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<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/essays/michael-cohen-complicated/"></div>Some years back, when the words “Mel Gibson” were still semi-respectable, I was having lunch with a writer friend who happens to be Jewish. And not just Jewish but a proud Jew who will volubly hold forth on the subject of his pride. Gibson had recently directed The Passion of the Christ, a controversial movie about Jesus in which Jewish characters were portrayed in an unflattering light — and by unflattering, I mean as if the movie had been directed by the editorial staff of Der Sturmer. This problem was made exponentially worse by the distressing fact that the film had raked in hundreds of millions of dollars all over the world. What did you think of Gibson’s movie? I asked, hoping to further enliven our conversation. Leaning back, I braced myself for an aria of denunciation. Instead, he cocked his head and regarded me through horn rimmed glasses. As a Jew, he said, I wish I had invested.
Coming from a man whose proudly philosemitic attitude takes a back seat to no one’s, the tenor of the joke seasoned the complexity of the humor (self-confident Jew invokes antisemitic trope in service of schtick!), which is to say, I laughed.
Recently, I found myself reflecting on this exchange because “As a Jew” never used to be a way I framed a response to much of anything. I am not a fan of the identity-driven American public space and the “As a —” construction has always left me cold. A human being, a man, a husband and father, an American, a New Yorker, a Knick fan, sure, all those things. Only then did I look at something “as a Jew.” The advent of the Trump era and the concomitant rise of white nationalism, racism, and yes, old fashioned antisemitism has changed the math. Which brings me to my Michael Cohen problem. Thinking about the Trump bagman’s upcoming Congressional appearance I found myself wondering about what the takeaway of that testimony, as well as Cohen’s more global sleaziness, would be for the diehards of Trumplandia. That Cohen is a confessed felon who implicated the President in a felony not mutually designed but concocted entirely by the President and only executed by the underling would be, I imagined, lost on the MAGA hats. So what will be the lesson of Cohen’s testimony in places that voted overwhelmingly for Trump? And what will be their take when Cohen holds forth at his upcoming closed session in front of a Congressional committee? Might it be: You can’t trust a Jew? Not for all of the Trump-drunk legion, perhaps. But for ones looking for a reason, there it is.
Am I being paranoid? Perhaps, but I don’t think so. If you’re reading this you already know that anti-Jewish attitudes are trading like Bitcoin two years ago. Yes, the usual suspects are still at it but now they’ve spiked their habitual hatred with subtle new flavors like Roger Waters, and it’s become increasingly sticky for Jews in Europe. Here in America we just saw the worst mass-killing of Jews in our bloody history. These are not boom times. Bernie Madoff was an embarrassment to our co-religionists but when his malfeasance first came to the world’s attention a decade ago, the environment was not as overtly perilous. Personally, I would’ve preferred if Madoff were Polish Catholic or Samoan, but at the time his Jewishness did not leap out in a way threatening to his fellow Jews. In those more innocent days being a “bad Jew” wasn’t as freighted. Now it can only serve to further exacerbate an already dangerous situation, one where neo-Nazis are emboldened and a leader of the Women’s March is comfortable extolling the virtues of Louis Farrakhan.
Perhaps my attitude toward the Cohen predicament is vestigial, my worries outdated. (Do I sound like the parents of my generation or, worse, their parents?) Always it was a point of pride as kids whenever we learned that a public figure was Jewish. Whether Sandy Koufax or Joey Ramone, this fulsome ethnic tendency bloomed into Adam Sandler’s “Hanukkah Song,” basically a list of Menorah-kindlers who thrill Jews with the simple fact of their Jewishness. But because we remain a tiny minority of America, when one of us cuts through the media clutter with the blade of notoriety, that individual becomes, to a certain degree, no matter how much progress society has made, a stand-in for the rest of us. And who wants Michael Cohen as their stand-in?
What makes the Cohen problem even more symbolically complex is that he also presents as a Jewish imbecile, a concept with which the average gentile will only be familiar in the unlikely event she is conversant with the work of Isaac Bashevis Singer, who portrayed Jews of every imaginable stripe and whose best-known story might be Gimpel the Fool. This iteration of Jewishness is not a western archetype, which is unfortunate since it potentially adds another dimension to the non-Jewish conception of what a Jewish person can be. While Madoff, in his epic greed and skullduggery, embodied all of the worst antisemitic tropes, Cohen is a matzo ball-scented goombah whose law degree from a barely accredited institution confers on his shenanigans a poignancy they would otherwise lack (Look Ma, I made it through law school!). Perhaps this is his saving grace. Everyone who attended an American high school knew guys like Michael Cohen. Yours was a bully, a loudmouth who wore his football jersey the day before the game; he drove a muscle car.
When one conjures Cohen pacing in his home at 3:00 a.m., we can see him weighing the ramifications of his dark deeds and wrestling with what he has wrought, the misfortune he has brought down upon himself, his family, his country, and the world. But remember, this is a man whose role model for a dozen years was Donald Trump, someone for whom he famously said he would “take a bullet.” One imagines the interior landscape of an individual who slavishly admires a man like Trump as an industrial kitchen where fast-food is rendered, sharp edges and hard, shiny surfaces all in the service of cheap meat with a high fat content. The search for depth goes unrewarded. So when I consider Cohen’s middle-of-the-night vexations, they do not resemble the moral struggles of a Karamazov brother, but rather those of a child who has been apprehended doing something forbidden and is now intent on demonstrating to a disapproving parent that he is not a bad boy. Perhaps this makes him more sympathetic, more relatable. He got caught and now he’s willing to take his medicine in the trusting hope that by making a clean breast of it he will be forgiven. This vision of Cohen as adolescent miscreant, while admittedly denying an adult man a certain agency, makes me reconsider the unkindness of my initial assessment. Maybe I have the situation all wrong and Cohen is, rather than a mortification, a modern version of Shylock, if slightly less clever. Flawed, but deeply human, and as a character in this American tragedy one who solicits terror and pity.
But don’t get me started on Jared.
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Michael Cohen and Me: It’s Complicated

