Art & Polemic

What we ask stories to do.

In sophomore acting class on September 13th, 2001, for obvious reasons, we did no acting. We sat in a circle on the studio floor and talked about the meaning of what had happened two days ago and how we could even move forward with our lives.

One friend and classmate said that part of him wanted to drop out of acting school and join the military. I responded with an impassioned mini-speech in defense of making art even during the darkest times, my 19-year-old breast swelling with a self-regard that was only one part arrogance — the other part being a mask to hide the defensive unease I felt but couldn’t admit into consciousness. My friend had spoken for a part of me, too — a part that I successfully stifled.

It was more than a year later that my brother Micah and I began writing our musical “The Golem.” But when I think back on the story of that musical, for me it starts there, in that acting studio on September 13th, 2001. Because it was a moment that crystallized my desire for my art to do Real and Important Things.

And it was then that Real and Important Things felt newly in my orbit — the era when history wasn’t just something in books (I had relished learning about the Revolutionary War in elementary school) or something happening far away on TV (the Gulf War or the handshake between Rabin and Arafat) but something in my life. History now included my own brother, who worked next door to the World Trade Center in New York, explaining over the phone that deciding to go into work late that Tuesday might have just saved his life. History included the endless stream of warplanes flying just over my head in Dayton, Ohio, where, even though commercial airline traffic was suspended for two days nationwide, the nearby Wright-Patterson Air Force Base was sending out plane after plane to patrol the skies. History, for all we knew at the time, might have been the huge boom that shook Dayton in the afternoon of September 11th; we would learn later that it was just a sonic boom from an errant Air Force pilot who shouldn’t have broken the sound barrier over town, but on that terrible day, rumors flew that it was a bomb.

We were in things, is the point. That was the simple, unassailable truth behind my friend’s musing about putting down our paperback Stanislavskis and picking up guns: We were adults, we were in the game, and our lives were an opportunity to change the world.

I knew that this was right. But I didn’t want to join the military, so I fell back on the excuse that artists, too, can change the world.

Look, excuse or no excuse, my little speech wasn’t groundless. Can’t art, in fact, change the world? Perhaps the clearest prooftext is Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Unlike Abraham Lincoln or U.S. Grant, Harriet Beecher Stowe won no elections and commanded no armies; she wrote a novel. But the story she told was so moving that it became the second-best-selling book in America in the 19th Century, second only to the Bible. President Lincoln probably didn’t say to Stowe, upon meeting her in 1862, “So you’re the little lady who started this great war.” Yet, if he had said it, no one would have asked him what he meant. Uncle Tom’s Cabin was a major factor in American politics for a decade.

I’m not at all saying that my little speech had anything to do with this, but as it happened, for good or ill, none of us in that room left college for the Afghanistan war.

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My days were full — dance classes, acting classes, voice lessons, music theory, a few non-theatre courses here and there to fulfill requirements. In the evenings there were usually either rehearsals or performances. Then there was time in the underground practice rooms of the Creative Arts Center, practicing singing or monologues. There was time learning lines for classes and shows. There was time doing homework for those few academic courses. There was, mostly on weekends, time for parties and (usually mild) debauchery with friends. There was even time, fitfully, for writing and composing.

But somehow, I also made time to stay up too late in my dorm room reading Haaretz and whatever other sources of Israeli news I could get online at the time. By the standards of 2002, I was perhaps a bit precocious in being unhealthily consumed by reading news on the internet. Compared to now, much less of the news was online, but whatever was there was never yet behind a paywall. “Doomscrolling” was not yet a thing, but that was only because “scrolling” was limited; every web page still had an actual bottom. There was no shortage of doom.

On March 27, 2002, a Palestinian suicide bomber murdered 30 Israeli Jews at a Passover Seder. This was just one of a string of horrors unfolding at the time, as part of the Second Intifadah. As many pro-Palestinian activists will be eager to tell you, “intifadah” means “shaking off,” which sounds pretty benign, and, heard with post-2014 ears, reminds one more of the Taylor Swift hit than anything else. But the Second Intifadah was not a song of the summer. It was a lynching, a sniper targeting a baby in a stroller, a string of bombing attacks in places like a Sbarro’s, a train station, and a number of buses, and quite a lot more.

