorious smile! And at her crusty, sandaled feet this … this what? This son! This boy! This baby! Alexander Portnoise! Portnose! Portnoy-oy-oy-oy-oy!
Roth, like Freud, sees the Diaspora Jew as powerless. And while Freud died before the founding the State of Israel, it would not take a prophet to see that Portnoy’s dilemma is at root Freudian: Rather than assert his own identity as a Diaspora Jew, he remains impotent in the face of the Israeli-Zionist uber-Jew. The Sabra Jew is here all-powerful, the Diaspora Jew a pathetic example of a human being. Unnatural, twisted, pathological, repressed, neurotic, we see in Roth’s novel the classic trope ´Negation of the Exile¡ that marks Jewish life outside of Israel as warped and inauthentic.
Jewish funnymen from Lenny Bruce to Woody Allen to Mel Brooks to Larry David and most recently Judd Apatow have enriched the comedic traditions of America. In their own way, such Jewish comedians reflect a critical strain of the Ashkenazi Diaspora mentality. In his rants against standards of civility, Lenny Bruce was defying his own religious culture; by creating the ´nebbish as hero¡ Woody Allen was sexualizing and secularizing the effete, intellectual Talmud student whose erotic charms stem from his cerebral nature, it is this intellectualism that serves as his entryway into the Shiksa world where cross-cultural pollination can be effectuated; and in the case of Mel Brooks there was an attempt to draw from the Jewish ethical tradition critical ways of seeing to create a universal humanism.
But in the new generation of Jewish comedians, represented by Adam Sandler, Judd Apatow and Seth Rogan, there is a renewed concern for reframing sexuality by addressing the matter of the Diaspora Male Jew and his powerlessness. Incorporating revisions of the old Woody Allen paradigm, Apatow’s films typically present a nebbishy young Jewish boy whose incompetence, itself an anti-intellectualism as the characters lean towards slackerism, endears him to the blonde-haired, blue-eyed Shiksas that are less elite WASPs as they were in the case of Woody Allen and more akin to the erotic female dream creatures of pornography.
When Adam Sandler released his movie ´You Don’t Mess with the Zohan¡ last year, it became clear that another paradigm shift was taking place. In the wake of the neo-Zionist kerfuffle of Sacha Baron Cohen’s Borat character, who trafficks in anti-Semitic Russian stereotypes by deploying textbook examples of such racism and re-framing it within a gibberish Israeli-style Hebrew that Borat uses in place of the Russian language, Sandler, perhaps the most popular and commercially successful comedian working in movies today, jumps into the deep end of the pool by creating an entire movie based on Middle Eastern stereotypes and motifs.
The ´Zohan¡ is a former Israeli counter-terrorist officer who comes to New York home to the largest concentration of expatriate Israelis in the world in order to escape his Israeli past which is full of violence and cruel actions towards Arabs. He has faked his own death when on a mission to take out a Palestinian named Phantom (original Arabic name, Fantoosh) in Lebanon. He is an ace operative who is widely known for his fearlessness, but has tired of his role in the world; in his bedroom he pores over a Paul Mitchell styling book and dreams of becoming a hairdresser to escape his predicament in Israel.
Immediately upon his arrival to America we see that Zohan is marked as both a violent thug and a sexual predator. After assisting a young Jewish New Yorker who was beaten up simply for being involved in an accident while riding his bike (an episode similar to that of the hat being knocked off of Freud’s father’s head), he is warmly taken to the boy’s home and fed a large bowl of Matzoh Ball soup. After eating the soup, the Zohan proceeds to have sex with the boy’s older and voluptuous mother played by a zoftig Lainie Kazan. When the boy enters his mother’s bedroom to see the couple in flagrante delicto, Zohan sets the tone for the rest of the movie: He tells the boy that sex is a beautiful thing, there is nothing is wrong with it; he is just expressing his thanks for the soup and the hospitality with the precious gift of a roll in the hay.
While such a scene has probably lost its ability to shock the contemporary moviegoer, the point that Sandler is making here has deep roots in the Ashkenazi Jewish consciousness: Zohan, like Portnoy’s Naomi, is a different kind of Jew than those of movies past. He thinks with his phallus and uses sex to express his true identity.
Now it is not all that outlandish to see the dual aspects of his character the macho, violent killer of Arabs and the libertine sexual predator as complementary sides of a single personality. In the recent history of Jewish culture, a culture exclusively understood through its Ashkenazi antecedents, the place of sex and sexuality has become central. From Mel Brooks, Lenny Bruce and Woody Allen we see the evolution of a sexual pathology that incorporates the Shiksa other, the neurotic, flaccid, cerebral Talmud student, and the repressive nature of Jewish sexuality in a heady swirl that turns sex into something more than just sex. Sex in this context becomes an emblem of Jewish identity in the Diaspora.