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<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/essays/thoughts-pittsburgh-empathy-novel/"></div>Last night, one day after the murders in Pittsburgh, Tom Lutz and I had a conversation about my new novel in front of an invited audience in a private home. I’d like to share the remarks that I began with:
After yesterday’s tragic events, when I remembered that I was going to be coming here tonight to talk about my book, the first reaction I had was: This is really not good timing. But then I thought, wait, it is actually excellent timing. It gives us a chance to come together as like-minded people and kindle a light in a dark hour. My friend Albert, who is here tonight, is a child of Holocaust survivors. My friend Sharon, our host for this evening, is in America because the challenges of being Jewish in Iran made it impossible for her family to stay there. My grandmother was one of nine children. The six who remained behind in Europe between them had 30 children. Of those 36 people, none survived the war. I suspect many of you have similar stories. So this is not new. Even the anti-Semitism in America today isn’t new. My father dedicated a great deal of his time to working with the ADL and he used to tell me what it was like to hear the notorious anti-Semitic priest Father Coughlin spewing hatred on the radio. It turns out I grew up in a gap between two bad periods. What was once seemingly vestigial, a bad memory, has become the contemporary reality. Now my children are living through this era of the new Father Coughlins, of neo-Nazis. The world can be a very dark place. So, why art? Why literature? One answer is that it shines a light in the darkness. It brings people together. Sometimes it provides beauty. But since we’re here to talk about books, let me make a case for the novel as the highest form of art, and especially so at a time like this. Wait a minute, you say: Higher than a symphony? Or a sonnet? Or a painting by Raphael or Botticelli or Chagall? Yes, and here’s why — because, at their root, the best novels, the ones that really stay with us, allow us to practice empathy. They take readers inside the heads of other individuals, allow us access to the workings of their minds in a way that plays or movies or even the best television shows cannot do. A novel can reveal the essence of another human being. Today our country is suffering from a serious deficit in both understanding and empathy. It was the extreme absence of those qualities that led to yesterday’s horror in Pittsburgh. In times like these, it is imperative that that is the message we try to get across. Understanding, empathy for others. To not talk at each other but to listen. I’m not saying literature is a panacea for the world’s ills. But I do believe it can make us better citizens. The change, if it is to come, has to start with us. Sometimes it may feel hopeless, but we owe it to the next generation to keep fighting.
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<h6>image via <a href="https://www.wgrz.com/article/news/nation-now/investigation-delays-burials-for-tree-of-life-synagogue-shooting-victims/465-7a4e3cb8-5a67-4996-9c01-202bd541fb7a">wgrz</a></h6>
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Thoughts on Pittsburgh, Empathy, and the Novel

