"The Wicked Son: Anti-Semitism, Self-Hatred and the Jews" by David Mamet, NextBook/Schocken, 208 pages, $19.95

David Mamet hates anti- Semites. He hates secular Jews even more. Most of all, he hates secular Jews who criticize the State of Israel. In his eyes, they are the worst anti-Semites of all.

This may sound like an oversimplified reading of a serious book by a respected playwright and filmmaker ("House of Games," "Lakeboat," "State and Main," "Vanya on 42nd Street"), but regrettably, this particular work does not offer anything more challenging or emotionally complex. If Mamet's new book is interesting in any way, it is in the fact that he has launched this crude, angry, pompous tirade against haters of Israel and assimilated Jews from the heart of upscale America - home to the world's largest and most comfortable Jewish community outside of Israel.

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"The Wicked Son: Anti-Semitism, Self-Hatred and the Jews," published in the United States a few weeks ago, takes its title from the parable of the Four Sons, recited at the Passover seder. The wicked son says: "What does all this mean to you?" He excludes himself from the community, turns his back on religious observance and feels no sense of belonging to the Jewish people. These are the people Mamet speaks to in his introduction: "To the Jews who, in the sixties, envied the Black Power movement; who in the nineties, envied the Palestinians; who weep at 'Exodus,' but jeer at the Israel Defense Forces; who nod when Tevye praises tradition, but fidget through the seder; who might take your curiosity to a dogfight, to a bordello or an opium den, but find ludicrous the notion of a visit to the synagogue; whose favorite Jew is Anne Frank and whose second-favorite does not exist; who are humble in their desire to learn about Kwanzaa and proud of their ignorance of Tu Bishvat; who dread endogamy more than incest; who bow their head reverently at a baptism and have never attended a bris - to you, who find your religion and race repulsive, your ignorance of your history a satisfaction, here is a book from your brother."

Mamet's indictment is full of these candid (not to mention provocative and often simplistic) observations. "The world hates the Jews," he writes. "The world always has and will continue to do so." The apostate Jew, in his effort to "muddle toward community," will experiment with yoga, self-help, agnosticism, Buddhism and sports in the same way that the rich obsessively try out new cars, houses, husbands and wives. If the apostate is so sure he can find the supreme good, Mamet asks, why is he so miserable?

Lack of faith

Quoting his rabbi, Mamet says that all sins fit into one of two categories: the sin of the Golden Calf or the sin of the spies. Ultimately, this boils down to one sin - namely, lack of faith in God. The way Mamet sees it, nothing is more emotionally and culturally contemptible than secularity. Anti-Semitism, he says, is a sick sexual fantasy. In one breath, he lumps together Nazism and Marxism as examples of pseudo-religious movements that have promoted vicious anti-Semitism. He accuses left-wing, liberal, "New York Times Jews" of chronic passivity (most of the opposition in America to keeping guns at home comes from Jews, he says), and of devoting all their energy to currying favor with the Christian majority.

The flaws in the book are immediately obvious: Mamet lashes out at assimilated Jews who are turned off by their religion and by their fellow Jews, but offers no estimate of how widespread the phenomenon is. He takes a whole group of people to task for thinking a certain way, but does not bring a single quote to illustrate this mindset, let alone mention anyone by name. The implication is that all Jews who do not believe in God as a religious entity, are lax in their religious observance and do not celebrate Passover by the book, are self-loathing Jew haters.

Mamet does not recognize the existence of secular Jews who study Judaism (or other religions) out of scholarly or intellectual curiosity, or it goes without saying, secular Jews whose philosophical, spiritual, moral and aesthetic outlook has no connection whatsoever to religion or religiosity. Mamet's views on the State of Israel are even more simplistic and troubling. The Palestinians have taken an oath to throw the Jews into the sea, he writes. He calls Noam Chomsky's criticism of Israel's occupation policy "filth."

According to Mamet, no one has the right to criticize an occupation that has gone on for 39 years, and any mention of the suffering of the Palestinians or the built-in violence of the mechanisms that control them is "siding with the victim" or "supporting terror." Those who see things differently are enemies of Israel and self-hating Jews, and David Mamet hates them. And yet "The Wicked Son" provides an interesting lesson in how to launch an all-out attack, not the least bit defensive, in the name of an abused and rejected minority group.

In the course of the book, Mamet compares the Jews to homosexuals and lesbians at least six times. He argues that there is no point asking why the world hates the Jews because the question itself presumes the existence of an answer that is worthy of consideration, in the same way that homosexuals and lesbians in our day have stopped trying to understand the irrational hatred from which they suffer.

Contrary to what Mamet says, but in line with his militant tone, I happen to think we should ask why anti-Semites hate Jews. And certainly the time has come (after all the recent fuss over the gay pride parade in Jerusalem) to ask what homophobes have against gays - not in such a way as to justify the hatred, but to stamp it out. The time has come to shine the spotlight on anti-Semitism, and in equal measure on homophobia, racism, misogyny and national aggressiveness, as abhorrent, loathsome phenomena deserving of the strongest censure. That way, perhaps, there is a chance of breaking out of Mamet's dichotomous world, where haters of Israel are lovers of terrorism, and haters of leftists are lovers of Israel, and establishing more complex options for fomenting change.

Why not take the perspective of a secular Jewish lesbian, for example, who is not trying to wrest free of her people and is even fond of certain moral precepts in Jewish tradition, but at the same time, abhors terror and fundamentalism, wants occupation and the cruel treatment of Palestinians to end immediately, and regards homophobia as a sin or a social disease as ugly as the sin of racism, misogyny and state-sanctioned aggression? How much greater these transgressions are than the sin of the Golden Calf and the sin of the spies, which signify only disbelief in God.