As Philip Roth has brilliantly argued in Portnoy’s Complaint, the Diaspora Jew could literally not achieve an erection while in the presence of an Israeli Sabra. The Israeli there was a woman who neutralized the Diaspora phallus in the ultimate ´negation¡ of non-Zionist Diaspora Jewish identity. Now where Roth, like Freud, refused the Zionist option and elected to remain impotent and weak as a member of the Diaspora tribe, it is clear that the subsequent generations of American Jews have not taken this attitude of Diasporism at any cost.
Sandler’s Zohan is perhaps the first explicit attempt to create an Israeli-Zionist character reflecting the love affair of American Jews with the state of Israel in a way that cleverly incorporates the sexual metaphor and often literalizes that metaphor in new and unexpected ways. Caught in the web of this assertion is the complex factor of Israelis leaving Israel to escape the inexorable violence and seeking a new life while still maintaining the trace of their Israeli cultural posture, itself superior to the misanthropy of Diaspora Jewish existence. The Jewish victim now becomes the Jewish victimizer.
Sandler, along with his co-writers Robert Smigel (the Saturday Night Live writer who does the TV Funhouse cartoons) and the aforementioned Judd Apatow, paints an eerily perceptive, if caricatured, portrait of the expatriate Israeli world in New York; a world of Hummus, highly-sexed men and electronic stores which cheat their customers. It is by deploying the macho barbarian ethos of the Israeli that the film makes its central thematic points.
Zohan adapts to New York by seeking to fulfill his bizarre dream to be a hairdresser; a profession not uncommon in the Israeli expatriate culture where many yordim emigrants open up beauty salons. Flipping salon culture on its head, Zohan seeks to make macho the stereotypical gayness of the male hairdresser; this in light of his parents’ earlier pronouncements on the faygele nature of the typical male stylist.
After his failed attempt at finding a job at the Paul Mitchell salon on 5th Avenue, Zohan who knows nothing about cutting hair other than what he has read in books asserts a primitive Sabra machismo that is typical of American Jewish perceptions of the Israeli, but also a mechanism that reframes that machismo away from its original Israeli context. Rather than asserting the native Israeli macho culture of anti-Arab hate, the Zohan takes his aggression out on the New Yorkers who are seen as weak and effete. Not for Zohan some Woody Allen-type cowardly neuroses, the Zohan will mow over anyone who stands in his way.
Zohan faces not simply the Upper West Side crowd pampered Jews and Gentiles alike but is caught up in the downtown culture of retail shops owned by Arabs and Israelis. On a street that looks a lot like New York’s Canal Street once home to a bunch of Arab and Israeli stores Zohan finally finds a job at a hair salon owned by a young and beautiful Palestinian Arab woman. In typically macho fashion, he boasts that he can cut hair and takes an unpaid job sweeping the floor until he gets his chance at having his own chair.
And when one of the stylists unexpectedly quits the salon for a better job, Zohan is given his shot. Here Zohan makes his mark, as he did earlier in the film with Lainie Kazan, having hot old-lady sex with his clients. Beginning the seduction process when he provocatively lathers the ladies up for their hair-wash recalling Warren Beatty’s character in ´Shampoo¡ he then cuts their hair and escorts them to the back room where he proceeds to screw their brains out.
Now, as I have said, such vulgarity and distastefulness is part and parcel of the contemporary comedy film, but in the hands of Sandler the matter goes a step further than mere vulgarity. Zohan is marked as a symbol of what it means to be an Israeli in American Jewish eyes. In quite literal terms, the phallus of the Zohan an element of the film that is truly inescapable once inserted into the old ladies elicits an orgasm that physically shakes the walls of the salon.
We are miles away from the Bergman-esque head-games of Woody Allen’s Alvy Singer in ´Annie Hall¡ whose sexuality is neurotic, repressed and pathologically warped. The Zohan is a free swinger who literally does whatever he wants to do whenever he wants to do it. Whether he loves these old woman is beside the point. What he is doing to them is liberating them from their Diaspora mentality and their repressed conventions. Zohan shows these old Jewish ´broads¡ that the Upper West Side has suppressed who they are as human beings. He is a true Israeli Jewish ´friend¡ whose earthy primitivism and unrepressed sexuality, his ´naturalness,¡ is a concretization of the Zionist dream in the American Jewish mind.
