Amanda Shaw reviews Macbeth in First Things.
The director, Rupert Goold, masterfully depicts the evil of power and, more terrifying, the power of evil-yet he doesn’t go about this in any traditional, warty-nosed-witch sort of way. His production, starring Patrick Stewart and Kate Fleetwood, debuted last year in England and, after finishing its run in Brooklyn, will be moving on to Broadway.
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[T]his production is somehow both awe-full and terrifying. Bestial behavior and violence can cause us to feel pity or disgust. It is when they are shrouded in feigned ignorance and quotidian merriment-when they wear human faces-that they become truly horrible. Stars, hide your fires, says Macbeth. Let not light see my black and deep desires: / The eye wink at the hand; yet let that be, / Which the eye fears, when it is done, to see.
I am skeptical of the Stalinist setting; I find such anachronisms frequently distracting. But the review suggests that the setting may have been put to good use here and offers other good reasons to keep an eye on this production.
March 18th, 2008
Posted by
Fitzroy |
Theater |
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Susan Jacoby writes that “Jewish Identity Is What Each Jew Makes of It.” I am not Jewish, but Jacoby’s thesis is not wrong merely as applied to Judaism; it is fundamentally wrong about any group defined by faith or ethnicity. Indeed, Jacoby’s arguments do much to disprove her title and thesis.
She expresses a profound confusion about what being Jewish means to her.
What Jewish identity means if one is not an observant Jew is unclear. I am a half-Jew, American born. My mother was a Roman Catholic, my father a Jew who denied his identity and converted to Catholicism. . . . By traditional Jewish religious standards, I am not a Jew at all. I do consider myself culturally Jewish, in that Jewish history, and the Jewish experience in America, has informed my life in ways that have been affected by my father’s experience–for better and for worse.
Jacoby fails, however, to explain how her own confusion and tenuous connections to being Jewish translate into freedom for “each Jew” to define what Jewish means. In fact, Jacoby has some objective criteria that she is more than willing to apply to others. For example, being Jewish entails not being neoconservative.
One thing I will never understand is why neoconservative Jews are so unmindful of their own history that they have embraced a political alliance with the Christian Right. . . . This is an outstanding example of right-wing Jewish historical amnesia.
Since she levels this criticism specifically at an observant Jew, one must conclude that, for Jacoby, being politically liberal is a better Jewish credential than being observant. She is obviously not content to let an observant Jew define his Jewish identity as he pleases.
Jacoby defines Jewish culture almost exclusively in terms of its recent secular history, mentioning in passing the Diaspora but failing to acknowledge any of Judaism’s foundational history or beliefs. Consequently, she ends up discussing what it means to be Jewish in very small terms. But no matter how much of Judaism she ignores, she never escapes the need to define something as distinctly Jewish. Whatever that is, it is not simply a matter of personal taste, but something shared and passed from one generation to another. Her fatuous statement that each individual can decide what it means to be Jewish defies the definition of culture.
March 18th, 2008
Posted by
Fitzroy |
Religion |
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