Is Israel the wallpaper in US culture?

“Girls” creator Lena Dunham has a new book out, a memoir. I haven’t got the book yet, but the proposal promised that Israel played a “life-changing” role in her career path. And here she describes the lost-n-kooky-Israel-lovin part of her career path to Jessica Steinberg, from the Times of Israel. Bear in mind that David Mamet is a rightwing militant Zionist who believes the world will always hate the Jews, i.e., criticize Israel’s conduct:

Dunham mentioned in the interview that she first traveled to Israel for the screening of her first movie, “Tiny Furniture” in the film’s first international screening.

“I think I thought because Israel has this fascinating cultural difference — of having to spend time in the military right after high school — that there would be an increased seriousness,” she said. “But even though there’s this impressive discipline thing, they’re just as lost and kooky as the youth in America.”

She also spoke about some Jewish angles to the show — Dunham herself is half-Jewish and was raised in New York while Shoshanna Shapiro, another character, is played by Zasia Mamet, the daughter of American playwright, essayist, screenwriter, and film director David Mamet and actress Lindsay Crouse.

Is Israel the wallpaper in US culture? Sometimes it seems that way. Thanks to Max Blumenthal.

Oh and let’s do a tangent here. Last week when someone in the Obama administration described Benjamin Netanyahu as “Aspergery,” the comment brought the ire of the Ruderman Family Foundation, which looks out for the disabled (“The term Aspergery’ was used in a manner that is insulting to the millions of people around the world with Asperger Syndrome.”) Well, David Mamet has stated that Asperger’s is a Jewish gift; he says the road to Hollywood ran through Warsaw. From Walter Kirn’s review of his book on Hollywood:

For Mamet, it helps that Preminger was Jewish, and that he is, too. Casting himself as a straight shooter who isn’t deceived by political correctness, Mamet contends that Hollywood movies are profoundly, genetically Judaic: the product, via the minds of their creators, of certain distinctive racial traits that arose in the ghettos of Eastern Europe and transported themselves to Beverly Hills. Mamet makes this connection by associating these traits (two of which are “ignorance of or indifference to social norms” and “high intelligience”) with a form of autism known as Asperger’s syndrome that, he writes, “has its highest prevalence among Ashkenazi Jews and their descendants” and “sounds to me like a job description for a movie director.”

Mamet’s willingness to advance this crackpot thesis is more interesting than its legitimacy or lack of it.

From that book:

The symptoms of this developmental disorder include early precocity, a great ability to maintain masses of information, a lack of ability to mix with groups in age-appropriate ways, ignorance of or indifference to social norms, high intelligence and difficulty with transitions, married to a preternatural ability to concentrate on the minutiae of the task at hand. Neal Gabler, in his An Empire of Their Own points out that the men who made the movies – Goldwyn, Mayer, Schenck, Laemmle, Fox, – all came from a circle with Warsaw at its center, its radius a mere two hundred miles. (I will here proudly insert that my four grandparents came from that circle).

Widening our circle to all of Eastern European Jewry (the Ashkenazim), we find a list of directors beginning with Joe Sternberg’s class and continuing strong through Steven Spielberg’s and the youth of today.