The Israeli is freely able to be who he really ´is¡ without worry, while American Jews remain repressed until the Israeli can unlock the key to their twisted psyche.
Taking as axiomatic a New York Jewish sexuality that is neutered and repressive, Zohan swings these women from the figurative chandelier. Within days, the line outside the salon owned by the young Palestinian woman has snaked around the corner. Zohan becomes the Aryan uber-Jew, a Jew who is not cerebral or well-mannered; he is a beast of a man who treats women as sex objects in the way that the film’s flashbacks show that he treated his Palestinian Arab prisoners with the same combination of aggression and confidence when he was working for the Mossad. The line between sex and violence is blurred in ways that we have not seen in our cultural productions to this point.
The sub-plots involving the Arabs who eventually figure out that Zohan did not die in Beirut and remember his role in oppressing them in their homeland speak to this newfound sense of Jewish empowerment. The Arabs in the film are presented as filthy, decrepit and degenerate ´towelheads¡ who are just waiting to kill a Jew. In spite of the freedom in America’s open society, the Arabs represent a fifth column ready to dial the ´Hezbollah hotline¡ for assistance in killing the Zohan. Unlike the presentation of the Israeli expatriates who are both clever and ruthless good things in this context the Arabs are disgusting, boorish and idiotic; people not clever or courageous enough to beat the Israelis.
Throughout the film, by the use of food symbols and linguistic markers, Israelis are seen as exclusively Ashkenazi. The movie’s accurate use of Israeli lingo is replete with words and sounds that are very European. The use of Jewish actors to play some of the Arabs Rob Schneider and the Sephardi Emmanuelle Shriqui as the owner of the salon where Zohan works often creates a confusing set of accents and attitudes. Schneider’s hotheaded Palestinian cab driver often resembles a nebbishy Ashkenazi Jew while Shriqui and other Arabs in the film use Egyptian accents rather than Palestinian ones. It is this disdain for the integrity of Arab culture that is also uniquely Israeli-Zionist. In this culture all Arabs are barbaric terrorists whose ways are primitive and boorish.
So while the unbridled sexuality of the Arab terrorist Phantom played by John Turturro is seen through an Orientalist filter as degenerate and misogynistic, the Zohan’s sexuality is seen as liberating and revelatory. This double standard plays out over the course of the film, making the ´let’s all get along¡ conclusion that much more offensive.
In the final act of the film, a bizarre sub-plot involving a WASP real-estate mogul who wishes to displace all the Arabs and Israelis from a downtown that he is trying to gentrify comes to a head. In this part of the movie, Zohan realizes that he is in love with Shriqui’s character and that his hatred of the Arabs must be set aside as he has now lost his perpetual erection with any other female but Shriqui.
In order to resolve his new issues he must have it out with Turturro’s Palestinian mogul-terrorist the man who was thought to have killed off Zohan in the first place and now returns to New York to get the job right.
But critical to the denouement of the peace moves in the final act of the movie is the idea that peace must come in spite of the hate and the differences between Arabs and Jews.
At a critical moment in the final climactic sequence of the movie, Zohan and Phantom unite to defeat the White Supremacists that have been hired by the WASP real estate mogul to literally burn out the Arabs and Israelis from their stores. To do this the two men must generate a particular sound that will blow out store windows in a sonic boom. Each of the men sings together his own unique melody Zohan humming an Ashkenazi-Israeli sounding tune and Phantom intoning a piercing Arabic-style whine that are clearly different. The idea that these two enemies can share anything cultural is deemed impossible. In order to come to terms with each other, the men must relinquish their differences rather than affirm their common humanity.
Such is one aspect of the film’s understanding of the Middle East conflict: it is a typical Left Wing Zionist peacenik view that affirms the disparity of the two cultures, but which nevertheless demands that the sides come together in order to eventually separate once again. How the final union of Zohan and Shriqui fits into this after all is said and done I cannot pretend to grasp. In the film’s final scene, Zohan’s very Ashkenazi and very Israeli parents walk into the new salon where Zohan and his Palestinian wife are cutting hair now Zohan would seem to be weaned from his sexual congress with old Jewish women; and immediately and unbelievably come to accept their son’s choice for a bride without hesitation. This I must say was quite perplexing given all that has preceded it.
