"The world hates the Jews," writes David Mamet in the first essay of The Wicked Son: Anti-Semitism, Self-Hatred, and the Jews, "in or out." It is one of the many strong statements he makes in the 37 short pieces that comprise the book, indictments and accusations which, at first reading, can overwhelm his subtler points. The statement can be read in two ways: as a fact and as a question. It is a given, claims Mamet, that Jews everywhere, no matter how they identify themselves, in or out, are subject to unrelenting hostility. How, then, will the individual Jew respond? By embracing his heritage despite the consequences, or with apostasy? As the wise, or even the simple son of the Passover Hagaddah, open to discovering himself in the context of tradition? Or as the self-loathing wicked son, who asks, in the hostility of his alienation, " What does all this mean to you?"

What's it gonna be, asks Mamet, "In or out?"

The Wicked Son is, in fact, a challenge thrown down to those he believes have already made the wrong decision, a subset of the Jewish world he classifies alongside the renegade Passover child. "To the wicked son," he writes in his introduction, "to you, who find your religion and race repulsive, your ignorance of your history a satisfaction, here is a book from your brother." Essay after essay reveals to this wicked son not only the error of his ways, but the depths of his betrayal. Mamet's variations on the themes of anti-Semitism and Jewish self-hatred range from vigorous defense of the State of Israel, to psychoanalytic analysis of social pathology, to divrei Torah on the binding of Isaac and the building of the golden calf. But he has one overarching message: the trauma of being Jewish in a hostile world is only exacerbated by the rejection of tradition. Our only salvation is to belong.

A text like this, coming from a writer of Mamet's caliber, is interesting both for what it communicates directly to the reader, and for its connection to themes that have preoccupied the writer throughout his career. These bear some investigation.

Mamet is primarily known as a playwright, the author of such modern classics as American Buffalo, Glengarry Glen Ross, and Oleanna. He is also an accomplished screenwriter (The Verdict, Hoffa, Wag the Dog) and has directed a number of his own screenplays, including House of Games and State and Main. In addition, he has published several collections of essays, a few novels, and two books for children.

Throughout his career, Mamet has had a reputation for dramatizing violence, whether the explosive acts of physical aggression that recur in his plots, or the turbulent, often obscenity-laden language that his characters tend to speak. This language is actually part of his gift. He is a virtuoso in the tradition of Sholem Aleichem, differentiating his characters through the idiomatic speech he puts in their mouths. As for the violence, it is a cautionary depiction of what critics describe as Mamet's sense of "moral dismay." It holds up the mirror to what the author perceives as an age of apocalyptic social disintegration, in which identity and relationships are reduced to the dog-eat-dog laws of financial expediency, and to the shallow appraisals of the sexual meat market.

Judaism, as a set of moral principles and as an ethnic identity, has always had a place in Mamet's work, becoming more pronounced as his personal commitment to tradition has grown. But at times it is just another aspect of the general corruption. The grandson of immigrants, Mamet felt that his parents' generation had bequeathed him a gutted legacy, the sad remainder of its desire to acculturate to America at all costs. In his 1988 essay "The Decoration of Jewish Houses," he wrote, "For my generation, Jewish culture consisted of Jewish food and Jewish jokes, neither of which, probably, were very good for us." This particular sense of cultural debasement, according to Mamet scholar Leslie Kane, is a subtext even in works that are not expressly Jewish, informing, for instance, the anomic characterizations and the sense of moral tragedy in such "secular" plays as American Buffalo and Glengarry Glen Ross. Mamet's 1991 film Homicide, however, rather than using Judaism as subtext, foregrounded the existential anguish of a rootless American Jew: a city cop brought face to face with his own terrible isolation by the twists and turns of a murder mystery.

Since then, Mamet has emerged as an explicitly Jewish writer, presenting heritage as a viable alternative to degradation. His 1999 children's book Bar Mitzvah tells, through a gentle distillation of typical Mamet dialogue, a satisfying story of the transmission of culture, from grandfather to grandchild. His novel The Old Religion, appearing two years earlier with a dedication to his spiritual mentor Rabbi Lawrence Kushner, is by no means as gentle. Mamet takes up the true story of Leo Frank, a Jew lynched in Atlanta in 1915 for a rape and murder he had not committed. He delicately portrays a man whose strange habits of mind make no sense, until they take root in the Judaism he thought he had escaped, at which point they achieve a quiet grandeur. Taking aim at the triviality of assimilated Jewish life, and even more so at the hypocrisy of Christian society, the book ends on a note of understated fury: "A photographer took a picture showing the mob, one boy grinning at the camera, the body hanging, the legs covered by a blanket tied around the waist. The photo, reproduced as a postcard, was sold for many years in stores throughout the South."

The Wicked Son ties together many of these themes. Anger at anti-Semitic brutality and hypocrisy pervades the entire text. It is brought to bear especially in his repeated castigation of those, whether Jew or Gentile, who question the State of Israel's right to exist. The particularly Jewish manifestation of Mamet's "moral dismay," the sense that Judaism has been hobbled in America, underlies the criticism he levels at soulless synagogues and overblown bar mitzvahs. In their place, he offers the kind of spiritual rehabilitation with which he ennobled the character of Leo Frank: the cultivation of a full and proud, moral and ethnic Jewish identity. All this is presented, not in the refracted voice of the playwright, but in the sharp, sermonic tone of a fiery rabbi, defending his people and their Torah against the wickedest, most deluded of sons: the self-hating Jew.

Mamet's polemic is certain to provoke negative response, some of which is justified. For instance, he seems awfully short on compassion. He offers the "wicked son" a zero sum game - either you're with us or you're against us. He seems more eager to express his anger at the host of "race traitors" he has met in his life than to explore more sensitive approaches to the project of bringing conflicted Jews back into the fold. The fold itself is something he describes in very stark terms, through an us-against-them world view that ignores certain complexities of the current Jewish reality. The vital task of learning to differentiate legitimate concern from real anti-Semitism, committed self-criticism from neurotic self-hatred, is something he alludes to only in the briefest of asides.

But fundamentally, The Wicked Son it is a work of passion, and it should be respected as such. Mamet has not come to these opinions lightly, but through a lifetime of spiritual and artistic struggle with the Jewish tradition, which has brought him to a state of reverence, love, and concern. Of course, nothing is ever as simple as his opening interrogation. We are taught, though, that the Passover seder itself, the source of Mamet's central metaphor, should begin with a shocking question, something to stir us out of our lethargy and into a heated discussion of the history, identity, and destiny of the Jewish people.