The girl will not sleep.
It is past ten in Berkeley, and Adam Mansbach (b. 1976) has read the books, sung the songs, refilled the cup of water, and lain down on the floor beside the small bed, and risen, and lain down again. His daughter Vivien is two. She watches him from the pillow with the calm of someone who has all night and knows it. He backs out of the room. He sits at his desk in the dark of the next room and listens. Nothing yet. He opens his laptop and types a joke to his friends, a title for a book no house will print, the book every tired parent wants and no store can stock: Go the Fuck to Sleep.
The friends write back. They want the book. They have the same child in the same bed across the country, and the joke lands on all of them at once. So he writes it, a lullaby in the old cadence, the soft animal images of the nursery, the cats and the lambs and the wind in the trees, and then the line that breaks each verse like a man at the end of his patience. He sends it to Johnny Temple at Akashic Books in Brooklyn, a small house that prints crime novels and political tracts and has never sold a children’s book to anyone. Temple takes it.
Months before the print run, a galley leaks. Someone scans the pages, or forwards the file, and the book moves the way a joke moves, by email, parent to parent, the subject line a confession. By spring of 2011 the thing that does not yet exist as an object sits at number one on Amazon. When the hardcover arrives on June 14, 2011, it goes to the top of The New York Times list and stays. It sells more than three million copies and travels into more than forty languages. Samuel L. Jackson (b. 1948) reads the audiobook in a low and weary growl, a man addressing a child and a cosmos at the same time, and the recording becomes its own event, played at parties, quoted in offices, a small national release valve.
Mansbach is thirty-four that night at the desk. He has already lived a full writing life that almost no one in the bookstore lines knows about.
He grows up in Newton, Massachusetts, outside Boston, in a secular Jewish home that runs on words. His father edits. His mother reports. The house holds the assumption that language is work a person does for a living and also the medium in which a family argues, jokes, and remembers. He goes to Columbia and graduates from the college in 1998, then takes a Master of Fine Arts from the School of the Arts in 2000. In New York he walks into two cultures at once, the literary world uptown and the hip-hop world all around it, and he refuses to choose. He founds and edits Elementary, a journal of hip-hop criticism, at a moment when the academy has not yet decided the music deserves footnotes. He writes for The Source during the magazine’s years of reach, and he treats rappers as he treats novelists, as makers of form.
His first novel, Shackling Water (2003), follows a young jazz saxophonist through addiction and ambition and the long argument between jazz and the music that has come to replace it. The book finds a small readership. It sets the terms he keeps for twenty years. Music stands in his work for identity, for the thing a man inherits and then has to make his own or lose.
The breakthrough comes with Angry Black White Boy (2005). He takes the bones of George Schuyler‘s (1895–1977) satire Black No More (1931) and builds a comedy of American racial bad faith. A White suburban kid wants so much to be Black that he becomes a public figure, an apostle of racial guilt, and the wanting exposes everyone it touches, the kid most of all. Universities put the novel on syllabi. A stage adaptation wins prizes in 2008. The book earns the cult status that follows work people feel they discovered.
He turns to his own inheritance in The End of the Jews (2008). The novel moves across generations of one gifted and wounded American Jewish family and asks what passes down and what breaks. Assimilation, grief, memory, the burden of talent, the comedy of intellect under pressure. He wins the California Book Award for fiction. He draws Jewish identity not from the synagogue but from history and family and humor and a restlessness of mind, the version of Jewishness a secular Boston childhood produces, carried in argument and joke rather than law.
He teaches while he writes. From 2009 to 2011 he holds the New Voices chair in fiction at Rutgers. He teaches later in the low-residency program at San Francisco State. He takes a fellowship at the Sundance Screenwriters Lab in 2012 and another at Berkeley Repertory Theatre in 2013. In lectures he keeps returning to the seam between the high literary tradition and the music of the street, and he keeps insisting there is no seam, that the division is a failure of attention.
Then the lullaby. The success of Go the Fuck to Sleep might have ended a serious writer, or freed him to stop. It does neither. He writes the sequels, You Have to Fucking Eat, Fuck, Now There Are Two of You, and Go the Fuck to College (2026), the last read on audio by Ted Danson (b. 1947). He keeps the franchise alive across a decade with anniversary editions and child-safe versions. He also goes back to the novel.
Rage Is Back (2013) gives New York’s graffiti writers an epic, a legendary artist and the son who inherits the spray can and the grudge. The comedy runs hot and the city changes underneath the family, and NPR and the San Francisco Chronicle name the book among the year’s best. The same year he publishes The Dead Run, a thriller that pulls Mexican folklore and border politics through horror and crime, and follows it with The Devil’s Bag Man (2015). He writes for children too. With the comedian Craig Robinson (b. 1971) he builds the Jake the Fake series, a Scholastic main selection that takes the 2021 Grand Canyon Readers Award. With Alan Zweibel (b. 1950) he writes Benjamin Franklin: Huge Pain in My Ass. With Zweibel and Dave Barry (b. 1947) he writes A Field Guide to the Jewish People and For This We Left Egypt?, a Thurber Prize finalist, both of them affectionate raids on Jewish custom that mock the Jews and the gentiles who watch them in equal measure.
He writes for the screen. In 2016 he co-writes Barry, a portrait of Barack Obama (b. 1961) as a young man at Columbia, navigating a campus and a country that cannot decide what to make of him. Netflix releases it. The Independent Spirit Awards and the NAACP Image Awards nominate the script. He writes political satire on demand. In the 2012 election he writes “Wake the Fuck Up,” again in Jackson’s voice, and in the pandemic spring of 2020 he writes “Stay the Fuck at Home,” and the videos move the way the first book moved, fast and far, and they bring him Reed and Webby and Gold Pollie awards.
Look at the shape of it from outside and a critic might call it scattered. A man cannot be the bestselling humorist in America and a serious novelist and a screenwriter and a hip-hop scholar and a children’s author and keep his name attached to any one thing. The market wants a brand. Mansbach gives it a refusal. He treats the comic and the literary as one practice, and he treats success as a tool rather than a destination, and the through-line holds across every form. He writes about people who build a self out of borrowed culture, and he uses laughter to walk up to the things that frighten him.
Then the thing he cannot laugh at.
His younger brother David takes his own life. For years Mansbach circles the loss and finds no form for it. The comedy will not hold it. The novel will not hold it. He has spent a writing life moving between registers at will, and now the subject sits in front of him and refuses every register he owns. He sits with it. He waits. The form that comes is verse.
I Had a Brother Once (2021) is a book-length poem about David’s death and the years after, about survivor’s guilt and the family’s silence and the way memory keeps a dead man present and unreachable at once. He has called it the most personal writing he has done. The book breaks from everything the public knows him for. There is no joke in it. The critics praise the honesty and the form, and readers who came for the lullaby find a man counting the cost of being the brother left alive.