All the examples linked above were from before April 2002. Many more would follow, but personally, what hit my heart hardest was the “Passover massacre” at that 2002 Seder. If the terrorist’s intentions were not only to kill Israelis but also to try to make Jews everywhere feel vulnerable, particularly in their own most sacred spaces and times, then I was a success story. I was enraged and heartbroken, and became even more emotionally invested in reading news about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Like many other young American Jews, I was torn apart in many directions by rage at the terrorists, frustration with the Israeli right wing for its intransigence, passion for defending the principle that Israel had a right to defend itself, and anguish about individual reports of IDF overreaches, or seeming overreaches.

In the weeks following the Passover massacre, there was a battle in the West Bank refugee camp of Jenin. The media reported 500 Palestinian civilians killed by the IDF, and some Palestinian officials spoke on TV, vaguely, of “thousands” dead. Much later, Israeli and Palestinian investigations would find that not 500+ but rather about 52 Palestinians died in the 2002 Battle of Jenin, then generally called the “Jenin massacre.” This is not to say that every one of the 52 deaths isn’t still a tragedy, but it is a far cry from 500 or “thousands.” I wouldn’t learn how much lower the actual death toll was in Jenin until many years later, and that experience has, believe me, colored the way I read news coverage of the current war. In 2002, meanwhile, I believed the news coverage of it that I saw online and on CNN, and I felt intense revulsion and horror.

Social media did not invent the kinds of sensationalist reductionism it has elevated and expanded; they were already there in 2002. The arguments about Jenin in 2002 opinion columns seemed, as I recall, anyway, to reduce the moral options down to two: Either the innocent dead in Jenin don’t matter at all, or they mean (in effect) that Israelis should set down their guns and agree to die in unchecked terror attacks. I was (and remain) unwilling to embrace either of those positions.

For one of my non-theatre courses, on sci-fi and fantasy literature, I had recently written a short paper on the legend of the Golem of Prague. The parallels between that story and my strongly ambivalent feelings about Israel’s military responses to the Second Intifadah were obvious.

• Jews face murderous hatred.

• Jews build a remarkably powerful system of defense.

• Jews begin to lose control of what they have made.

• Jews face an impossible choice: Keep their power and be murderers, or give it up and be murder victims.

I wanted to tell that story in a musical. I wanted to tell it in a way that would cleave to the shape of the story as it had come down to us in the folktale, but, more importantly, I wanted not to let the audience feel comfortable about either option in that final choice.

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It was the spring of 2004, and I was tired but proud. I sat onstage for a “talkback” with the creative team and the audience after a truly incredible cast of students and professors had just finished presenting a staged reading of my musical (co-authored with Micah) “The Golem” in Wright State University’s directing lab. We had written and composed a first draft and then enlisted the help of friends from Wright State (across both the musical theatre department and the music department) to make a recording of the songs in 2003. Then in 2004 we revised the show and produced a staged reading. The whole thing was a dream come true — I could not possibly be more grateful for that insanely talented team of volunteers who put our show on its feet, for no compensation whatsoever, and they all performed magnificently.

Honestly, most of that talkback conversation is a blur in my mind. Maybe that’s partly because of the adrenaline rush, but maybe it’s also because there is one element of the talkback conversation that was incredibly clear, shocking, and vexing, and has dominated my memory of the conversation ever since. And it is this: The audience missed my main point! Or, put better, I had failed to get my main point across with the show.

Remember, that one key point for me was that Jews faced a choice between being (as one of our song lyrics put it) “predator or prey,” and for me, neither choice was bearable. In what I feared was a snub to subtlety, I gave each of these options a straightforward advocate in the show, to bring to life the two extremes I wanted to reject: a Jewish war-hawk character named Joshua who wanted ever more strength and power with no regard for the lives of others beyond the tribe, and a Christian character named Mrs. Matatko who was the avatar of Gentile liberal piety.

Joshua was (in today’s terms) Israeli Ministers Smotritch and Ben Gvir. Mrs. Matatko was supposed to be the United Nations, the BBC, the New York Times. She stood for those whose ideal and idea of a Jew is a victim. She was the “People” in Dara Horn’s People Love Dead Jews. In our show, Mrs. Matatko is a sincere friend to the Jews during pogroms, reacting with sympathy when the Jews can’t defend themselves. But from the moment the Maharal breathes life into a golem who is strong enough to fight back, she’s uncomfortable with it — even before it harms anyone who isn’t a direct threat. And when the golem becomes more and more out of control, and it becomes clear that the choice is between Jewish strength and survival through real moral risk and Jewish purity through martyrdom, she (with no skin in the game herself) demands that the Jews become martyrs.

