Joshua Cohen is an author of both novels and non-fiction. This interview was conducted on March 7, 2021.
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I want this to be a conversation. I know every interviewer says that, but especially because I just released my first book and I've been on the other side of …
… which I've read. I read about 50 pages of it before yesterday and then yesterday I read all of it.
Oh, no shit.
Yeah, well, I mean, you were like, “Let's kind of do it in a both-ways thing,” and I was like, Oh fuck, I gotta finish this thing. So I read it and I loved it. I mean, I know I'm probably the best audience for it because I know nothing about Marvel. He's just the guy whose name I heard of. And so, in that sense, it's like, you gotta convince me. And you did.
That was the goal.
Yeah, for me, it's like, picking up a book like … I lived for a while in this very odd apartment in Poland, and the only book the person had left behind that was in German was a biography of [former Polish president] Lech Wałęsa’s, like, father, or Lech Wałęsa's. family. But not him. So I’d heard of Lech Wałęsa and I was like, I'll read it, but I was like, it's not about him, it's about his family. And so it was the only book I could read, ’cause I can't read Polish but I can read German. I was there for a month, so I read this book three times. And I felt like in that same situation of like, this person's gotta convince me, and you did.
Thank you. I really appreciate that. My great handicap, mentally, is I hate that I don't know how to be a novelist. A novelist of research like yourself. I write non-fiction because I just get too intimidated by the idea of trying to convince people of things that didn't actually happen. So I suppose a lot of that, me sending you things of myself, was a little bit of neurosis of 'I have to prove myself to this guy.' But also I thought it would be good for the convo, so I'm glad you liked it.
It's a really novelistic biography.
Well, that's what I wanted to do. Because, look, like I said, that's my big Napoleon complex, something, I don't know, inferiority complex, of wanting to write something like that, but in non-fiction.
In that same way that — and this is probably a stupid comment, because again, I don't really know the territory, and because I don't know the territory, I don't know how interesting it's going to be for your readers or for people who come to it who really know that really knows this world — the only comparanda that I can really think of that I know is the Chabon book.
Kavalier and Clay.
Right. Novels have this — especially historical novels — have this problem that they're written by novelists who might know how to write novels, and certainly Chabon knows how to write a novel, but then it's like, what do I do with the research or with the facts that I think are interesting? There are a lot of times that books can seem like, you can take a pen and circle and say, "Here's the Wikipedia graft. Here's where the skin of Wikipedia was grafted onto this fictional body.” And the truth is that more and more, especially as we're reading books written in the time of the internet, you could spot that a mile away. And I think another writer can spot that a mile away. But the way in which that stuff actually sits well on the page, all those really interesting facts and digressions, is in nonfiction that has a novelistic rhythm to it. Because then it doesn't seem like these are bodies that are grafted on, they seem like they are in fact the body itself.
Right. That's my cheat. You're describing it as a virtue, but for me, it always feels like a cheat. It's the old line from Glengarry Glen Ross, "just tell the truth, it's the easiest thing to remember." If you stick to what's there, then you can tell the story. As long as it's an interesting story. But anyway, The Netanyahus: I really liked and it was funny that it came right when it did because I was in the middle of reading Zakhor, the Yosef Haim Yerushalmi book/essay/collection of lectures. Have you read that?
Oh yeah. There's a whole lot of Zakhor-parody in The Netanyahus.
Yeah, it's very funny. That was the thing. I was reading it and I was like, "I bet you he's riffing on Zakhor." Especially given you have the Harold Bloom stuff at the end and he wrote that introduction for Zakhor. Happy coincidence. We keep having these happy coincidences. Like, me picking up your The Book of Numbers right when, like the main character in that one, my own book got delayed because of a national disaster — COVID, in my case. I read Moving Kings while I was moving and pondering the fate of Zionism. It just keeps happening. Let me whip up some of the questions or topics that I put together so I can stop spinning around in circles.
No, we can talk about Yerushalmi, too, and whatever you want to talk about.
I would love to talk about Yerushalmi. I love his idea of Jewish historical study as the faith of fallen Jews because, from a narcissistic perspective, that's absolutely … “It me,” as they say on Twitter. I don't have the background of practice when it comes to Jewish life that much. I mean, I grew up in suburban Illinois. My dad is from here in Providence, but he got a job in Chicago right before I was born. So when I was a kid, I was raised in Illinois. I became a bar mitzvah and everything and went to Hebrew school, but it's such a classic Millennial Reform Jewish story: I pretty much just dropped it all once I was in high school or so. And in the past few years, I've really become this sort of secular baal teshuva and dived in and had this become — “this” being the writing miasma that is Jewish Studies or Jewish topics — has been a fixation for me. And I keep coming back to the historical narratives. That's just what … At my public high school, I did a lot of work in the history department because we had this award-winning history department. So that's just sort of my love language. And coming toward the topic of Jewishness, I keep coming to these historical narratives and getting frustrated that I don't know everything. And while reading Zakhor and reading The Netanyahus, I kept thinking of how that's my — not to get too mythological about it — but that's my Jewish yearning. I don't have the tools to be able to decipher Jewish "religious" texts in the same way that I can with historical texts because I've studied history, I know how to read that stuff. And I don't know, you say that there's a lot of parody of Zakhor in there. What do you think of the idea of historical study of Jewish stuff as the faith of fallen Jews?
