Borg, shmorg, as Sam Baum might say.
Star Trek's cybernetic schnorrers with the assimilation fetish have nothing on mid-20th-century immigrants when it comes to incorporation into a cultural collective.
Not to mention understanding the flesh-and-blood pain of prejudice—in all its disguises.
Sam Baum does, even if he does his damndest to ignore it, conceal it, deny it and escape it.
Sam (John Wennstrom, in a brilliant performance) is the blustery soul of Test Market's Adam Baum and the Jew Movie, Daniel Goldfarb's knowing treatise on anti-Semitism, religious identity and false liberalism. (The titular Adam is Sam's newly bar mitzvahed son.)
This is one knockout piece of theatrical sparring.
Based on an actual incident between Hollywood mogul Samuel Goldwyn and screenwriter Ring Lardner Jr., Jew Movie is set in 1946 and gives us overbearing producer Sam Baum, fretting that rival Darryl Zanuck, a gentile, is making Gentleman's Agreement, an actual movie about anti-Semitism starring Gregory Peck, with Jewish scribe Moss Hart. Declaring there's room for only one "Jew movie" per year, Baum competes by hiring Oscar-winning—and goyish—Gar Hampson Jr. (ever-excellent Erik Amblad), a self-styled champion of the disenfranchised, to pen the script for his project because Sam wants the subject filtered through an Americanized (i.e., gentile) perspective.
But Gar's take winds up being ... well ... too Jewish for the producer's taste.
Baum's rewrite demands—don't make the goyim look so blatantly evil; stop making the Jews into saintly victims; don't mention the fresh-in-the-memory Holocaust—confound the ardently left-wing writer, whose extreme leanings are hinted at by his "political club" meetings with fellow screenwriters. Baum wants the script scrubbed of much of Gar's painstaking research into Jewish rituals and even Yiddishisms (which Gar amusingly mangles into even more exotic malaprops).
These are men passing each other going the other way on America's postwar ideological spectrum, though each may be lying to himself about where they really fall on that paradigm.
Sam is a good, nominally religious Jewish immigrant—but a more enthusiastic American, eager to blend with gentiles to the point of nearly denying his Jewishness in pursuit of seamless assimilation.
Sam sees the American dream.
Spouting liberal cant about oppression of minorities and the disadvantaged, Gar can't fathom why Sam wants to suppress what he considers the epic story of Judaic struggle in America, a tale of gentile bigotry and hatred, and Jewish triumph against tremendous obstacles erected by the white, wealthy, WASPy elite.
Gar sees the American nightmare.
Both see clearly. Both are blind. And both are fighting not only each other, but their own sense of social and personal identity—of who they really are behind the disguises they've assigned themselves.
It's all stripped raw in a thunderous climax after Adam's (Layne Montgomery, appropriately rambunctious as a gangly teen) bar mitzvah—to which Gar's been invited—when the good left-winger's ugly anti-Semitism surfaces, soaking clear through his false liberalism and veil of solicitous condescension. Meanwhile, Sam is forced to reconsider the depths of his Jewish soul and his own cultural cowardice—as well as his responsibility in that regard to his son.
Carefully directed by Ernest Hemmings to build each man's contradictions into an eruptive conclusion, Wennstrom and Amblad fall into such a natural, compelling rhythm that it becomes a flawless dramatic dance, two actors in breathtaking lockstep.
From their excessively polite meeting (Sam fawningly showers Gar with offers of fruit and nuts and sends his secretary to fetch some scotch because he figures gentiles like to drink) to their explosive confrontation (Gar's booze-fueled tirade met by Sam's unleashed outrage), it's a two-man tour de force.
The show's final words, spoken in Hebrew by Adam as his father weeps, are of his scripture reading from his bar mitzvah—accompanied by the National Anthem.
It leaves a haunting echo:
"Baruch atoh adonoi, no'sayn ha'toroh ..."
Amen, Adam Baum.