I wanted people who partake in these politics in real life regarding Israel to see Mrs. Matatko, recognize themselves, and feel discomfort. I wanted them to feel some kind of sense of questioning. I didn’t have any desire (let alone hope) to make Likudniks of my peacenik friends. But I wanted to open up a question mark in their minds and hearts. Bring people, at least, to a point of understanding the anguish of the choice.

But most of the audience didn’t see Mrs. Matatko’s position as bad in any way. They didn’t see an anguished choice or any real choice at all. People in the audience (and in the cast!) praised Mrs. Matatko as a clear and heroic voice of moral clarity in the show!

I was rather gutted. I had worried before that perhaps my message lacked subtlety, that my polemic was too bluntly hammered home. In fact, though, it seemed the allegory was too precise for the message to get through. I felt as if Claudius had just watched the play within “Hamlet,” in which Hamlet instructs the players to show Claudius his own crime, but instead of interrupting the play, Claudius claps Hamlet on the shoulder, saying, “Yes, by Jove, Hamlet, that’s me up there, and that’s exactly how and why I killed the old king, as anyone of good sense ought to have done. Jolly good, spot on!”

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When art and polemic travel well together, it’s because the polemic lets the art drive the car. Artistry comes first. If the art is bad, we recoil from it even if we completely agree with its message. If the art is good, it somehow feeds our souls even if we disagree with its worldview.

And that is to say, the first and most important reason “The Golem” didn’t do what I wanted to do is that (in hindsight) it just wasn’t very well-written as a show. I think the music was alright, but there’s still enormous room for improvement there. The plot was linear to the point of banality. A lot of the characters weren’t distinct enough, but worse than that, they weren’t interesting people. Virtually nobody was any fun, and the few characters who were any fun were the Jew-baiting bad guys (whom we gave a fun drinking song to sing in a pub before the golem smashes them). The opening number was a particularly big missed opportunity, as it utterly neglected to establish the world of the Jewish quarter of 16th Century Prague. It didn’t set up the problem of pogroms that the Jewish community faced — the i.e., reason one might want to build a golem to begin with— except in extremely vague ways that were always told instead of shown. The Jewish vulnerability was absent and abstract while the Jewish overreaches of power were operatically present. Meanwhile, the Jewish content in the show, coming as it did from my Jewishly-undereducated-at-the-time brain, was extremely thin gruel. The central character lacked any real connection to the real Maharal of Prague, who never (demonstrably) made a golem but who was (assuredly) a real person. He left an enormous amount of interesting writing, all of which is still in print, and any of which might have yielded some interesting character traits, but none of which I bothered to read before writing him as the central character of the show.

My biggest regret in the entire process of putting on that reading is that when one particularly brilliant friend, Christian Duhamel (who would go on, years later, to win a musical theatre writing award), who very kindly agreed to be musical director for the staged reading, asked me whether I wanted his help in improving the show or just his help in making the reading of the show as it was as good as possible, I foolishly chose the latter! He could have given incredibly helpful feedback. I might even have discovered earlier the mismatch between my desired message and the actual message the show delivered to someone outside my own skull.

But were quality problems the only problems I faced with “The Golem?” Or did the issue with my expectations, perhaps, go deeper?

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What, reasonably, can we ask art to do?

For much of my life, I have assumed that it can change people’s minds. Not just in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s day, but in my own. Tony Kushner’s “Angels in America” and Jonathan Larson’s “RENT” were both incredibly beautiful and effective arguments for left-wing cultural politics on gender and sexuality in the 1990s while being (which is to say, because they were) just plain gorgeous works of art.

RENT deeply affected me when I first saw it on Broadway, and it has kept something of a hold on me ever since — not changing me, perhaps, as much as preventing me from changing too drastically. It remains a powerful challenge to my traditionalism. Among my core narratives about myself is this one: I feel deeply drawn, on one hand, to Orthodox Judaism and the cluster of worldviews espoused in the journal First Things, a journal of religious, social, and cultural traditionalism that stands implacably opposed to the vision of wild liberation elegized in “La Vie Bohème.” But, on the other hand, damned if I don’t also love that song, the story from which it comes, and the spirit of love, generosity, and creativity that animate it. Can I justify holding fast to both of these visions of the common good? Can I fashion an ethos that is, somehow, loyal to both? I don’t know, but part of my life project is to try.