When I say there was parody of Yerulshami, of Zakhor, it's more like the novelistic approach of me channeling Benzion Netanyahu's mockery of Zakhor. I think that to someone like Benzion Netanyahu — not a friend of mine, not someone I knew, I know people who knew him, but I'm speculating, but really — I think to most revisionists, historians, Revisionists with the big "R", but a little bit with the little r, historians, I think that they essentially reached Benzion's … that Yerushalmi essentially reached Benzion in a Revisionist point of view in a pretty roundabout way. I think any Revisionist would essentially say, "Of course it's immaterial whether history is a Jewish thing or not, the point is that whoever is in power gets to write it. And whoever gets to write it, needs to write it in a way that continues their power.” Right? And that this idea that this history was anathema to Jewish people was exactly the problem. And that the more that a certain history, a certain history, was insisted upon as an unbroken sort of history, and the more that you bring the religious interpretation of time into a secular interpretation of history, the greater chances you have of reinforcing your political power. This idea of eternality. The idea of the calendar as eternity's microcosm, that every year, the same holidays repeat. That community life, that the rituals in community life create the calendar and kind of immerse everyone in a perpetual religious present. Constantly reliving the Exodus from Egypt, constantly marking the regalim, when you would go to the Temple, even though there was no Temple: these things create a people. And if we can translate these religious notions of time and these religious notions of eternality of time into the political realm, you essentially have a deathless nation-state. And so I think that, from a Revisionist point of view, Yerulshami was a poet, or was poetic, but blanched before the political implications of his thesis.
Interesting.
There's not much politics in that book.
In Zakhor?
Yeah.
No. Israel sort of pops up one or two times briefly, but no, it's not about politics, really.
It pops up, especially one time when the man relays a story, the kibbutz. Where essentially the way Israel is a perversion of this notion of diasporic eternality. And certainly, that would not have been Benzion's position.
The return to history is so key to a lot of understandings of why Zionism seemed necessary. But I guess that's not universally agreed upon. I mean, it's interesting to think about this idea that history is not only something that is not a concern, but also anathema to Jewish thought for so many centuries. I recall, early on in my recent Jewish awakening, just assuming, Oh, there must be a ton that I can dive into about certain eras and I'm just not hearing about it because I'm uneducated. As opposed to the fact that there's sort of a deliberate burying, either for political/nationalist ends or just the idea that the history doesn't really matter. Obviously, Jewish history, you can learn it, but the fact that I wasn't learning it that much as a child or even as an adult, I've learned to be somewhat forgiving of myself, because that's sort of a political project or also just sort of part of something kind of baked in, as Yerulshami says, to that idea of the calendar and memory and the fact that we don't have a Hebrew word for history, we just have blah blah blah. We're getting kind of heavy here. I want to ground us a little bit more. What's interesting, also, speaking of history, about the Netanyahu situation in time, it being 1959, is you have this era when a Jewish professor at a liberal arts college is hosting an Israeli professor and he doesn't have to hear anything about the Palestinians. There are no discussions of Palestinians in any kind of great detail. They're just a complete non-entity. I don't really have a question there, I just found it fascinating. Was that part of what appealed to you to about looking at this period, this kind of interzone before the '67 war where American Jewish conceptions of Israel haven't really cohered necessarily? Or were they more coherent? I don't know. I can rephrase the question.
I can answer what interested me.
Yeah, go ahead. That's always the best way to go.
Look, I wanted to write something about campus politics today. And I didn't want to write directly about them because that's the first step to having someone shut the book on you. Right? And so one of these stories that I had gotten about Benzion Netenyahu, it was a tiny anecdote and it was pretty funny to me. But I thought it contained a little bit of sex. And I thought it contained a little bit of ideological suspicion — especially, you know, this is the McCarthy era, or a little bit after the McCarthy era. And so I thought a combination of the Red Scare hangover with a little bit of sexual politics and reckoning was maybe the right place to do it. I find what's most interesting is to me at least when it comes to the question of Palestinians, when it comes to the question of Israel/Palestine, it's really the Israelis who bring it up in the book. And if you want to go even farther than that, it's not even the Israelis who bring it up, it's the German emigre to Palestine to Israel who brings it up in the recommendation letter for Benzion. The guy who writes the long thing that basically explains Jabotinsky and explains the Revisionists and the way they're fomenting these anti-Arab riots and their racist policies and so on and so forth. So for me, the role of Palestinians in the book is really to be a concern of what you would consider a liberal European, y’know, mamash Ashkenaz intellectual.
A yekke.
Totally. So that, to me, that's sort of the role. That wouldn't have been something brought up by an administrator at an upstate college.
No. I am not as much of an expert as I should be on exactly all the currents that lead you to the place where we are now, but it is such a stark contrast that now that's the only thing that gets talked about on campus. But also, when you say in the book it's the Israeli that's bringing up the Palestinians, today, you have this world where ... Good luck finding an Israeli who wants to talk to you about Palestinians at all. It's become this complete … Not just verboten, it's almost like it doesn't … It's the Big Other obviously, it's always there. I went to Israel/Palestine/West Bank, etc in 2017 in this solo trip that stirred up a lot for me. What was interesting was that I kept trying to talk to Israelis about the Palestinians and the conflict and nobody wanted to talk about it. And not only that, not only did they not want to talk about it, they thought I was just some dumb rube for wanting to discuss it. Not my political views. I wasn't even expressing any political views. I was there as a journalist. But they were rolling their eyes like, "Ok, another fucking American wants to talk about Palestinians." And I guess that was a consequence of Bibi and the Second Intifada. We just sort of stopped having these discussions.