He returns to the comic key, changed, with The Golem of Brooklyn (2023). He takes the old Prague legend, the clay man a rabbi builds to defend the Jews, and sets it loose in contemporary America. The golem becomes a screen for modern Jewish fear and modern Jewish nerve, a figure for trauma carried forward and for the responsibility a community owes itself. The Yiddish folklore is not a museum piece in his hands. It works. It speaks to the present, which is what he has wanted his whole writing life, for the inheritance to remain alive enough to argue with.
Across more than two decades he resists the category every gatekeeper offers him. His fiction draws on hip-hop, on Jewish thought, on the history of cities, on satire, on the plain machinery of realism, and he sees no contradiction in the mix. He writes about graffiti writers and golems and race hustlers and exhausted parents and a dead brother, and the comic energy and the moral weight ride together in the same sentence. He moves between the prize jury and the bestseller list and gives up neither audience. He builds identities for his characters out of the cultures they are handed, and he uses comedy to face grief and prejudice and the contradictions of the country, which is the work he set himself at the desk in Berkeley, on the night the girl would not sleep, when he wrote a joke and found a vocation hiding inside it.
Adam Mansbach: What the Joke Is For
Ernest Becker (1924–1974) holds that a man builds a hero system to outrun two terrors at once. The first is the body that ends. The second is the life that does not count, the years that close over without a wake. The hero system hands a man a short list of sacred values and promises that if he earns them he joins something the grave cannot reach. Watch what a man treats as sacred and you read the shape of his fear.
Adam Mansbach builds his out of the joke.
A booth in 2011. The engineer rides the levels behind glass. Samuel L. Jackson (b. 1948) stands at the mic with a paperback in one hand, reading a lullaby. The cadence is the old nursery cadence, the cats and the lambs, the wind soft in the trees, and then at the close of each verse the line drops like a man at the end of his rope and tells the child to go the fuck to sleep. Jackson reads it low. He does not push. He gives the profanity the same tenderness he gives the lambs, and the room behind the glass loses its composure, the engineer’s shoulders going, the publicist with a hand over her mouth. Somewhere in the room Mansbach watches the thing he wrote at a desk in Berkeley travel out past anything he planned for it. The book reaches number one before it exists as an object. It sells past three million. It crosses forty languages. A joke he posted to friends becomes a rite that exhausted parents perform on each other, the file forwarded at midnight, the confession that the love and the rage live in the same body.
Under the laugh sits the first terror, and the joke is how Mansbach walks up to it. He has said the comedy lets him approach what he cannot face head on. The lullaby is about a father at the limit of his patience, and patience at the limit is a small rehearsal of the larger thing, the night that will not end, the child who outlives the parent or does not. The joke gets him to the edge and lets him look.
Then the second terror, which for this man takes a private shape. He does not fear obscurity. He fears the file. He fears being named once and shelved, the bestselling humorist, the serious novelist, the hip-hop guy, the screenwriter, each label a small coffin sized to one body. A man whose whole self is movement reads fixity as death. So he keeps moving. He writes the franchise and the literary novel and the children’s series and the political video and the verse memoir, and he treats every category that reaches for him as a thing to slip. The refusal looks like ambition from outside. From inside it is the second terror handled the only way he knows, by never holding still long enough to be buried alive.
The hero system works until it meets the death it cannot joke about.
His younger brother David takes his own life. Mansbach has spent a writing life moving between registers at will, and now the subject sits in front of him and turns every register he owns to ash. The joke walks him to many edges and not to this one. He tries the novel. The novel will not hold it. He tries the comic key that has carried everything else and the key does not fit the lock. He sits with the silence for years. This is the subtraction the hero system exacts. The fluency that frees him from every category also leaves him without a native register for grief, because grief does not move and he has built a self out of movement. The man who can say anything cannot say this.
The form arrives late and from outside his repertoire. I Had a Brother Once (2021) is a book-length poem, and there is no joke in it. He has called it the most personal work of his life. He has said poetry was the only form that would carry the weight. Read through Becker, the memoir is the hero system breaking and setting the bone wrong on purpose, admitting the one death the joke could not approach and finding a register that does not flee. He keeps the comic key after this. He keeps it changed.
Now the sacred values themselves, and the trouble Becker leaves us with. The same word sits at the center of many hero systems and means a different thing in each. A man’s sacred terms are not shared property. They are local currency, and they spend only inside the system that mints them.
Take the joke, which Mansbach treats as the vehicle that gets him near the unbearable. The word does not hold still across hero systems either.
The trauma surgeon uses the joke at two in the morning over an open chest. “You crack wise so your hands don’t crack,” she says. For her the joke is ballast, the thing that keeps the instrument steady. It is function, not approach. She does not want it to bring her closer to the thing. She wants it to hold the thing far enough away that the work continues.
The Hasidic rebbe tells a story that lands as a laugh and turns, on the second beat, into law. “The laugh is the spoonful of honey,” he says. “The child swallows the medicine because of the honey.” For him the joke is a vessel that carries transmission past a man’s defenses. The honey serves the medicine. Strip the medicine and the honey is waste.
The touring comic in the black tee under the brick wall has no medicine and wants none. “The laugh is the whole religion,” he says. “You get the laugh, you exist. You don’t, you’re dead up there.” For him the joke is not a road to anything. It is the cathedral and the altar and the proof of the soul, the immortality itself, and a man who points past the laugh to some deeper purpose has misunderstood the only purpose there is.
Four men, four sacred jokes, and no two of them mean the same word. Mansbach approaches the grave with his. The surgeon holds the grave off with hers. The rebbe smuggles the law in his. The comic worships at his. The joke is local currency.
Take movement, which Mansbach holds sacred above the rest, the freedom to cross from the lullaby to the literary novel to the verse memoir without asking permission at the border.
The career Marine officer hears this as the name of the enemy. “You hold the line,” he says. “The man who moves is the man who breaks.” His hero is the one who does not shift under fire, whose fixity is the whole virtue, who dies in his position rather than yield it. What Mansbach calls freedom the officer calls collapse.
The Benedictine takes a vow against it. Stability is his word, stabilitas, the promise to enter one house and die in it, to stay when staying is hard. His Rule names the wandering monk a gyrovague and counts him the lowest sort, a man who drifts house to house and serves his own appetite. Mansbach is the gyrovague raised to a virtue. The monk would pray for him.
The museum conservator holds movement sacred only as its opposite. “You leave no trace of yourself on the work,” she says. Her heroism is invisibility. She cleans the varnish and matches the loss and signs nothing, and the highest praise is that no one can find her hand. Mansbach signs everything and the signature is the point. To the conservator that is vandalism with a byline.
Take inheritance, the living past Mansbach argues with, the golem he wakes up in Brooklyn and walks through the present.
