Thursday, March 11, 2004
Lawrence F. Kaplan reviews Tim Robbins' new play. It's a kabal-fest.
What exactly are those theories? The cabal, despite its repeated shouts of "hail Leo Strauss!" (this, to a Jewish refugee from Nazism), doesn't give us much insight. Fortunately, the program for Embedded, which contains an essay by someone named Kitty Clark, does. (For the New York production at least, someone in Robbins's orbit had the good sense to expunge from the original essay, which I found on the Internet, several pointed references to the Jewishness of Strauss and his supposed adherents.)...
Now, stop right there. You would think having to tone down the potentially antisemitic rhetoric of an essay you include for explanation of your message would send up warning signals to a self-professed humanitarian such as Robbins. I mean, by way of extreme example, if I found an essay by David Duke that I felt made some good sense, but needed to do some creative editing to make it more palatable for my audience, that might be a signal that it was time to do some serious self-examination. But, as we've seen over the past months, for some on the left, looking to either side to see who it is exactly that they've found themselves marching with has never exactly been a high priority.