For a lot of people, yeah, Netanyahu, Bibi Netanyahu has taken the place of the Palestinians in the domestic discussion. And so he's kind of like the synecdoche or mnemonic device for discussing it. One of the things that I was really thinking about is, now Netanyahu has become the longest-serving prime minister in the history of his country and there's a way in which I think, from reading history, that so much of history is a collapsing of small acts or small events that essentially accrue to different people's spiritual ledgers, let's say. And in a lot of ways, Netanyahu has become this magnet for all thoughts of Israel's ultimate success and all thoughts of Israel's ultimate failure. And in a way, Netanyahu's entire reign almost presents the Israeli question, the Jewish question of Israel, as a choice between the wild success of Israel as this military/technological ...
Now economic.
Economic powerhouse. And on the other hand, more than ever, an apartheid state. And I think it's the idea that this is the choice that really expresses the extremities of emotions that Israelis feel with Netanyahu. So to talk about Netanyahu, to get Carveresque about it, what we talk about when we talk about Netanyahu is we talk about Palestine. And so in a way, I found in my own reporting over there, when I've done that, the way to get people to talk about the situation, as they call it, is to bring up Netanyahu. Because there you have the entire history after the entire Second Intifada.
And the whole history of Israel in some ways. Did you read the Anshel Pfeffer bio of Bibi? He situates it as, yeah, he was born in '49 and his whole arc is that arc of Israel’s history, in some ways. Or at least one of the many arcs of the country.
Yeah, sure, but one of his own personal arcs was trying to convince people that he wasn't American. That he was really Israeli. And, not only that, but that he was almost a non-Ashkenazi Israeli. I mean, the degree to which he attempted to kind of pervert his own sense of identity and also rewrite it, not just for public consumption, but for himself. And to rewrite his father's place in the country's history and the way that he was almost forced — and in this sense I have sympathy for him — forced to trade on his brother's legacy. All that. All of that really speaks to a person who is very adept at self-preservation. But to the point where he loses a core.
It's all PR.
And really, I wanted to read him in the same way that I think Trump can be read in a certain way. As this sort of son, as an eternal son, of a father for whom nothing was good enough. I think the difference really is, with Bibi, that's really the return of the repressed, because Benzion was exiled/self-exiled, unemployable, had the kind of ambition that would never have been satisfied with anything. But beyond that, had put himself in a politically untenable position. And look, during the two most important events of Jewish history of the last half millennium, which is the foundation state of Israel in '48 and the Holocaust, Benzion Netanyahu is not in a concentration camp in Poland, nor was he in Palestine fighting. He was in suburban Philadelphia. It was that total sense of being out of history and the rage occasioned within him.
It's not exactly like the classic thing of a dictator often coming from the imperial periphery, but it's not wildly dissimilar. I mean, I'm not calling Bibi Hitler, but Hitler's Austrian, Stalin's Georgian — and Bibi is, in a lot of ways, American.
Yeah, I think for this, it's that feeling of, his father comes from Poland, but really has a headstart on a lot of academics, at least who begin coming into Hebrew University in the '20s and '30s, when it was founded. And he's a person who speaks better Hebrew, reads better Hebrew, is much more acclimated to this new country, but every year, the best faculties of Europe kind of stream in and he finds himself farther and farther away from his goal of just getting a decent academic appointment there. In a way, it's this interesting thing that we have here. The immigrants are taking away all the jobs. But it's different when...it's this sense there that it's different because it's the faculties of Friedrich Wilhelm University are coming in to take away all the jobs. But the truth is, that nationalist feeling was the same. And the nationalist feeling was the same and really in order to deal with that resentment, with that pure, pure resentment and that sense of entitlement, his ideology, his editorializing, and his polemics became more and more severe to the point where he essentially faced the choice to become a terrorist. And so, what I kind of enjoyed was putting a person like that into an academic setting. Especially a person who's an expert on the Inquisition, in a setting of interrogation by a university interview department. I mean, when these guys are talking about Bolsheviks, he's essentially saying, "No, I've met real Bolsheviks. Real Bolsheviks. People who've killed people." And I think that that part of the idea of finding a real ideologue on an American campus — meaning someone who really is ready to lead — read some pages of a newspaper or not, he still had his Jabotinsky ties. There were people on the streets. Someone who's ready to say, "Yes, we will spill blood for this. We're ready for this."
I haven't actually read Benzion's work. What do you make of Benzion's actual work on the Inquisition?
I mean, I think it's … from how I can evaluate it, I can really only go on whatever people in the field kind of think.
Sure, but it's more than I know, so what do you think?
I think that he's seen as a very, very eccentric figure. He's seen as someone who's kind of … His point is essentially: “I'm looking at sources that previous scholars had overlooked or had never really been able to access linguistically or through some prejudice, never really looked at.” What I think is that he is a master rhetoritician. I mean, he knows how to persuade. He is a great, great polemicist. I think that he martials a huge amount of facts to reach these preordained conclusions. And the sheer doggedness in which he pursues a lot of these associations or links in his research — talking about blood libels one moment, talking about the inquisition tribunals, and other moment, talking about the relationships between the monarchy and the nobility, between the nobility and the peasant class, his almost repurposing of Marxist political analysis for opposite — is all masterful. I think, at the end of the day, he was trying to come up with a historical justification for an ethno-nation-state. To which I would answer, if you want an ethno-nation-state, you’d better get a military, and it helps to have a nuclear program, too. I think there's something that I find poignant about someone who needs to really manufacture an intellectual basis for something like this. Certainly, the people who were fighting on the front lines weren't so concerned with having an intellectual justification for their efforts. But this was a person who was not acting out of total desperation in terms of, he wasn't fighting for survival. He was someone who knew he had the leisure to create the intellectual justification for those fighting for survival.