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<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/essays/judgment-day-jared-kushner/"></div>By <a href="https://lareviewofbooks.org/contributor/seth-greenland">Seth Greenland</a>
From: Jkush@gmail.com 
To: HonLesterDetweiler@usjustice.gov 
Date: Sunday, May 17, 2020
Your Honor:
I am writing to request leniency when I appear in court to be sentenced for my “crimes.” <a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/essays/judgment-day-jared-kushner/#more-4238" class="more-link">Read more</a>
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Judgment Day for Jared Kushner

Seth Greenland’s first memoir, A Kingdom of Tender Colors, will be published in 2020 by Europa Editions. He is the author of five novels. His 1997 play Jungle Rot won the Kennedy Center/American Express Fund for New American Plays Award and the American Theater Critics Association Award. He was a writer-producer on the Emmy-nominated HBO series Big Love.

Seth Greenland

The Tiger King and I

"Life doesn't imitate art, it imitates bad television." —Woody Allen

Television

Disturbance

Je Suis Charlie

"For a long time now I haven't been I."
— Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

Around the World

"You can't ignore politics, no matter how much you'd like to." — Molly Ivins

Politics

"The older one grows, the more one likes indecency." — Virginia Woolf

Memoir &amp; Essay

Dear Zealots

A Moral Guide: On Amos Oz’s “Dear Zealots: Letters from a Divided Land”

Coach Wooden and Me

Bookish Basketball: Kareem Abdul-Jabbar’s Latest

"I see great things in baseball." — Walt Whitman

Sports

David L. Ulin is the author or editor of eight previous books, including The Lost Art of Reading: Why Books Matter in a Distracted Time and the Library of America's Writing Los Angeles: A Literary Anthology, which won a California Book Award. He is book critic, and former book editor, of the Los Angeles Times. &nbsp;(Photograph by Noah Ulin.)

David Ulin

Lauren Weedman is an award winning comedic actress, playwright and author. Her new book, Miss Fortune: Fresh Perspectives on Having it All from Someone Who is NOT OKAY, was published by Plume in March 2016. Her first book, A Woman Trapped in a Woman's Body, a collection of comedic essays, was named by Kirkus Review as a top ten Indie book for 2007. She has written and performed 9 solo plays including Homecoming, Amsterdam, If Ornaments Had Lips, Huu, Rash, Wreckage, Bust, and No… You Shut Up, which was commissioned by Boise Contemporary Theater.

More recently, she created and performed The People’s Republic of Portland for Portland Center Stage. Her television credits include The Daily Show, True Blood, United States of Tara, Reno 911, Curb Your Enthusiasm, New Girl, Arrested Development, Looking, and Hung. Film credits include Imagine That, Date Night, A Five Year Engagement, and The Gambler. 

Lauren is the host of the popular Moth storytelling slam in Santa Monica.

Lauren Weedman

<h4>Tom Lutz is the editor-in-chief of the Los Angeles Review of Books. His latest book is&nbsp;<a href="https://smile.amazon.com/Born-Slippy-Tom-Lutz/dp/1912248646/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=born+slippy&amp;qid=1574435254&amp;s=books&amp;sr=1-1">Born Slippy: A Novel.</a></h4>
For more, go to <a href="https://www.tomlutzwriter.com/">tomlutzwriter.com</a>

&nbsp;

Tom Lutz

Laurie Winer is a Los Angeles Review of Books founding editor.

Laurie Winer

Radio Hour: Lauren Weedman's 'Miss Fortune' & David Ulin on Donald Trump

Julia Claiborne Johnson worked at Mademoiselle and Glamour magazines before marrying and moving to Los Angeles, where she lives with her comedy-writer husband and their two children. The name of her debut novel is Be Frank with Me (William Morrow, 2016).