The Torah scribe copies letter for letter. “One wrong letter and the scroll is dead,” he says, and he means it without metaphor, the scroll is pasul, unfit, buried. For him inheritance is exactitude and zero invention. The hero changes nothing. Mansbach’s golem, reimagined and made to argue with the news, is to the scribe a beautiful corpse.
The startup founder calls inheritance technical debt. “The old code is a tax you pay until you kill it,” he says. The past exists to be deprecated. You inherit a system to disrupt it, and the man who reveres what came before has confused sentiment with strategy. Mansbach reveres the old forms and reanimates them. The founder buries them and ships.
The griot carries inheritance in his body, the genealogy of the line, the names of the dead kings in order. “I change nothing and I keep everyone alive by saying them,” he says. The voice is the archive. To improvise the lineage is to lose the dead. Mansbach treats inheritance as raw material to remake. The griot treats it as a charge he holds in trust, and the trust forbids the very freedom Mansbach calls sacred.
So Becker leaves us here. Mansbach’s sacred values are real and they organize a life, and they buy nothing outside the system that issues them. To the surgeon his joke is a luxury. To the monk his movement is a sin. To the scribe his inheritance is a desecration. The man is a hero inside his own walls and a cautionary tale in the next house over, and so is every one of us, which is the part Becker meant to leave under the skin.
Three coordinates fix him.
The first is where the joke points. Most comedy points at the audience and asks to be loved. Mansbach’s points at the grave and asks to be let near it. The lullaby is a father’s love and a father’s terror in one breath, and the franchise that made him rich is, read close, a long rehearsal for the night that does not end. The laugh is the honey on a darker spoon.
The second is the vow he never took. The monk swears stability and the soldier holds the line and the conservator erases her hand, and each buys a kind of peace by standing still. Mansbach buys his freedom by refusing the vow, and the price comes due once, at the desk, in the years when grief would not move and he had no register that could sit with a thing that stays. The man who can go anywhere found the one room he could not enter, and he had to build a new door to reach it.
The third is the place the joke cannot reach and what he made when he arrived. The hero system met its limit at his brother’s grave and did not pretend otherwise. He set down the honey. He wrote the poem. A lesser version of this man keeps cracking wise to the end and calls it courage. Mansbach let the system break, and the breaking is the most heroic thing in the record, because it is the one time he stopped moving long enough to be buried alive in the feeling, and lived, and wrote it down.
Adam Mansbach’s Social Set: The High Thing and the Low Thing
Adam Mansbach (b. 1976) sits at a table that does not usually set itself. On one side are the comedy professionals who descend from the writers’ room and the Borscht Belt, Alan Zweibel (b. 1950), the original Saturday Night Live writer who gave him the parody Haggadah, Dave Barry (b. 1947), the syndicated humorist who co-wrote it, and the voices who read his work aloud, Samuel L. Jackson (b. 1948), Larry David (b. 1947), Bryan Cranston (b. 1956), Ted Danson (b. 1947). On a second side are the people of nineteen-nineties hip-hop who took the music as an art worth a footnote, the scholar Tricia Rose (b. 1962), whose NYU seminar he audited, the graffiti writer Alan Ket, the Antibalas founder Martín Perna, the record diggers Eugene Cho and Eli Epstein and Chiwale Shannon, the rapper Common (b. 1972), the rapper and organizer Killer Mike (b. 1975), the actor and rapper Daveed Diggs (b. 1982). On a third side are the Bay Area progressives of comment and comedy, W. Kamau Bell (b. 1973), Sarah Silverman (b. 1970), Sarah Cooper (b. 1977), Lewis Black (b. 1948), Andy Samberg (b. 1978). On a fourth are the collaborators of the page, the comedian Craig Robinson (b. 1971) and the cartoonist Keith Knight (b. 1966) on the children’s books, the illustrator Ricardo Cortés on the lullaby, the playwright Danny Hoch (b. 1970) and the comedian DL Hughley (b. 1963) on the screen. Behind them stand the gatekeepers and the houses, Johnny Temple at Akashic Books who took the joke no one else would print, the editors at The New Yorker and The Believer, the producers at This American Life and The Moth, and the political shop Colehouse Walker, where Mansbach writes ads for the Biden-Harris campaign and the New Georgia Project. He roadied as a kid for the drummer Elvin Jones (1927–2004). The whole set runs coastal, educated, left of center, secular or culturally Jewish, and bicoastal between New York and the Bay and Los Angeles.
What holds people this different at one table is a single conviction. They believe the wall between high culture and low culture is a fraud, and they treat the crossing of it as the proof of a serious person. The novelist who tops the bestseller list, the rapper who reads the academy, the comic who writes the campaign ad, the scholar who loves the mixtape, each one earns standing by refusing the border the gatekeepers drew. They value craft and they value reach, and the rare thing they prize above either is the man who has both at once. They value wit as the table’s hard currency, the fast line, the turned phrase, the joke that lands and then turns serious on the second beat. They hold a baseline politics, anti-racist, progressive, suspicious of propriety as a cover for power, and they treat profanity as a kind of honesty and decorum as a kind of lie. They love the cosign across a line, the White Jewish novelist with standing in a Black art form, the comedian trusted by the literary jury. They fear two things above the rest, irrelevance and phoniness, and a long career in this set is a long effort to stay loved by the crowd without losing the respect of the room.
Their hero system follows from that. The life that counts here is the life that reaches millions and keeps its craft, that does good with its platform and never goes precious. Jackson reading the lullaby in his weary growl is the set’s idea of heaven, the high gift and the mass audience folded into one performance. Mansbach writes a get-out-the-vote video and it moves voters, writes a pandemic public-service parody and Jackson reads it on Jimmy Kimmel, and the set counts this as the artist using his gift for the side of the good. The immortality they chase is cultural, the work taught in a hundred schools and quoted at a thousand midnight bedsides, the joke that outlives the joker. To matter to the culture and to the cause at the same time, that is the project. The man who reaches no one has wasted his gift. The man who reaches everyone and stands for nothing has sold it. The hero threads both.
The status games are where the set shows its real shape. Standing comes first from the double credential, the bestseller list and the prize together, and the harder trick of turning one into the other, which is the trick Mansbach has run for twenty years. It comes from the cosign, and the cosign is policed. Samuel L. Jackson reading your book, Killer Mike in your campaign video, Common in your film, these are not favors, they are transfers of standing from a figure the set reads as more authentic or more arrived. It comes from the room, from being the funniest man at the table, because wit here is the price of a seat and the slow man loses caste no matter his sales. It comes from the venue, the New Yorker byline, the Believer essay, the Moth stage, the Sundance fellowship, each a stamp the set recognizes. It comes from political use, the ad that worked, the Reed Award, the Gold Pollie. And it comes, more than the set likes to say aloud, from the race line and the right to stand on the far side of it. A White man who has earned a hearing in hip-hop holds a particular and fragile standing, and the set watches who claims that standing and how. Mansbach built his first novel, Angry Black White Boy (2005), out of that exact anxiety, the White kid who wants to be Black and exposes everyone by wanting it, and the set rewarded the book because it named the game the set itself plays.