And as Pfeffer says — I was just going through the biography and pulling out some quotes there — in the space Benzion occupied outside the Zionist mainstream, Bibi Netanyahu's Israel was built. It's emphasizing this idea that he couldn't be a part of the front lines because, in a lot of ways, Benzion was geographically and ideologically marginalized. So of course you can retreat to intellectualism.
And he was also too old to fight.
That too.
There's a gift that's hard for people to see as a gift. There's a gift given to certain writers, especially when they're left out of history. Because it certainly feels like a death sentence, I think, but what they're being given is an opportunity in which they can … They're given a neglected corner in which to write. And they're also given an anger, or an opportunity for anger, or to repurpose their anger and resentment into a goad toward writing. Anger becomes the goad — if not the subject, too. I think they're constantly seeing people doing things from a periphery. To throw a question back to you is, what's interesting to me is, on one hand, we have an intellectual who is putting together what he considers to be an airtight case for the necessity of a Jewish nation-state. But it's attempting to use facts to justify something entirely fantastical, almost. And then you have you writing about people who write comic books, who are creating these fantasies of triumphalism or victory, let's say, out of positions of weakness or at least perceived cultural outsiderness. And I was wondering, do you feel like these projects of imagining immense strength or laying the groundwork for immense strength [in superhero comics], are somehow related?
Certainly that's what a lot of the Chabonites would say. And I love Kavalier and Clay and I love that it started, or at least brought into the mainstream this discussion of, “Ok, what are the Jewish aspects of this genre that means so much to us?” And it's only become more relevant as the superhero genre has become more dominant. But if I understand what you're asking: Certainly, the outsiderness of the Jewish population that was making these comics informs the power fantasies that they're putting in there, but I always get nervous about being too 1:1 on that. I wrote an essay for Jewish Currents a few weeks ago, pegged to the book, about resisting the urge for the Secret Jewish History. And just saying, “Because creator X was Jewish, that's the defining lens in which we should look at this.” Or even a lens where we can look at it for a 1:1 relationship of, “This is a thing that exists in Jewish tradition or Jewish psychology, and this similar-sounding thing is in the finished comic book, and therefore there's a straight line between one and the other.” But that's all sort of a caveat to say, I do think there is something there. I do think you have people, especially like Jack Kirby, who grew up at the margins of American society as a poor Jew, growing up in Jewish street gangs, going and fighting, et cetera, and that certainly informs the way in which you craft — I would imagine — you craft a character that is imagined to be extremely powerful. If tortured and neurotic. But still powerful. Is that what you were getting at? Or is there something else?
Yeah, I was really getting at this idea of triumphalism. I don't really know what else to call it. It's like, there was this interesting thing about the superhero genre that I thought about — maybe this goes nowhere, this is just a question, something that I've had — it's like, especially in a lot of the thinkers that Benzion was talking about in his work … He wrote his thesis on Abravanel, ’cause he really identifies the beginnings of Jewish political thought with Abravanel, who, essentially, he's the great vizier. There are all these Jews who are these kind of court Jews who are very powerful merchants and tax farmers for the nobility, but they're essentially, they're the duke whisperers, they're the baron whisperers, they're the Kissingers of the Middle Ages. And it was Abravanel’s political philosophy that Benzion was very interested in. He kind of saw, in studying this, that there was a great mysticism to Abravanel’s book, political philosophy. There was almost a Kabbalistic kind of idea of the heavens being political or being governmental. It was almost like a large bureaucracy of angels and that you would appeal to these angels that would have higher angels who themselves would have higher angels or higher incarnations of the same angelic presence until finally you approach the Unapproachable. And what's interested me, is when someone invents a bureaucracy of angels, it's because God itself is too far away, is too inaccessible, so you have to imagine some intermediary figure. But it’s interesting to me that, in a lot of the dreaming that has been done by Jewish writers, it’s never dreams about Jewish political stability, never dreams of a normal Jewish life in a normal Jewish country, it always goes toward angels, superheroes, supernatural interruptions of the basis ordained world order. Like a miracle, essentially. And I'm wondering why you think that there seems to be something in the Jewish imagination that always does kind of lead to the supernatural or the miraculous as opposed to a vision of a better realism. I'm talking about something like Yiddish literature, like Singer.
If I'm going to theorize off into the ether, perhaps it gets back at this idea of Jewish events. Even if we're not thinking about them as necessarily historical study, the resuscitation of Jewish events always has — not always, but largely — has some degree of intercession from God, from the divine. There's always some way in which, going back to the Tanakh, you have, in the course of human events, there's always a god there. It's one of the reasons why Hegel and Marx were so appealing for a lot of Jews. It's this idea of, like you say, the intervention. That there are moments when the world breaks, or is made new, or is whatever, and those are contingent upon divine intervention. And whether that intervention is on a small level with just a human life or life of the people, there are those moments, and you can say that maybe that's what's going on with a lot of the '60s Marvel comics. You have these traumatic events that involve, basically, magic. I mean, gamma radiation, cosmic rays — these are all just made-up things that are stand ins, maybe, for the idea of God intervening in history. There are certainly later comics that have been explored there. There's currently an Incredible Hulk comic that has dealt with Kabbalah in an interesting way that I don't quite know whether I don't understand it, or it hasn't fully been explained yet. But people do mess with this idea of, maybe the creation of these superheroes, in their fictional universes, is something akin to the intervention of God. And saying, “History is going to move in a different direction now because I say so.” Maybe that's part of it. I don't know, that was a lot of rant and theorizing.
