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Mamet responds to boilerplate Zionist accusations as "a crock of s---."
5/28/11, "David Mamet's Coming Out Party," WSJ, Bari Weiss
"In March 2008, David Mamet was outed in the Village Voice. The Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright had a comedy about an American president running on Broadway, and—perhaps to help with ticket sales—decided to write an article about the election season. The headline was subtle: "Why I Am No Longer a 'Brain-Dead Liberal.'"
"They mistitled it," he insists. Mr. Mamet had given the piece the far more staid title, "Political Civility." But the Voice's headline was truth in advertising. "I took the liberal view for many decades, but I believe I have changed my mind," Mr. Mamet wrote, referring to his prior self as, yes, a "brain-dead liberal."
The article was the most popular ever published on the Voice's website. But was the acclaimed Mr. Mamet really a conservative?...
And so it was with Mr. Mamet and politics. He couldn't move on, so to speak, before he understood "what the nature of government is, just sufficient so that I as a citizen can actually vote without being a member of a herd." Same for taxes: "I pay them, so I think I should be responsible for what actually happens to them." As for the history of the country itself, he wanted to understand "the vision of the Founding Fathers. . . . How does holding to it keep people safe and prosperous?"
Reading and reflecting got him to some basics. Real diversity is intellectual. Whatever its flaws, America is the greatest country in the history of the world. The free market always solves problems better than government. It's the job of the state to be just, not to render social justice. And, most sobering, Mr. Mamet writes in "The Secret Knowledge," there are no perfect solutions to inequality, only trade-offs....
On the left, Mr. Mamet is accused of having ulterior motives for his political shift. The New Republic's Jonathan Chait writes that the story is a familiar, Zionist one: "An increasingly religious Jew with strong loyalty to Israel, he became aware of a tension between the illiberal nationalism of his right-wing views on the Middle East and the liberalism of his views on everything else, and resolved the tension by abandoning the latter." Mr. Mamet calls this a "crock of s—."
The Slate website has run with the "Rich Person Discovers He Is a Republican" narrative. And then there's the jiu-jitsu theory offered by a film blogger: "Mamet's escalating interest in martial arts—traditionally the domain of right-wing nutjobs like Chuck Norris—has pointed toward this new stance for some time." Obviously....
Mr. Mamet was in Toronto that day (Sept. 11, 2001) for a film festival. "I read an article, I think it was in that day's Toronto Star, that had been a reprint from the Chicago Tribune," he says. It was an interview with Bill Ayers and his wife Bernardine Dorne, two former leaders of the Weather Underground. "They were talking about the bombings in the '60s. And the guy says to Bill Ayers: 'Are you regretful?' And he said: 'No, no, no.' . . . And I read it, and I thought, this is appalling and immoral," recalls Mr. Mamet.
"Then I got on a plane. And while I was on the plane they blew up New York City. The combination of the two things just started me thinking what have we—meaning my generation—done?" Mr. Mamet knows these characters intimately. They went to school with him at Goddard College in Vermont, or they passed through. "Some of the people I knew actually were involved in blowing up the building on 11th Street [in Manhattan by
- members of the Weather Underground in 1970]. . . .
- And I thought: how does this happen?""...
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