Their normative claims come fast and firm. The artist should use his platform for justice. Profanity and irreverence tell the truth, and the institutions that frown on them deserve the mockery. Racism is the central American sin and fighting it is not optional. Humor that punches up is good and humor that punches down is bad, and the set enforces that rule with care. The personal should be told straight, grief and family and failure brought into the light rather than hidden, and the set holds Mansbach’s verse memoir about his brother’s suicide, I Had a Brother Once (2021), as a high moral act for that reason, the man saying the worst true thing instead of joking past it.
Their essentialist claims sit underneath the normative ones and argue with them. The set’s stated creed is that race is a performance and identity a construction, the lesson of Mansbach’s own first novel. The set’s working practice rewards the opposite. Authenticity here is treated as a real property a man has or lacks, a thing in his blood and his ear and his block, and the cosign exists because the set believes some people carry the real connection and some only borrow it. They hold that talent is real and that the in-group can tell good art from hack on sight. They hold that the comic sensibility is a form of intelligence, not a knack. They hold, when pressed, that certain people have a truer claim on certain art forms, which is the claim their official anti-essentialism denies. The set preaches that race is made and lives as if authenticity is born, and Mansbach’s whole position, the Newton Jew with a hearing in the culture, sits on that fault line and pays rent to both sides.
The moral grammar runs on solidarity and complicity. Good means standing with the marginalized, spending your power on them, telling the truth, staying funny, refusing to take yourself too seriously. Bad means punching down, selling out, going silent when you might speak, hoarding the credit, or turning precious. The cardinal sins are phoniness, hypocrisy, and racism, and the set can forgive a weak book faster than it forgives a phony one. Grace arrives as the laugh and the cosign and the shared byline, the writers’-room habit of crediting the collaborator, Zweibel and Barry on the cover, Robinson and Knight on the cover, the refusal to claim the whole win alone. Confession arrives as the personal essay and the memoir, the painful true thing told in public, which the set reads as the highest proof of seriousness. A man redeems himself by being good, being real, and being funny, and he falls by being exposed as fake or caught punching down.
The contradiction. The anti-elitism gets performed from the Columbia MFA and the New Yorker and the Netflix deal. The irreverence stops at the edge of the set’s own politics, where you may mock anyone except your own side. The rule against punching down gets written and enforced by people standing at the top of the cultural ladder. And the celebration of crossing the race line runs alongside an anxious watch over who may cross it. None of this makes the set cynical. It makes the set human, a group of gifted people who believe their taste is a conscience and who have built a world where being loved by the crowd and respected by the room and useful to the cause feel like the same virtue. Mansbach is the set’s representative man because he has spent a career proving the three can be one, and his brother’s grave is the place where that proof ran out and he had to tell the truth without the joke.
Adam Mansbach’s Voice: The Sampler’s Ear
Adam Mansbach came up as an MC and a DJ before he came up as a novelist, and the order shows in every sentence. He builds prose the way a producer builds a track. He takes a high phrase and a low phrase, a line of Columbia diction and a line off the corner, and he lays them over the same beat until they sound like one thing. He has named the method himself. He calls his writing a kind of sampling, a borrowing of many styles to make his own beat. The voice is the crossing.
Hear the diction first, because the diction is where the crossing happens fastest. Open Angry Black White Boy (2005) and the hero “fisted the wheel and swung his new yellow cab downtown,” and within a breath the prose names the venerable voice on the radio and the huge nonexistent things the boy loves, truth and revolution and the rest. The sentence holds a literary register and a street register at once and refuses to rank them. Mansbach reaches for the elevated word and the obscene word in the same clause, and the profanity is not there for shock. It is there for percussion. He sets it on the downbeat. The lullaby that made him famous works on the same principle, the soft nursery cadence built verse after verse and then the hard word dropped at the turn, the way a producer drops the bass after eight bars. He spends proper nouns like a man proving membership, the radio host, the station, the station’s tagline, each name a small credential laid down for readers who can read it, and a texture for the ones who cannot.
The syntax runs long and then snaps. He favors the roving sentence that gathers clauses and detours and cultural asides and then lands a joke or a reversal at the end, and critics have heard the hip-hop in it without always naming the source. One called the prose jazzy and penetrating and provocative. One said he writes like firecrackers. One heard buoyant rhythm under dark material. The rhythm is the engine. Internal rhyme surfaces in the heated passages, the break and the return, a jittery forward push that a reader feels before he parses it. The architecture borrows on purpose too. The race novel divides into sections that answer Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison, the homage worn on the sleeve, the sample cleared and credited. Mansbach treats the American canon the way he treats a crate of records, as material to flip.
The range is the real signature, and the memoir is the proof. A man can write hot and call it a voice when hot is all he has. Mansbach writes hot in the novels and clean in the essays and mock-solemn in the parodies and then, once, he writes cold. I Had a Brother Once (2021) sets down every device. The maximalism goes. The wordplay goes. He recounts his brother David’s suicide in long plain stanzas of free verse, anger and sorrow and confusion carried in flat declarative lines, and the flatness is the point. Listen to how he speaks about David and you hear the same instinct, the brother three years younger, the scientist in a family of word people, the man who wore shorts through the Boston winter and answered a feeling with a list of facts. Mansbach reports it. He does not perform it. The man whose gift is flash discovers that flash cannot carry the one thing, and he strips to the studs. The voice has a floor, and he found it once, and the finding is the most disciplined writing in the body of work.
The rhetoric serves a single conviction, that the joke can do moral work. He has said the conversation about race had stalled, that White people had stopped coming to the table, and that he built his satire to jumpstart the talk by force of humor and absurdity. Satire is his main instrument, and a reviewer caught the rule of it, that he is an equal-opportunity mocker, the blade swung at every side including his own. The comedy is a door. He gets a reader laughing so the reader walks in, and then he shuts the door and shows him the room. Direct address carries the load. The lullaby speaks to the child while the parent listens in. The campaign videos speak to the voter. The address presumes a shared exhaustion or a shared anger and folds the audience into it before the argument starts, so that agreement feels like recognition rather than persuasion. Under the laughter sits a plain moral claim, the one he states without a joke, that anger is a form of attention and that the man who feels none has stopped paying it.