No, I mean, all I have with the comics stuff is, I'm kind of theorizing, I have my unformed notions, so you have to forgive me here. Another thing I thought about a lot was that one of the things that turned me off sometimes from later comic books or later movie iterations of comic stuff was that it didn't have what a lot of the older things had. I was born in 1980, so I have a kind of small sampling of it before something seemed to change, but there seemed to be a … The closer these heroes were to their origins or their initial generations, let's say, iterations in comics and movies, there always seems to be a foundational irony that I really appreciated. So yeah, it's the Clark Kent irony in a way, or the “Who's your alter ego?” irony or the classic hamartia, the fatal-flaw kind of irony. And now, I really feel like a lot of the Marvel properties really lack that irony. And, in a way, it's when a culture loses its irony that I feel like it loses its humanity. And I also mean that in a Jewish context, too. There's a lot of Jewish life, especially Israeli life, that has lost a lot of its irony, to my mind. I wonder how you feel about that.
That's interesting. Irony can mean a lot of things. Are you speaking of the origin story and, like, irony of the O. Henry twist at the end of Spider-Man origin where the one criminal he failed to stop was the one who killed his uncle? That sort of irony?
Like Clark Kent can't get Lois Lane. Almost like that double irony of, like, the schlemiel and the hero.
Yeah. I completely agree that once it turns into something triumphalist, to use your word from before, whether that's national myth or a superhero myth, you lose a lot of the power. And that's one of the reasons why the Marvel revolution in the '60s really grabbed people, because DC had largely lost that sense of irony. Superman was a kind of guy who can move planets and is always good and everything good happens to him. Even Batman lived in the sunshine, was a deputized member of the Gotham PD. And then you get Jack Kirby and Stan Lee and Steve Ditko coming along and telling these stories where the heroes are miserable and their lives outside of superhero-ing are filled with grief and neurosis. That stuff still resonates a lot in the comics, but not nearly as much, because the longer someone's a superhero, (a) you start running out of original stories to tell, and (b) the more they have to become a folk hero who always wins, rather than some kind of person who just went through an accident and all of a sudden has their body and their brain doing things that they can't control and they have to try to juggle that with a normal life … Once you have Peter Parker being a billionaire, which has happened in the comics, you've really sort of lost the point of what was going on with that character. But maybe that's the nature of the game, because it's such an iterative genre. Superhero fiction is all about, “We ran out of ideas a few decades ago, let's keep reinterpreting and reinterpreting.” Which makes it very Jewish in some ways. You've got the full story and then you spend the rest of the time reinterpreting it and recasting it in different ways because the age of prophecy is over.
In every generation, we were bitten by a spider.
Ooh. That's good. I should use that for the next one.
But one of the things that, I find, at least, very interesting, from my own point of view, is it’s like living in this world that has really become this sort of critical-theory prophecy come true, where we all just went about fulfilling that theory/prophecy that everything has become politics. That decision of what tea or coffee we drink and where we drink it and who we drink it with is a political act. That the idea of saying we don't have politics as a political act, living in this age, where politics has saturated everything … It becomes very difficult for a fiction writer to maintain that childlike naivete and the belief in stories and in fantasy. It becomes equally difficult, I think, for a person with spiritual or religious tendencies to think about the actually fantastical or supernatural elements of those belief systems. And so we rely on what we now call the “spiritual,” which is just some wellness idea as opposed to some actual encounter with the totally strange divine and the all-powerful divine. So, in a lot of ways, I think that comic books become this total access that had once been a very, very central part of our lives. And I was kind of wondering to what degree you feel that comics are, in a sense, ghettoized — not necessarily because they're for kids or they're not serious or something along those lines, but because people are afraid of those ... People who think they're serious fiction writers. Because they're afraid of the generative power of the fantastical and the encounter with the strange.
Sure. And there's a lot of comics that have gone into the vein — and not just comics now, adaptations as well — that do a lot of work to try to literalize the nature of these things and go, "The Joker is the Joker because he was abused by jokes as a child." That sort of thing. As opposed to just, "There's this thing called the Joker that exists since time immemorial within the universe and his origin need not be explained because who gives a shit, it's a primal force."
I mean, this was the worst part of the movie.
Which movie?
The Joker movie. The idea that trauma explains evil.
I hate it.
But ok. Let's talk about, what is the difference between someone writing something who believes that trauma causes evil and a person who might actually be in touch with the idea that evil is an enduring force in the universe — or might even be the universe?
Wait sorry, phrase that again. I was thinking too much about the big picture of it.
There are people who are writing comics and want to explain evil through trauma.
It's often the only lens that they are ever able to use.
And what is the difference between someone who thinks about it that way and someone who thinks about it in the way of, "Evil is an enduring property of the universe" or "Evil might be the universe itself and has chosen this person to be its representative here on earth."