I still affirm that story. But I want to question it a little, without disowning it. Does that story I tell about myself put too much weight on “RENT” rather than what I brought into the theater as an audience member before the curtain even rose? On reflection, I would bet that many people have managed to watch “RENT” and “Angels in America” without drawing the same ideological conclusions that I did when I first saw them, just as I’m sure many readers of the 1850s managed to read Uncle Tom’s Cabin without becoming abolitionists.

For that matter, does my story put too much weight on First Things and not enough on what I bring to the sofa as a reader before I open the magazine? Between the Trump and COVID storylines in recent American history, there has been much anguish recently over whether anyone is, in fact, able to have their minds changed by rational arguments. Is it paradoxical enough that these rational arguments against rational argument have convinced me to be somewhat skeptical of rational argument?

Yet it seems obvious to me that art and polemic can both influence us to some degree. The question is how, and how much?

“Real art,” writes Susan Sontag, “has the capacity to make us nervous.”

I used to love that quote for how far it goes; more recently, I am struck by how far it doesn’t go. “Nervous” is not the same as “brainwashed,” and, indeed, Sontag’s quote in context seems to draw real space not only between the artistic and the polemical, but between the artistic and the rational altogether:

“Real art has the capacity to make us nervous. By reducing the work of art to its content and then interpreting that, one tames the work of art. Interpretation makes art manageable, conformable.”

— Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation

One implication of Sontag here is that politics (among everything else articulable) should keep out of art’s way. But, in an insightful article for Tablet, poet and essayist Alice Gribbin suggests the reverse — that art may also need sometimes to get out of the way of politics:

Rarely are the politics of an artwork, even when it addresses political matters directly, any more penetrating than the statement of a problem. Rarely does art treat political subjects with the complexity found even in quality journalism. Expecting artists to contend with social scientific data, to carry out the work of think tanks or propose legislation, would be silly. Instead, what political art does proffer is the experience of recognition.

— Alice Gribbin, “Why Good Politics Makes for Bad Art”

“Recognition” is extremely powerful, but it implies previous knowledge.

A working theory suggests itself, then: Art can awaken things in us. But I’m not sure it’s fair to expect any given piece of art to implant anything in us. At least, not by itself. At best, perhaps, any given work of art might be one drop in a larger stream of culture that does that job at the speed of water carving rock.

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Over the past few months, I have wanted so badly to write something about the current war in Israel and Gaza. Over and over, I keep composing things and then deleting them.

I delete them because there are only so many threads of Twitter replies and Facebook comments you can live through without beginning to find the whole exercise of Arguing on the Internet tedious and predictable.

I delete them because in order to write things I don’t disagree with myself, they have to be long (witness the current novel of a screed, and kudos to you if you’ve [doom]scrolled this far; it’s almost over, I promise).

I delete them because I’m still smarting from hearing people praise Mrs. Matatko.

I have become very skeptical of the powers of both art and polemic to do what we (what I) keep wanting them to do. Just as Alice Gribbin implies, good polemic can be miles clearer and miles smarter than good art. But even all that clarity and intelligence in the most rational of arguments just arouses our defenses. And perhaps that’s where art, for all its oversimplifications, can (when done well) have an edge. Emily Dickinson (“Tell the truth but tell it slant”) and B.H. Liddell Hart (who titled his book Strategy: The Indirect Approach) knew what they were talking about. You’ve gone in by the side door, if you managed to get in at all.

We all see what we want to see. You will all read this with the eyes that have seen your lives leading up to this day, and those are different lives than mine. We each and all see different things happening in Gaza right now. You nod along with Mrs. Matatko or you recoil from her.

We can tell each other stories. We can make arguments and share analyses. None of it will do as much as we want it to do. Tiny drops in a stream. But what else can we do?

I suppose all of this is just me trying, in public, to readjust my hopes and intentions. I don’t want to keep failing, either at art or at polemic; neither do I want to stop trying. Let me drip more drops into the stream, but let me also lower my expectations for the effects of each or any one of them.

What would I do differently, I wonder, if I crafted them all, artistic and polemical alike, not with any expectation of results but for the simple satisfaction of making something new?