His manner, the self he puts on the page and the stage, is fast and profane and learned and unwilling to be caught taking itself too seriously. He will name a genre and wave it off in the same sentence, a postmodern race novel if you will, the term offered and then undercut. He wears the reading lightly. The record-collector’s precision is in him, the exact years, the good labels, the bad sign of a string section, the connoisseur’s fluency carried as ordinary talk. He shares credit by habit, the co-authors on the cover, the collaborators named, the producer’s ethic that a track is a room full of people. He teaches with the same clarity, the instinct to meet a writer at the theory of his own project and improve that rather than replace it. The bearing is generous and quick and a little armored by wit, a man who has learned that the joke gets him through the door of every room, the literary jury and the hip-hop cipher and the synagogue and the campaign, and who treats the moving between those rooms as the natural condition rather than a trick.
The cost is the showiness, and the better critics named it early, the youthful flash, the rhyming runs that call attention to the hand that made them. The flash can tip into performance. The voice that crosses every line can sound, in its weaker passages, like a man crossing lines to be seen crossing them. He knows it. The clean expository Mansbach exists alongside the pyrotechnic one, the essayist who can lay out the birth of hip-hop in the Bronx in flat historical prose when the subject asks for it, which tells you the flash is a setting and not the only gear. And the cold Mansbach of the memoir is the answer to the charge, the writer who proved he could put the toys down when the subject would not survive them. The career reads as a long argument with his own facility, a man born with too much range learning, book by book, when to use all of it and when to use none.
December 1, 2008
I was sucked right in by Adam Mansbach‘s provocative new novel, "The End of the Jews."
Here’s part two of the interview.
The beginning of the book is good ol’ fashioned storytelling. It has the making of an epic, an up from poverty all-American novel about individual triumph through hard work.
Then the book takes a disconcerting turn. It’s no Triumph of the Will. It’s something much more true to life. It’s literature, not genre fiction. It’s an independent production, not a studio film.
I call Adam in San Francisco Monday morning. We talk for 90 minutes.
Luke: "When you were a kid, what did you want to be when you grew up?"
Adam, the eldest of two kids: "I wanted to be a writer."
"It was always pretty clear to me. I was always making up stories, making people take dictation for me before I could write. I have writers in my family. Nobody seemed to think it was that strange. It wasn’t until I was in graduate school that I was surrounded by people who were like having phone calls every day with their parents, ‘Why don’t you go to law school?’ ‘What’s this bulls— you’re going to do?’"
"My grandmother (Felicia Lamport) was a poet. My grandfather (Ben Kaplan) was a judge but he seemed always to be writing. He was a law professor first. He was known as a pretty great legal writer. My father (Charles Mansbach) is a journalist. He works at the Boston Globe. My mother (Nancy Mansbach), when they met, was a reporter. Her brother is a sportswriter."
"My earliest trajectory as a writer was poetry and lyrics. I was pretty serious about hip hop. I was an MC. Probably the first thing my parents saw me doing circa junior high was writing a lot of rhymes and performing them and recording them. They were perplexed by that because hip hop was not something they were too familiar with. Nobody was in 1987 aside from those committed to it. They appreciated that I was doing something artistic… Hip hop was very political at the time and they were able to make those connections. My father, being a journalist, had a collection of sixties paperbacks on his shelf. I’d be listening to Public Enemy and they’d mention Bobby Seal or Eldridge Cleaver and those were books that were in my house. I was able to make those connections and my parents saw it happening.
"My grandmother’s poetry was analogous. Her s— was satirical and pointed and political and it rhymed. Her wordplay was fantastic. She had a weekly column that was syndicated in a number of newspapers called, ‘The Muse of the Week in Review.’ She’d take classical forms, rewrite them, remix them, about current events. She did a famous piece called ‘The Love Song of R. Millhouse Nixon.’ She took [T.S.] Elliott and turned it on its head. ‘Do I dare them to impeach?’
"In a funny way, my grandmother’s writing was very similar to hip hop. It was rhythmic, it was rhyming. My family was able to see what I was doing without freaking out too much."
"I grew up in Newton, Massachusetts. It’s a close suburb to Boston. It’s pretty white, about 40% Jewish. The schools that I went to were fairly diverse, public schools that were part of the bussing program, which was Boston’s unilateral form of school integration. Boston’s a pretty segregated and racist city and it took about 20 years after Brown vs. the Board of Education to desegregate their schools and the way they did it was by bussing black kids from the inner city to suburban schools."
Luke: "Do you have a black accent?"
Adam: "You mean like Barack Obama or Colin Powell?"
Luke: "Umm, I don’t know how to say it. I’m sure there are right and wrong ways how to say it. Has anyone ever? I guess the polite term is urban. Has anyone ever said that to you? Maybe I’m totally out in left field."
Adam: "Yeah, every time I do any kind of public event, to a mostly white or Jewish audience, somebody asks me some kinda questions about the way I speak. I always try to get them to think a little bit critically about what it might mean to sound black or to sound Jewish or to sound urban because we tend to think monolithically about these things. Like anyone else, the way I speak is the some of various experiences and travels. So people always want to ask me that and sometimes they don’t know how to say it. They talk around it. Sometimes they come right out and say, ‘You sound black.’ My impulse is always to f— with people when they ask me that. I don’t know exactly what sounding black means. Who sounds quintessentially black? Jay Zee or Bill Cosby? It’s not a question I have a particularly good answer for except to wonder what it means."
Chaim Amalek emails: "Now who would you rather sound like, James Earl Jones (the voice of Darth Vader), or Woody Allen?"
Josh: he stresses certain consonants like the blacks do
Josh: the hyPOCrisy
Luke: "Barack Obama sometimes speaks differently to a black audience than a white audience. The intonation and accent he uses will change."
Adam: "Yeah, that’s very true. I think there are occasions with all of us, there are infinite variations with the way we present ourselves and speak. The funny thing is I try to sound… I’ve been doing these Jewish book fairs the past couple of months, and I’m certainly trying to come off, I’d really like to avoid that question because I’d like to talk about other s— at these festivals. I try to come off as straight forward. I try to sound as vocally uninteresting and undifferent as possible. I still get this question so maybe there are limits to the amount of control I have over this."
Luke: "At what age did you fall in love with blacks? Or did you?"
Adam: "I don’t fall in love with blacks. I don’t think that ever happened. I got into hip hop when I was about eleven, largely because it was articulating realities that I wasn’t seeing personally but that I knew were out there. It was talking about subjects that were taboo such as racism, police brutality, the inequality in the school systems. These were things I had seen a little bit but nobody I knew was talking honestly about. I was moved by the world-expanding nature of the music. That led me to explore other black cultural forms. When I was 14, I became friends with Delfeayo Marsalis, Branford and Wynton’s younger brother and a trombone player, he was friends with a teacher at my school who was a mentor of mine. He would come to town and I would hang out with him for the week and he would put me on all kinds of jazz which led me to writers like [Ralph] Ellison, Amiri Baraka (formerly Leroi Jones), [James] Baldwin.