And what has preceded it is a movie of unbridled male egocentrism and macho narcissism driven by the Zionist-Israeli ethos. However Sandler and his co-writers want the movie to end, ´You Don’t Mess with the Zohan¡ is a triumph of what Israelis call ´Shelilat ha-Galut¡ the negation of the Diaspora. All the Diaspora stereotypes are dredged up and laid out against the American Jewish view of Israel that goes back at least until Portnoy’s Complaint; the view that Israeli Judaism represents all that is ´normal¡ and that the Diaspora New York being the paradigm of that Diaspora is filled with abnormality and neurosis.
However much the image of Zohan’s phallus is used for comic relief, that very phallus now represents much more than just an amusing Jewish Mandingo; it is the symbol of Jewish power in a world of perpetual anti-Semitism.
The climax of the old Jewish lady orgasm that becomes a central part of the movie is a very literal rendering of the love affair that is currently being perpetuated in places like West Palm Beach, the Hamptons, Beverly Hills and the Jersey Shore the haunts of Jewish predators like Bernie Madoff who successfully pulled off the same kind of intimate seduction as does the Zohan; though for some very different reasons.
In such places the love of Israel is very serious business. Do not think that Bernie Madoff was not a solid Zionist and friend of Israel. With this ´love¡ Madoff could get away with almost anything. The incestuous nature of this ´love¡ is brilliantly marked for us by Adam Sandler in an ostentatious display of raw and vulgar sexuality that subsumes the violence of torture and cruelty that for many American Jews represents the ´Never Again¡ pathology that has overtaken the community.
In fact, with the recent release by the Obama administration of the infamous ´torture¡ memoranda from the Bush-Cheney era, we see the very concrete triumph of the Israeli mentality in American culture and politics. With the entry of many Right Wing Zionists into the highest echelons of the Bush administration, the rationalization for torture along Israeli lines was clearly a given. In the Israeli psyche torture is a critical part of Jewish survival and was practiced by the Israeli security services for many decades. Stories told by Palestinians of the prodigious violence of Israeli operatives like Zohan are legion. The Bush administration was applying Diaspora Jewish Talmudic PILPUL to find legal justifications for the violence of torture. Such was the ultimate Israeli-zation of the US military in the violation of its own noble ethical traditions.
Behind the PILPUL of the Bush-Cheney torture memos is this malignant sense of Ashkenazi Zionist fears of existential doom. Rather than remaining true to the traditional values of America as George W. Bush stated, unequivocally and dishonestly that the US ´does not torture,¡ the PILPUL logic had by then chillingly overtaken the government of the United States.
The assertion that we do not ´torture¡ not true in reality as we have now seen from the disclosure of the memoranda is then taken to mean that what we did was not really ´torture.¡ This is the classic and tortuous logic of PILPUL methodology: first, we do what we need to do and then find ways to rationalize it a posteriori. The PILPUL method was used by Ashkenazi rabbis to anchor a situational morality where principle and law came second and where personal predilection came first. Whether or not ´torture¡ is legal or illegal does not matter what matters is that we do what we wish to do. Shoot first and ask questions later. Rule of law is not a consideration under such a worldview.
´You Don’t Mess with the Zohan¡ is on the surface just another crude and vulgar comedy coming from the current Hollywood cesspool. It carries all the nastiness and primitiveness of the other pieces of garbage that now pass for commercial entertainment. It strains to be funny, but knows that standards are so low as to be nonexistent.
But this time, the creators of the movie want to make bigger statements beyond their pathetic attempts at getting a cheap laugh. They want to take on big themes deployed in crudely stereotypical ways. With the great confluence between Right Wing Christian fundamentalism and Zionism, the film’s anti-Arab hatred is not at all out of place in today’s mainstream American culture. What is somewhat unconventional is the use of Jewish sexuality and Zionism as a sign of American Jewish identity and its increasing near-pathological love of the state of Israel.
By using its title character’s phallus as prominently as it does, ´You Don’t Mess with the Zohan¡ not only plays to the potty-mouth crowd, but speaks to an American Jewish community that has made Israel the centerpiece of its existential worldview. It speaks to the primacy of AIPAC in the American Jewish conspiratorial mentality. Israel is here seen through the prism of Zohan’s phallus and its innate ability to seduce, mystify and literally bring its recipients to orgasmic climax and sexual ecstasy.
Gone now are the ethical qualms and existential casuistry that permeated the Woody Allen and Mel Brooks films. Allen and Brooks of a bygone generation rooted in the Borscht Belt of another Ashkenazi culture altogether rejected the machismo of the Zionist Zohan and sought to generate a Diaspora Jewish humanism, however difficult, as a way to integrate into the larger American melting pot.
