The End of the Jews Explores the Jewish Relationship with Black Culture
The End of the Jews. By Adam Mansbach. Spiegel & Grau, 2008.
As a kid in Boston in the late 1980s, Adam Mansbach fell hard for hip hop. These were the early days of the subculture, when eager listeners took weekend trips to New York to dub the newest songs off the hip hop radio stations. The scene revolved around local parties, where MCs and DJs gathered to showcase their skills. For a hip hop-crazy Jewish kid the only problem was getting in. Mansbach remembers “the experience of walking into a hip hop party and immediately being asked why you’re there, which is a fucking good question. You couldn’t just be like, I like hip hop. So I’d be like, I rhyme. The follow up question is, ‘Oh, really. Rhyme. Kick something for me.’ Which is what I wanted to be asked to do.”
Attending a suburban school with a busing program, Mansbach grew up particularly attuned to issues of race. “I was aware of a lot of things just by being observant from a young age about the ways in which black kids in my school were being treated differently than I was,” he says. Being accepted on the hip hop scene became a means of reconciling with the dissonance of his experience at school. “It was a way of feeling that I was not a part of the problem,” he says. “Of course, this is a frayed equation. But I was trying to distance myself from some shit that I wasn’t really down with, and that was a way to do it.”
The End of the Jews, Mansbach’s excellent new novel, explores the dynamics of the Jewish relationship with black culture. Mansbach’s characters negotiate the space between appropriation and collaboration with the black artists to whom they seem inevitably drawn. The book revolves around Tris, also known as RISK, a hip hop obsessed Jewish writer from the suburbs. His grandfather, Tristan Brodsky, is a heavyweight novelist whose creative life starts at a noisy rent party in Harlem. Nina Hricek is a young Czechoslovakian photographer brought to America by a traveling group of jazz musicians who tell her she’s Creole until she starts to believe them.
“What I wanted to look at was the line between inspiration and theft, and the way in which otherness in black and Jewish communities bounce back and forth,” says Mansbach.
The novel offers no easy answers. Tris thinks that Tristan has a superficial understanding of black culture, that his “taking-inspiration-from-the-raw-black-stuff-of-life bullshit might have been acceptable in 1930-whatever, might have opened up the man’s eyes when he was some blank canvas of a kid, but that time is long gone.” But maybe Tris is just upset at the critics who panned his novel about graffiti culture, “making snide references to his skin color…and suggesting those things made Tris some kind of clubfooted tourist…” Meanwhile, although Nina’s collaboration with her black counterparts is perhaps the closest of the three, her transgression, when it comes, is the most serious.
It’s not only the black artists who risk being essentialized. From the moment he receives a rejection slip that cites a publisher’s recent publication of “Mordecai Kaplan’s superb Judaism as Civilization” as the justification for the rejection of his first novel, Tristan resists being claimed as a Jewish writer. He explicitly distances himself from the New York Intellectuals, of whom he is meant to be a contemporary, as their self-definition is bound up entirely in their Jewishness.
The End of the Jews provides a complex, thoughtful, and compelling look at the artistic side of a relationship that has long been conceived only in political terms. Mansbach’s book adds cultural depth to the conversation.