"I don’t think per se that I ever fell in love with black people. I found inspiration in the art produced under such duress, art made by people who were profoundly marginalized, whose humanity was called into question, and who in some cases responded with works of astounding beauty, honesty and humanism, particularly somebody like Baldwin who was doubly marginalized by being gay and black.
"I started to notice a certain kind of hypocrisy, complacency on the part of a lot of the white kids and families that I was around. That pissed me off and it was more a desire to distance myself or to be critical in some way of white privilege than a desire to be black or falling in love with black people or black culture."
Luke: "Have you seen white people or Jews fall in love with blacks or black culture?"
Adam: "I don’t know. I don’t spend too much time ascribing motives to people for what they do. In the world of hip hop, there’s plenty of white people and there’s a predominant portion of them who are Jewish. Partly because hip hop is a New York-based form and partly because there are certain historical resonances between blacks and Jews that I try to explore in this book.
"The people I’m personally friends with who are white and are involved in some way with hip hop or black culture tend to have traveled a somewhat similar path where some form of black music and in this generation it’s generally going to be hip hop made them aware and critical of what it meant to be white in this country. It’s more of a critical response to whiteness than a falling in love with blackness.
"In this country there’s an enormous sense of voyeurism particularly around hip hop and the fetishization of black bodies, so on a larger level, there’s been a real split in this country where privilege is located. Traditional forms of privilege, economic privilege, has resided where it always has, but cultural privilege and cultural capital has increasingly been associated with blackness. There’s been a lot of confusion for young white kids in particular because they don’t understand that they’re still at the center. They turn on the TV and all of the most glamorous flashy conspicuous wealth they see is in rap videos. So they end up feeling like they don’t have a cultural identity and they’ve been marginalized and that black people are at the center of the universe. There’s a combination of desire and resentment that I’ve seen a lot when I’ve talked to some of these kids."
Adam graduated high school in 1994.
Luke: "What do Jews and blacks have in common in America?"
Adam: "Both groups are dealing with the after-effects of diaspora, whether in the case of blacks the legacy and horrors of slavery and in the case of Jews they kind of repeated banishments from the different countries in Europe. Both groups come to America under a kind of duress that I think is unique. In both groups there is a sense that identity is a multi-faceted and complicated thing. There are wide margins in both communities. For Jews it’s this conflation of ethnicity, religion, culture, history. There are many ways to feel Jewish and also many ways to feel marginal and push away from the core of the Jewish community. You’ve got Jews who say s— like, ‘I’m Jewish but I’m well Buddhist.’ Or people who connect ethnically but not religiously. There is a sense of double consciousness, a sense of being part of a community but also being distant or alienated.
"The same is true for blacks. There’s an essentialization of what it means to be black. An identity that doesn’t fit for a lot of people. There is also the double consciousness inherent to black life in America where you are aware of both yourself and the other, where you’re unseen in the white world and able to gain a certain perspective on it."
"There’s been a progressive alliance, a civil rights alliance, a lot of history of artistic interplay, whether it is jazz in the twenties where Fletcher Henderson is writing all of the arrangements for Benny Goodman’s band. In the 1930s, the Duke Ellington Band got pulled off a train in Germany and harassed by all these Nazi soldiers and they kept calling jazz ‘nigger Jew music.’
"There are great letters between [Ralph] Ellison and [Saul] Bellow. Some of this stuff Bernard Malamud said about wanting to be seen as a writer and not a Jewish writer, wanting to be allowed to speak universally instead of for his marginalized group. It was identical almost to the stuff Frederick Douglass was saying 90 years earlier. And then all the way up to the breakdown of that civil rights alliance in the 1980s. It’s been a subject of conversation even in this presidential race with Obama talking about how he wants to repair relationships in the black and Jewish communities. He was asked to distance himself from Louis Farrakhan. It’s a rich and interesting history, really collaborative at points and tense and fraught at others, particularly in the eighties. These comments that people like Farrakhan, Jackson, Sharpton made have been frozen in amber by the older Jewish generation as a reason for a pullback emotionally and practically from the civil rights alliance of the sixties.
"I think it has to do with Jewish assimilation, a desire to change bedfellows… If you ask a room full of Jewish people over 50 about Jesse Jackson, they’ll all go, ‘He called New York Hymietown in 1983.’ Well, what has he done since then, anything? I’m more disturbed that Jesse Jackson called New York ‘hymietown’ in 1983 is so fixed and central to Jewish memory than the fact that he said it. It implies a lot of things that I’m not too happy about."
"I’d like to be able to say that Jews have more progressive attitudes [than regular white folk] but I don’t know that that is the case. Certainly that was an issue in this election. The New York Times did a good job of going to Florida and finding Jews who were horrifyingly racist and saying ridiculous things. I’d like to think that that is out of the mainstream but it is hard for me to tell. It’s more of a generational thing than anything else."
I ask Adam if he thinks Barack Obama would’ve been elected president if he were white.
Adam: "I have no way of answering that question."
Luke: "How have blacks reacted to your interest in their culture?"
Adam: "Pretty well. I’ve never really had any problems doing what I do. The only people who seem to have a problem with it are white people."
"Anybody who navigates black culture with a sense of respect, a sense of the history, awareness of the tremendous legacies of exploitation and cooption, is usually welcomed. Expectations of white people in black culture are so low, there’s such an expectation that they will act like assholes, that anyone who doesn’t is welcomed probably more than they should be."
Luke emails: Pendergast seems to play for Tristan what Jews have done for blacks — blaze the trail, fund the NAACP, etc…and blacks resent Jews for this for the same reason Tristan resents Pendergast — not for doing too little but for doing too much.
It’s human nature to resent those who help us.
What do you think?
Adam replies:
Interesting. I think there’s some truth to the notion, in the abstract, that we resent those who help us – if the help is condescending, comes from self-interest, etc. Not categorically. In terms of blacks and Jews, it doesn’t ring particularly true to me. First of all, I question the assumption that blacks (who, of course, cannot be spoken of monolithically) resent Jews. What is the evidence of this as a tendency prevalent enough to dwell on? In my personal life, in which I interact with blacks and Jews more than any other groups of people, I hardly ever see it; if anything, being Jewish gives you an alternate identity to being white, creates a point of connection: you know, bigots hate you both, that kind of thing.