Well that's why The Dark Knight, the Heath Ledger one, is so beloved. Because it does posit that Joker is, as he puts it himself, an agent of chaos. And people use that term, but don't think about it always in the same way. I like what you're saying. The idea is that he is an emissary of, or a manifestation of, or a whatever of this larger primal force. And that's a much more interesting way to approach that character, I think, than to have it be trauma. ’Cause then you're pathologizing people. I don't know. There's so much wrong with this superhero idea, that trauma is the only thing that causes life to go forward, because (a) it's very demeaning and cynical when it comes to actual trauma that people experienced, and (b) it's so unimaginative. There are things that generate evil or cause evil outcomes that have nothing to do with "Something bad happened to me when I was a kid." That's also something that you have to struggle with as a biographer. You don't want to just have it be, "Oh, well, everything this person did was because of the trauma they felt as a child; that's the determining factor.” There are later environmental factors, historical trends, random chance. And, as you say, the world itself may be evil and it may be that some people channel that better or more efficiently than other people do.
Right, but also I think about the spiritual thing, the original trauma. In the Middle Ages, it was like, if someone was evil, it was because they were possessed by the Devil. They were the ultimate victim. And you can explain everything through the trauma, but the trauma was the inhabitation of a person by a force of pure evil.
Interesting. And that opens the way for empathy and understanding, maybe, in a way that people think they're doing when they have trauma as the core thing. Because with trauma, you go, "Poor person, if only that hadn't happened, they wouldn't have turned out the way they did." But even then, it sort of just passes the blame: “And the reason they turned evil is because of that other person who traumatized them,” and then you’re like, What is the original sin here? And I don't know. I obviously think there's great stories you can tell with that, but it's something that bothers me in general in politics now, because so much of our politics is informed by superhero fiction, I would contend. Not all of it. I'm not going to say “This is how superhero fiction explains the universe,” but given these are the dominant modes in popular enteirtanment around the world right now, you can't help but wonder the degree to which we're going, “Doing this stupid contradictory thing where we say Person X is bad because of trauma inflicted by Person Y?” and then we don't keep going down the chain. We just say, “So Y is the evil one. The dad who beat him up when he was a kid is the evil person” and he, himself, just by virtue of being the main character or the main antagonist, we let him off the hook, but pass the blame off one generation or whatever. And that's just not as interesting to me. Some of my favorite superhero comics — the ones that get into the really big, fat ideas — are the ones that do think about some degree of possession. Either literal or figurative. This idea that there are forces in the world beyond … "There are more things than Heaven and Earth, Horatio,” et cetera, et cetera. Forces that can completely fuck up everything in your life and fuck up the world in general, and looking for specific supervillains is just a complete waste of time. Much as it's a waste of time to look for specific heroes. That's something that I think gets back to the discussion we were initially having about The Netanyahus, which is, Israel is portrayed as a superhero in the American Jewish imagination a lot of the time. It has an origin story. It has its great battles that it fought that everybody remembers and chronicles and uses as metaphors for other things, and so on. It's a strong entity that defeats its enemies and has to make moral compromises in order to get to the greater good. One thing that frustrates me is, comics is this industry that's built by Jews initially — not so much anymore — and you have this idea of Israel that is so close to the idea of the superhero, and yet you have barely any superhero comics or superhero stories that explore Israel, or Zionism, or even modern Jewish identity in any kind of meaningful way. It drives me nuts! My dream — I talk about this all the time — my dream is to be able to write the most Jewish Magneto story that has ever been written. Because Magneto, canonically, he's a fucking survivor. He's a supervillain who's a Holocaust survivor. What a fucking mindblowing idea! That was not present in the original incarnation of Magneto, that came later with iterative storytelling. But now, we have this world where one of the most famous super villains in the world is a Holocaust survivor and a Jew. And we typically do nothing interesting with that in Marvel because everyone is so pussyfooted around talking about Jews and other minorities. And not only is he a Jew, he's a Jew who, after the camps, made aliyah! Canonically, Magneto is in Israel up until the ’50s, at which point he and Charles Xavier meet and they tour around Israel a bit. And, in my personal headcanon, they also become boyfriends, which makes it a lot more interesting when they have conflict later. But no one does anything with this story. It's sitting right there. But everyone's afraid to talk about Jewish power. Jewish power is still this completely anathema thing to discuss, unless you're doing it in this non-ironic mode. You can do the non-ironic, "Jews having power is great, hell yeah, motherfucker, let's do this." But as soon as you start trying to get into a discussion of, like, what it actually means to have power — all these things that, in the Jewish intellectual world, they're all we talk about — no one can bring that into superhero fiction. It's not allowed. We can't talk about powerful Jews qua being Jews and the Jewish experience. That was just me rambling a lot.
No, I think … Look, I think it's very insightful. There was, after a Holocaust and a struggle in Palestine that also was a power struggle in London and in Washington, they get a state. And, immediately, what happens? A lot of Arab and Muslim countries kick out their Jews. But what happens is the establishment of a right of return where you say, "There is some invisible quantum of blood in you that identifies you.” You can look like an “Arab,” you might look like a “German,” but there's some blood quantum that marks you out as special.
Your midi-chlorian count.