While recently watching Danny Kaye’s 1947 classic comedy ´The Secret Life of Walter Mitty¡ I was again struck by the issue of Jewish humanism as a product of Diaspora consciousness. Kaye’s Mitty is a scared, but smart and sympathetic young man who develops his own inner fantasy world where his pathological weakness in real life is replaced by a supreme confidence in his dream-life. Mitty is a fearless hero in his dreams, while in his waking life he is weak and afraid. Such a dichotomy between real life and fantasy represents the deep complexities of the Diaspora Jewish condition and its relationship to power and powerlessness, the critical role of victim and victimizer in Jewish self-understanding.
A recent example of such Jewish humor is that of Mitchell Hurwitz, whose brilliant television series ´Arrested Development¡ was canceled after two all-too short seasons. The show’s thematic depth and existential complexity was definitely not in keeping with the muscular anti-intellectualism of the new style of Apatow, Sandler and Rogan and was left to wither on the vine. Hurwitz’s form of Diasporism represented an attempt to situate American Jewish culture in a pluralistic context; a context that has increasingly vanished.
The harsh and relentless Zionist view of the Jewish Diaspora is accurately presented by the historian Yitzhak Baer in his 1947 book Galut:
The Galut has returned to its starting point. It remains what it always was: political servitude, which must be abolished completely. The attempt which has been considered from time to time, to return to an idea of Galut as it existed in the days of the Second Temple the grouping of the Diaspora around a strong center in Palestine is today out of the question. There was a short period when the Zionist could feel himself a citizen of two countries, and indeed in a more deeply moral sense than Philo; for the Zionist was prepared to give up his life for the home in which he had his residence.
A counterweight to Baer’s argument was made by the scholar Leo Strauss in his 1962 introduction to the English version of his book Spinoza’s Critique of Religion:
Cultural Zionism believed it had found a safe middle ground between politics (power politics) and divine revelation, between the sub-cultural and the supra-cultural, but it lacked the sternness of these two extremes. When cultural Zionism understands itself, it turns into religious Zionism. But when religious Zionism understands itself, it is in the first place Jewish faith and only secondarily Zionism. It must regard as blasphemous the notion of a human solution to the Jewish problem. It may go so far as to regard the establishment of the state of Israel as the most important event in Jewish history since the completion of the Talmud, but it cannot regard it as the arrival of the messianic age, of the redemption of Israel and of all men. The establishment of the state of Israel is the most profound modification of the Galut which has occurred, but it is not the end of the Galut: in the religious sense, and perhaps not only in the religious sense, the state of Israel is part of the Galut.
Strauss’s argument parts ways from Baer and from the Zohan as it rejects the idea that Zionism has triumphed over the Jewish Diaspora and the larger concerns of Jewish tradition; exemplified in the form of the Torah. After the failure of the Melting Pot ideology in the American Jewish community there has been a vigorous commitment not to traditional American values but to the state of Israel as an exclusive nationalistic marker of what it means to be Jewish.
Woody Allen ultimately failed because he refused to accept Jewish identity as a stable and licit foundation to a life well lived. Allen wanted the acceptance of the Shiksa-WASP world, while Zohan knows all too well who he is and finds his Jewish identity in the violence of the phallus.
The Freudian identification of sex and violence finds an inviting home in the world of the Zohan and the way it presents American Jewish identification with Israel. The genius of ´You Don’t Mess with the Zohan¡ is in the way it concretizes and literalizes the connection between American Jews, Israelis, sex and violence in a post-traditional context. American Jews look to Israel and not the Torah to affirm their sense of themselves. Seeing themselves as powerless wrongly as it happens to be, but that is a different discussion as do their Israeli counterparts, American Jews have nurtured their identity on the mythical powers of the Sabra like Zohan who can quite literally screw anything that moves.
This larger-than-life Sabra conflates sex and violence in ways that have rarely been explored in mainstream culture. This conflation is an American Jewish celebration that serves as the context in which the love of Israel is made manifest. This love represents a new Torah that serves to supplant for many Jews the traditional Torah of the Jewish past. The degenerate Zohan becomes the Moses of contemporary Judaism.
What Adam Sandler has done wittingly or unwittingly is to bring together Jewish paranoia and Jewish power by dwelling on the symbolic meaning of the sexual act and the way in which the orgasm can serve as a unifying marker of a new-found Jewish assertiveness and aggression that is literally embodied in the Zohan whose dual nature brings together the power of the phallic in both sexual and military terms.
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