Julia Claiborne Johnson

Norman Klein is a critic, urban and media historian, and novelist. His books include The History of Forgetting: Los Angeles and the Erasure of Memory, Seven Minutes: The Life and Death of the American Animated Cartoon, The Vatican to Vegas: The History of Special Effects, Freud in Coney Island and Other Tales, and the database novel Bleeding Through: Layers of Los Angeles, 1920-86. He is currently completing an interactive historical science fiction novel titled The Imaginary Twentieth Century. His essays have appeared in anthologies, museum catalogs, newspapers, scholarly journals, and on the web.

Norman Klein

Radio Hour: Father’s Day, The Tony’s, and Drinking Mare's Milk

<h4>Cynthia D’Aprix Sweeney lives in Los Angeles with her husband and two sons. She has an MFA from the Bennington Writing Seminars. Previously, she lived and worked in New York City for more than two decades, writing copy for a variety of clients, including American Express, McDonald’s, and more defunct Internet start-ups than she cares to count. Her nonfiction essays have been published in The New York Times Magazine and Martha Stewart Living.&nbsp;The Nest is her first novel.</h4>

Cynthia D’Aprix Sweeney

John Romano is a screenwriter and a writer-producer for television. His features include The Lincoln Lawyer with Matthew McConaughey, the Coen Brothers’ Intolerable Cruelty, and most recently, an adaptation of Philip Roth’s American Pastoral. He's been writer-producer on over 20 TV shows, from Hill Street Blues to Monk, including three of his own creation, among them Sweet Justice starring Cicely Tyson. Formerly he taught English at Columbia and wrote a book on Charles Dickens. He appeared on Charlie Rose with Salman Rushdie for Dickens’s bicentenary, and testified before Congress after 9/11 about Hollywood’s influence on America’s image abroad.

John Romano

Radio Hour: Cynthia D'Aprix Sweeney's 'The Nest' plus John Romano on George Eliot

Ryan Gattis is the author of the novels All Involved (2015), Safe (2017), and The System (forthcoming: July 2020). He is a member of L.A. art collective UGLARworks, and a mentor in PEN America’s Prison Writing Program. He lives in Los Angeles.

Ryan Gattis

Radio Hour: Ryan Gattis

An Interview with Ryan Gattis, author of “All Involved”

Death and the Library

Aimee Bender

<h4>Janet Fitch is a Los Angeles native and the author of&nbsp;White Oleander&nbsp;and&nbsp;Paint It Black. Her latest novel is a two-part epic, The Revolution of Marina M. and Chimes of a Lost Cathedral.</h4>

Janet Fitch

<h4>Paul Mandelbaum teaches the literature of Los Angeles at Emerson College’s L.A. Center. His books include the novels Garrett in Wedlock and Adriane on the Edge and the anthology 12 Short Stories and Their Making.</h4>

Paul Mandelbaum

Laila Lalami was born in Rabat and educated in Morocco, Great Britain, and the United States. She is the author of four novels, including&nbsp;<a href="https://lailalalami.com/the-moors-account/about/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">The Moor’s Account</a>, which won the American Book Award, the Arab-American Book Award, the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction. Her most recent novel,&nbsp;<a href="https://lailalalami.com/the-other-americans/about/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">The Other Americans</a>, was a national best seller and a finalist for the Kirkus Prize and the National Book Award in Fiction. Her essays and criticism have appeared in the Los Angeles Times, the&nbsp;Washington Post,&nbsp;The Nation,&nbsp;Harper’s, the&nbsp;Guardian, and the&nbsp;New York Times. She has received fellowships from the British Council, the Fulbright Program, and the Guggenheim Foundation and is currently a full professor of creative writing at the University of California at Riverside. She lives in Los Angeles. Her new book, a work of nonfiction called&nbsp;<a href="https://lailalalami.com/conditional-citizens/about/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Conditional Citizens</a>, was published by Pantheon in September 2020.&nbsp;

Laila Lalami

VIDEO:  The Question of Nonfiction

Seth Greenland’s first memoir, A Kingdom of Tender Colors, will be published in 2020 by Europa Editions. He is the author of five novels. His 1997 play Jungle Rot won the Kennedy Center/American Express Fund for New American Plays Award and the American Theater Critics Association Award. He was a writer-producer on the Emmy-nominated HBO series Big Love.