Katha Pollitt and Andrew Sullivan

Good morning, Andrew,

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Now I know you watched Seinfeld last night, so I had to also, just to keep you and 90,000,000 other people company. Not so funny, I thought, until the trial scene. Loved the Johnny Cochran-like lawyer ("you're so...articulate!" oohs the huge-breasted woman from the sauna as they lie in bed. That word! Like that other code word "dignified"--i.e. amazing! a black person who is smart! polite! Seinfeld is always very clever in pointing out these minutia of the social moment). My favorite line: "You don't have to help anybody. That's what this country is all about." And the old parents kvetching and nudging.

Ten years ago--well, maybe twenty, or thirty, Irving Howe would have written an essay about how anti-Semitic the show was: four selfish, greedy, lustful New York Jews. Where are the Jews who care about their fellow man? About Art! And ideas! And children! Who founded labor unions and socialist summer camps! I was thinking about him the other day--Eric Alterman calls him a "secular saint," a revealing judgment in view of Howe's support of the war in Vietnam and hostility to feminism--aren't saints supposed to have a better track record than that? I was thinking that, although Howe described himself as a champion of modernism and art vis a vis art as politics and propaganda, he was unable to apply those standards to the literature of his own historical moment. It's easy to be a modernist about Joyce and Kafka. They're classic, European, stamped High Art on every page. The test of a critic is the judgments he or she makes about new books. And Howe's famous attack on Philip Roth was basically a call for propaganda against truth: i.e. don't talk about rich nikulturny Jews in the suburbs, or little Jewish boys masturbating in the bathroom. Write about noble, socially presentable Jews. Don't make a scandal for the Gentiles, in other words. Howe's essay on Sylvia Plath also missed the boat completely: he couldn't understand what the poor woman was so upset about, since his mother had had a much harder life and complained a lot less.

So I would say the total all-American popularity of Seinfeld shows that assimilation is complete.

Cheers,
Katha

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