Secondly, even if we do accept the notion, I don’t think the facts support it: what is the "too much" Jews have done? How can anyone have done "too much" when structural racism remains a fact of American life, from judicial bias to the recent Princeton study indicating that a black job applicant has the same chances of being granted an interview as a white felon? No, I think any resentment stems from the more obvious reasons: a Jewish pullback from the progressive alliance, and old resentments of the kinds created by proximity and changing group fortunes (like the notion of Jews as slumlords, in the first chapter of my book, when Tristan goes to Harlem). I think that when you see conspiracy theories about the influence and power of Jews (in government, in the media) from segments of the black community, this is in large part code for "you assimilated into the mainstream and turned your backs on us – and your assimilation relied on your "otherness" playing off of ours, being more mutable than ours." And I see some truth in that. To connect to something I was saying earlier: 25 years after the "Hymietown" remark, for which he’s apologized repeatedly, after which he’s done major outreach to the Jewish community, Jesse Jackson remains a pariah to many Jews. Meanwhile, the ADL accepts Mel Gibson’s half-assed, incoherent apology, and rabbis line up to meet with him. To me, the deeper story is that keeping Jesse or Sharpton or Farrakhan’s old comments alive well past their expiration date helps to creating excuses for a practical, financial, emotional connection to black people, through the whipped-up specter of black anti-Semitism.
As far as Pendergast, Tristan’s resentment is complicated, but he’s actually happy to accept the benefits of Pendergast’s meddling; it’s the reasons behind them, and the implicit acceptance of Pendergast as an artistic equal, that rankle him. He’s pissed off, on some level, that this guy is even in a position to help him, is venerated as a writer, etc. And he suspects impure, selfish motives for the help, suspects that Pendergast is really reinforcing the differences between them… which, again, I think is usually at the heart of resentments toward those who help us.
Luke: "How did your white peers react to your interest in black culture?"
Adam: "They were the ones who gave me s— about it. They were the ones who wanted to make fun of me and let me know that they thought this was strange. A lot of kids in junior high called me "Mansblack." When some of the black kids I was hanging out with, some of the black mentors I had in high school, heard that they called me that, they thought it was hilarious and they started calling me that. What started out as a derisive nickname became a symbol of acceptance by this other community.
"This abuse was pretty minor. I don’t want to give the impression that I suffered greatly from my junior high classmates. I was somebody who didn’t care much what they thought and I realized quickly that I’d be somebody who’d navigate different worlds. More often than anything else, I was asked to play the role of a cultural translator. There are a lot of white people who are intrigued by other cultures but don’t want to approach somebody from that culture and ask them but will approach this crossover white boy. I’ve become used to fielding questions from white people about black culture. Sometimes it would be ridiculous. ‘Adam, why is the black community so angry?’"
Luke: "What has been your attitude towards the Jewish tradition?"
Adam: "I was raised by very secular parents who were the children of very secular parents. We didn’t go to synagogue. Out of a vague feeling that I should know something about Judaism, they sent me to a Jewish Sunday school at a junior college. I got kicked out of that school because I had this overtly racist old teacher who I got into big confrontations with. It came to a head when I sang ‘Living on a Prayer’ into a microphone at a school assembly instead of the prayer I was supposed to read.
"Because the community I was growing up in was pretty Jewish, I conflated Jewish with white as a kid. I was very critical about what whiteness meant, the historic economic social and judicial privilege of whiteness. I didn’t want much to do with either one of those traditions. It wasn’t until I got to college that I started thinking more deeply about what it meant to be Jewish, what the unique strains of that tradition looked like in terms of religion and culture and also a tradition of progressiveness and social justice.
"It was in the course of writing ‘The End of the Jews’, I worked on the book for about seven years, that I started thinking more deeply and in a sustained way about Jewishness… How was I to understand my grandfather? Part of understanding him was understanding that religion. I set out to write a book about his generation and mine."
Luke: "One thing that struck me with your book. There’s the title ‘The End of the Jews.’ Then I read the book and none of the characters have much of an interest in the Jewish tradition."
Adam: "Yeah. That’s true. Everybody in the book is relatively secular… One of the things I tried to deal with in the book is how identity for all of these characters is constantly in flux. At times the characters wield Jewish identity as a weapon and at times they try to distance themselves from it. For Tristan, being Jewish is central to his life and writing, but in a way that is particular to him and doesn’t have much to do with religion. As he goes through various stages of being accepted and rejected by the Jewish community and is asked in various ways to adopt the mantle of a Jewish writer, it emerges as something important to him…"
Luke: "I was struck by how all the protagonists in the book work hard at their heart yet they expend no serious effort to grapple with their tradition. They don’t try to learn Hebrew or study Talmud or live in Israel. They don’t work at it one tenth as much as their art."
Adam: "Yeah… The people who live on the margins and who don’t want to come into the fold, those are the ones who become artists. The position engenders a lot of perspective and a lot of pain and it gets channeled into art. You look at the pantheon of 20th Century Jewish-American writers (Bernard Malamud, Alfred Kazin, Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, Woody Allen, Lenny Bruce), you see people who occupy those margins. It’s the tortured relationship to the religion and to everything else…that allows people the space and the energy to create art. It might be to work against the tradition, to define the tradition for themselves, but it’s probably not going to come from these traditional forms of identification."
Luke: "Do you feel obligations to the Jewish tradition?"
Adam: "What do you mean?"
Luke: "You may not eat shrimp because you feel obliged, you may have an instinctive protective reaction towards Israel, you may feel obliged to know some Yiddish or Hebrew, do you feel commanded in any way by any part of the Jewish tradition?"
Adam: "The way you phrase it is interesting and is making me unsure of how to answer it. I wouldn’t say that I feel commanded. I’m having trouble working out the idea of being commanded by a tradition as opposed to being commanded by something in yourself that seeks knowledge or inclusion or something. There are things I react to in a certain way because I’m Jewish, because my entire family is Jewish, because most of them got wiped out in the Holocaust, but the thing I connect to most strongly is not a prohibition against eating shrimp and certainly not a desire to protect Israel uncritically, to me the crux of the tradition, or the crux of what connect with, is the notion of questioning. The notion that the Jewish tradition is one of constantly discussing, arguing, trying to resolve the unresolvable."
Luke: "Challenging the status quo."
"What have you loved and hated dealing with the Jews once this book came out?"
Adam: "I feel most frustrated by the way most events are a smokescreen for getting young Jews together to marry each other and have Jewish babies…
"If you are convening a panel to talk about community service or Jewish books, those topics…shouldn’t be an excuse to get this population in a room to meet each other. It’s been frustrating for me to be invited to some of these events…
"Some of my frustrations mirror some of the characters frustrations in the book. The idea that one is always supposed to lead with religion and is reducible to it and should only be concerned with, ‘What’s good for the Jews?’
"I’ve been struck by the conservatism and defensiveness and skepticism of the older Jewish generation when the topic turns to things like black-Jewish relations. It’s probably stupid of me to go to a JCC and speak to a bunch of people in their seventies and eighties about Jewish disinvestment from the civil rights movement and how it is time to get over being mad at Farrakhan… Someone will raise their hand and say, ‘What about Jeremiah Wright?’ I will say, ‘What about Jeremiah Wright?’