“You speak different languages, you have different customs. You even have different versions of canonical Jewish texts. And we're going to in-gather all of our exiles from Galut and we're going to build a country.” And part of that is insisting on similarities or an identicality that is completely unobservable. Especially at the time. That is an opt-in that few people would really feel that they weren't part of, would choose to be part of. Especially of their own free will. It's a bunch of mutants, basically. And we get together, and we run this country, and what's fascinating to me is, the person who then comes to power in this country — who, again, is now the longest serving prime minister of this country — is someone who comes from this Ashkenazi elite, but someone who has done everything he can to appear to not be a member of that. Right? And who has developed in himself this superhero ethos of almost a superhero prime minister of a country of superheroes that says, “Only I can save the country. Only I can do this.” This idea that there isn't a single other competent person in this place. And what I find pretty interesting about all of that — you're right, it's an interesting metaphor for superheroes' origin stories — is that, after its really existential wars, now it's a period of total technological and military hegemony. It's a superhero without a nemesis. And that's an interesting … That's what there hasn't been a comic book about, I don't think. It's literally a superhero in search of a nemesis, who then must become their own nemesis for a lack of any other suitable one. And that, to me, is the story of Israel through that lens.
That's really good. There've been experimental comics, superhero comic book stories that have played around with that. You reach your goal, you create the utopian world, and then what happens next? It's always that there is some kind of fly in the ointment. I would actually say that that story has been told in superhero comics, it's just that it hasn't been explored enough as a morality play or at least a thought experiment for a way that we think about Israel. We're still stuck in just this thing of, “Israel-Man wakes up every day and has to fight all of his foes and he goes back to bed having destroyed all of them and God’s in heaven and all's right with the world.” There is no longer that sense of having a Joker to a Batman, so you turn the entire world into Joker. And you say, “International institutions are the Joker. Liberal Jews are the Joker.” You're right, you end up creating these nemeses that you have basically won against every time, but you have to consistently say, "Hey, this time, fans, it's not going to work out. You have to clap and say ‘I believe in fairies,’” if we're gonna mix our metaphors. There's a lot of drumming-up of enthusiasm.
Superheroes, they're always yearning for a normal life. But they can't ever have one. That's certainly an existential problem in Israeli society. This idea that all of life is a struggle and all of life is proving to everyone around you that you deserve to survive and that you must be recognized. It doesn't become necessary to furnish those proofs on a daily basis. Where does that appetite for struggle go? You make the absolute psychological argument that those energies were largely canalized into intellectual achievement. And I think that there is some truth to that, but not all energies are canalized and not everyone is capable of that. And I think there is an absolute excess of psychic energy among Jews who happen to be alive 80 years after the Holocaust. And let's say 50 years or let's say 40 years after the last truly existential Jewish crisis with some of Israel's wars. Where does this energy go? Where is it applied? And I think that's a real question that needs to be asked. What can fulfill our genetically encoded appetite for struggle?
Maybe it's going back to one component of what was always there, which is internecine struggle. It's a lot of squabbling. Yehuda HaKohen, the settler rabbi I profiled — this didn't make it into the article — but we had an interesting little discussion where he was talking about the Hilltop Youth. He was saying the Hilltop Youth, they're known as these terrorizers of Palestinians, but their beef isn't with the Palestinians; their beef is with the secular Jewish state. They're trying to establish a theocracy, or at least get autonomy enough for their own theocracy, and the Arabs are just standing in their way. They're obstacles. I'm not saying that's necessarily what I agree with, but it was an interesting sort of thought experiment of thinking about, Who is our struggle with? If you're a Jew today, who is your struggle with? Who is your nemesis? It’s either there or invented by you. And I wonder if it's not so much the Palestinians or the Arabs or whatever as just as it is other Jews. It gets at this question of whether the Big Other for the American Jew is the Palestinian or the Israeli, which is something I sort of grapple with. I would contend that — and I'm not alone in this, maybe you'll agree, maybe you won't — the central Jewish question these days is the Israel question, and that question has a lot of sub-questions, but Israel has taken up all the oxygen of American Jewish institutions to this point where it’s frustrating. I like you as a writer because you and a few others who do this just sort of acknowledge the elephant in the room and go, "We have to talk about Israel and Zionism. We can't keep having this Jewish discussion that's afraid to bring it up at all because then these wounds continue to fester.”
Do I think Israel is the central subject? I don't know. I think certainly for institutions and for people on campuses.
I guess that's more what I'm saying. For organized Jewish life.
And I think for the internet as well.
That too.
I think, for me, the central Jewish question is, “How do you keep your own self and your own soul and your own ideas of things separate from those questions?” I think it's so easy nowadays to let the huge flow of information and the huge flow of opinion that we're all just drowned by everyday set our own agendas and set our own personal compasses, let's say. For me, I think my question really is just, “How did it come to this? How did I get here?” in a way. A lot of my central question of “How did I get here?” is a total feeling of hollowness and emptiness. A feeling that there's nothing in American culture — “culture” — that I feel connected to, or that feels anything besides totally manufactured and false — and gleefully manufactured and false. Before, it was manufactured; now, it's not just purposefully, but gleefully manufactured and false. And there's nothing, really, in Jewish culture now that I feel — of my own generation — isn't political. And so that leaves me really bereft. Because, politically, I am a Jew, and I've spent an enormous amount of time in Israel, but I'm not a citizen, and when people protest Israel, they don’t come to my house. They go to the consulate or the embassy. So I'm left out of that. And, in terms of American culture, I create, I believe some forms of American culture, but I feel so completely alienated from … This is a country of 370 million people or whatever, and I feel alienated from every single one of them. And we don't share any common realities. None of us do. So, to be kind of lost in the middle, to be cheap about it, does feel like a Jewish condition. But, to be honest with you, it feels like any thinking person's condition right now.
