"But Jewish history is filled with assimilation, especially by literary stars from Spinoza to Heine to Nathanael West. Assimilation is older than any other Jewish social dream, older than Zionism, communism, or, today, neoconservatism."
Philip, we know that Zionism is you bete noir. Still, Spinoza never assimilated. Had he done so he would have converted to Christianity which was the only vehicle of assimilation open to him. Try to get your facts straight.
Also, some people think of Spinoza as the first secular Jew who was also something of a proto-Zionist. He wrote about the possibility of a revived Jewish national home in his Political treatise.
Moreover, as Heine's experience shows (and you left out Marx) assimilation wasn't always successful The man convered but it was an open secret that he remained a Jew. He was more Jewish than either Norman Mailer or Nathanael West who did not convert.
As for your lame comparison of Zionism with communism and neo conservatism (why not Americanism, or even vegetarianism?) it makes no sense.
"Mailer said once that being a bookish Brooklyn kid felt like a limitation to him (in very much the way that V.S. Naipaul once told the 92nd Street Y that staying in Trinidad felt like a curb on his imagination), and certainly he rebelled against it."
Hey there are all kinds of limitations in life. The greatest writers were limited by the very profession they chose. Still they managed to transcend it. Think of Henry James. That Norman Mailer saw Judaism as a limitation says more about his lack of imagination than about Judaism.
The great poet Paul Celan who survived a death camp wasn't limited by his very narrow experience so why would Mailer be limited by his?
" Mailer wanted—like the Zionists—to be a man of action, and for a while, the writing was dwarfed by the extravagant life: the marriages, offspring and fights (on the Town Hall stage with feminists, and on the Hamptons turf with Rip Torn)."
I agree that Zionist were and are men and women of action, but their action was and is focused on building a Jewish polity so that Jews could live full lives and imaginatively engage the world.
Look at all the great poets and novelists and cinema directors Israel has produced in just a few decades.
This is what Mailer and his ilk should be measured against and not just Nathanael West, and Malamud.
"But Jewish history is filled with assimilation, especially by literary stars from Spinoza to Heine to Nathanael West. Assimilation is older than any other Jewish social dream, older than Zionism, communism, or, today, neoconservatism."
Philip, we know that Zionism is you bete noir. Still, Spinoza never assimilated. Had he done so he would have converted to Christianity which was the only vehicle of assimilation open to him. Try to get your facts straight.
Also, some people think of Spinoza as the first secular Jew who was also something of a proto-Zionist. He wrote about the possibility of a revived Jewish national home in his Political treatise.
Moreover, as Heine's experience shows (and you left out Marx) assimilation wasn't always successful The man convered but it was an open secret that he remained a Jew. He was more Jewish than either Norman Mailer or Nathanael West who did not convert.
As for your lame comparison of Zionism with communism and neo conservatism (why not Americanism, or even vegetarianism?) it makes no sense.
"Mailer said once that being a bookish Brooklyn kid felt like a limitation to him (in very much the way that V.S. Naipaul once told the 92nd Street Y that staying in Trinidad felt like a curb on his imagination), and certainly he rebelled against it."
Hey there are all kinds of limitations in life. The greatest writers were limited by the very profession they chose. Still they managed to transcend it. Think of Henry James. That Norman Mailer saw Judaism as a limitation says more about his lack of imagination than about Judaism.
The great poet Paul Celan who survived a death camp wasn't limited by his very narrow experience so why would Mailer be limited by his?
" Mailer wanted—like the Zionists—to be a man of action, and for a while, the writing was dwarfed by the extravagant life: the marriages, offspring and fights (on the Town Hall stage with feminists, and on the Hamptons turf with Rip Torn)."
I agree that Zionist were and are men and women of action, but their action was and is focused on building a Jewish polity so that Jews could live full lives and imaginatively engage the world.
Look at all the great poets and novelists and cinema directors Israel has produced in just a few decades.
This is what Mailer and his ilk should be measured against and not just Nathanael West, and Malamud.