"’Well, he said some anti-semitic things.’ I’ll be like, ‘What did he say?’ And no one would be able to answer. And I’d start to realize that in the imagination of this audience any black leader who said anything controversial and was in hot water must automatically be anti-semitic. You can feel frustrated when you put together a talk and people are only interested in finding out why you talk the way you do."
Luke: "How much of a driving force in your life is the desire to affect social change?"
Adam: "It’s a big desire. One of the struggles of writers is to justify what we do. Writing books take a lot of time, time spent in a room alone, and in a way it’s one of the most self-indulgent things you can do. If you care about social change, and you want to be a writer, you have to think that your books can play a role. It’s something I struggle with — should I be in this room writing this book or should I be knocking on doors and handing out flyers and organizing marches. The writing always wins out."
I read Adam these excerpts of an essay on blacks and Jews by an academic historian and Orthodox Jew, Edward S. Shapiro:
…If support for blacks is an ineluctable result of Jewish values, then one would expect that the most Jewish of American Jews — the Orthodox of Brooklyn — would be the most sympathetic towards blacks. The exact opposite, however, is true. Secure in their Jewish identity, they do not require close relations with blacks to define it. Their Jewishness rests on more substantial grounds.
…If the most Jewish of Jews are the least receptive to blacks, the Jews most supportive of blacks have often been alienated from Jewish culture and religion. (pg. 240)
…Jews needed blacks to authenticate their image of themselves as liberals, but blacks did not need Jews to authenticate their image of themselves as blacks. (Pg. 243)
Blacks have resented Jews not because they did not do enough for them but because they did too much. (Pg. 244)
In academia there is not one black scholar, apart from Julius Lester, a convert to Judaism, whose major field of interest is Jewish studies.
Adam: "I think it’s interesting. There are a couple of logical fallacies.The first is cause and effect. If the least Jewish of Jews are the most likely to be receptive to blacks, what is the cause and what is the effect?"
"The writer is defining Judaism as a matter of adherence to religion and to traditional ritual. It would not be a definition accepted by the people he’s talking about. He’s bringing a set of assumptions that the people he’s trying to analyze would object strongly to."
"What makes one group of Jews more Jewish than another group?"
Luke: "Do you think the Orthodox are more Jewish than you?"
Adam: "They’re certainly more religious than me. I couldn’t be less interested in deciding who’s more religious or claiming any level of Jewishness and asserting my right to be as Jewish as somebody else… Everybody in my family is Jewish and my blood is as Jewish as their’s. I’m not religious in the ways they would define it. They would probably view me as not Jewish.
"I can’t walk through an Orthodox neighborhood without thinking about whether I am being viewed as Jewish or not. Rather than think about the people I’m looking at, I’m thinking about what they would think of me. That’s the case for most secular Jews. Our judgments of the Orthodox end up getting deflected by our assumptions of their opinions of us."
Adam mentions his secular writer-friends such as Peter Orner, Sam Lipsyte, T Cooper, Keith Gessen, Darrin Strauss, Lauren Grodstein, Danny Hoch, Elisa Albert). "They are also publishing works considered Jewish literature. ‘The End of the Jews’ is my third novel but it is the first time somebody put me in the category of Jewish writer. I doubt that Sam Lipsyte does a lot of Jewish writer gigs."
"This time out of the box I’m doing these talks at synagogues. The Jewish community didn’t ask me to come talk about ‘Angry Black White Boy,’ my previous novel. Even though I’ve written a book on topics related to Judaism, I’m pretty sure they won’t invite me when my next book is published.
"A.J. Jacobs did a lot of Jewish-related stuff with The Year of Living Biblically, but I doubt he was doing it before that.
"Peter Orner did a bunch of [Jewish] stuff with his first book, but when his novel came out, his phone stopped ringing with Jewish programmers on the other end. T. Cooper did some Jewish book fairs for his last novel, but for his first one, nothing. T. and I co-edited a book of short stories, A Fictional History of the United States With Huge Chunks Missing (Akashic, 2006). That’s two Jewish writers co-editing a book of short stories with a decent number of Jewish writers in it but it wasn’t directed at or made visible to Jewish communities, so there was nothing.
"It seems to be on a book-by-book basis that the Jewish community on a formal level, the Jewish book circuit, the synagogues, the JCCs, there doesn’t seem to be a sustained interest in the careers of young Jewish writers except when those writers are talking about Jewish subjects."
Luke: "When you encounter somebody who says, ‘I’m a proud Jew,’ what do you think?"
Adam: "I don’t think I’ve encountered people who say that… I’m frustrated with the way that Judaism has been marketed. You go to these festivals marketed at young people and there’s all this ‘rah-rah, It’s cool to be Jewish’ stuff going on. ‘You should be proud to be Jewish. Jewish is cool.’ Why should it be cool? Cool shouldn’t enter into it. It’s a flimsy reason for wanting to do anything. If it’s cool this year, then almost by definition that means it is not cool next year. You’re talking about a fashion statement or an album. For me it would depend on what that pride is based on. If it is based on somebody telling you it is cool to be Jewish, then it is meaningless. If it is based on something more deeply felt, deeply understood, deeply studied connection with the religion or culture, then great. I’d also ask, is this the only thing you are proud of? Is it the only element of your identity?
"How does that pride translate? How does being Jewish inform the way you see yourself in the world?"
We talk about the absence of black scholar in Jewish Studies departments.
Adam: "The scholars I know who are black and do stuff that is totally unconnected to blackness are constantly having to answer for it. A good friend of mine is at Yale Divinity School. His work is on Kant and Erasmus. He constantly has to explain why a 38-year old black man studies those things."
Luke: "There seems to be much more of an eager need on the part of some Jews to be embraced by blacks than blacks feel to be embraced by Jews."
Adam: "Not necessarily."
"Jews are a sub-set of white people. They are seen in the world predominantly as white and have the privileges endemic to that. That has to do with validation that semantically divorces you from privilege so you don’t have to feel guilty. If black people accept you, then you don’t have to grapple with what it means to have all these unearned inherited privileges granted to you by society. That’s been the dynamic of my generation, the hip hop generation, that constant affirmation from black people…is a way to divorce yourself from privilege instead of confronting it and seeing how it might be dismantled."
"I can’t even tell you how many black Jew-aphiles I know, how many black friends I have who said, ‘I wanted to be Jewish when I grew up.’"
Luke: "Is there anything about your new book that I should’ve asked you and haven’t asked you?"
Adam: "Probably. It’s always interesting to me that any time I get talking to somebody ostensibly about my book, particularly someone smart and interesting like yourself, we always end up totally far afield. Sometimes I yearn to talk about craft and sentence structure and the book itself in some sustained way instead of using it as a point of departure for a whole other conversation."