Totally. I've been watching the new Adam Curtis documentary and feeling even alienated from its alienation. That's just sort of where we're at right now.
With the voiceover, I'm like, Stop it, stop it.
I haven't watched a ton of Adam Curtis, but like, this is so overly long, and I'm enjoying it on some level, but yes, I sort of feel like you can just get rid of the voiceover and just do the collages and images and archival footage and you'd have a better movie.
Most of them, I’m like, “I went to college, I can read this, just print it out for me. I can read it a lot faster.”
As an aesthetic experience, I love it. But that kind of gets at a larger thing that we're talking about here, which is this feeling of alienation. What do you do with it? It's so frustrating, but all the walls are covered in grease. You're trying to climb out of your feeling of, Well, I want to believe in something. This is not me saying I reject all beliefs because they're beliefs, this is me rejecting every belief because every one that comes up, you poke all the holes in it, even the ones you like, and there's no way to enact them.
I think you're totally right. That's why, in a lot of ways, the things that I've been doing have all really been about that feeling of being bereft. And trying to find characters who have their powers of their own loneliness. And that's Benzion Netanyahu. There's certainly elements of his life that I deeply sympathize with. Even the tech mogul from The Book of Numbers. People who have their own senses of melancholy. And what can you understand? People who are just trying to get you to understand … “If only you would understand, then everything would be ok.” And then, frankly, there are these people with great powers of self-reinvention, which is the other thing that I feel attracted to. So it's somewhere between loneliness and self-reinvention is where my own, let's say, Jewish question lies. And I think that's because that's the only place it feels honest. The Israel question, to me, not as a citizen, doesn't feel honest; and the American question, as someone who wields a real degree of anger, resentment, alienation from that, doesn't feel like I can be a participant. I can only be an observer.
You're reading my mind again. Here's the thing. Lately, in the age of COVID and mass death and dread, what I keep coming back to is the consolation that I can find. Other than the fact that I'm blessed because I've known true love with my partner, the only other thing is, what if maybe my work, the knowledge, removed from moral valence, just the actual knowledge that I've put down, will be in a time capsule through the magic of printed media, and someday, when people have things figured out a little bit better, maybe it'll be more useful to someone. Because right now, yeah, observing and recording what I observe is all I can do. Every form of activism feels like a complete waste of time to me. Whereas, if I can assemble what knowledge I can find and put it into some kind of box and hope that maybe it will last … I'm sure it's just me flattering my own vanity, but … I don’t know, what do you think? Judge me.
No, I think there are two models for this and I think about these things a lot. And as long as you're going between the two models as quickly as possible and not noticing which one you believe in, you'd probably feel safe. The two models are … The labor of creation these days is either therapeutic and you're doing it because writing and creating is a way to think and it keeps you sane; or the other way is what you're speaking of, the time capsule. And so, if Monday you can be working on your time capsule and Tuesday your writing is therapy and Wednesday it's time capsule and Thursday it's back to therapy and you can juggle the two, if you're not comfortable in just living in one, then I think that that's pretty much the best you can hope for. Occasionally, I brush up against a third thing, which is the pleasure in actually making the sentences. And that has a real kind of craftsmanship to it. But yeah, I think about one of the ideas that you said, that activism feels like it's pointless. I'd probably be an activist to some degree if no one else was. But the moment that someone else is an activist, it feels so easy to be co-opted into these groups. And never has the world felt more made of groups or tribes. And I've always wanted to be relatively alone, or relatively to the side. And the idea that something that you write has to have an activist point, or has to have some sort of redeeming social value, to me, has always seemed to be the worst of literature. To always try to have some sort of redeeming social value.
Not a big Upton Sinclair fan?
Not as literature, no. But it's not even that. All books are good for you. Even Mein Kampf is good for you, because while you're reading Mein Kampf, you're not killing someone, you're just sitting on a couch, reading. The problem is what you do with what you read. And the problem is that people don't … They learn to read, they don't learn how to read. And I think that there is a problem with the idea that there is some correspondence with the words on a page and life. And I think that, in some future world where the aliens get ahold of your book and they don't know anything about comic books or anything like that, they might think that this is a novel. They might think that you wrote a metafictional novel about a guy who wrote books. And in a sense, you have to write everything in that way. I try to write fiction in a way that, when the word “Netanyahu” is erased from the planet — if you want to talk about delusions of grandeur — that they can still read a book that's an entertaining novel about something that used to be called a college.
Exactly. And, as Harold Bloom says, all Jewish literature is trying to interpret the Bible on some level. You go back to that stuff and yeah, who the fuck knows how much of that was fiction or fact. It doesn't matter after a certain point. Now we're just telling ourselves stories in order to live, I suppose.
I also think that there is this real need to, whatever we decide that we have to write down, whether it's in a therapeutic mode or whether it's in a time capsule mode or whatever it is, we have to write it down primarily as a note to ourselves. Like, “Don't forget this.”
“Zakhor!”
And you wonder why. Why? Some things you write down to not forget because they're reminders to your own self of how you need to act, or what you need to do, or what should be the right way to be in your own life. It's as though you’re telling stories in order to live; it's more like, we're writing things to remind ourselves of who we are and who we'd like to be. And in a very personal way. And that's why I think it's funny that we then publish them. Because we're weak, we publish them. We need money, we publish them. We need praise, we publish them. But primarily, these things are just reminders to ourselves.