[In the following review, Hoberman focuses on the portrayal of tensions between Jews and African Americans in Homicide.]

With the unselfconscious absorption of someone working something out for himself, David Mamet has concocted an urban policier that has a deracinated Jewish detective searching for his identity in a grim world of tribal violence. Homicide ostensibly pits Jews against blacks and Jews against neo-Nazis, but its underlying vision is that of Jews against the world. Mamet is a master of unpleasantness, but his latest is awful in a particularly timely way. Perhaps inspired by the new and widespread post-Gulf War concern for Israel reported among American Jews, as well as by the resurgence of political anti-Semitism in the former Soviet empire, Homicide opens in New York after a summer of black-Jewish tensions.

Times Square, where black Muslims sometimes sell the nineteenth-century forgery, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, along with incense and herbal perfumes, was enlivened by a pair of street preachers explaining that the so-called Jews stole their identity from the black Jews of Africa and that's why Hitler wanted to kill them. This convoluted theorising was comic relief compared to events in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn, a once-genteel neighbourhood shared by West Indian immigrants and highly insular, ultra-traditional Hasidic Jews. In late August, a Hasidic driver ran a red light and hit a seven-year-old black boy. Fed by rumours that a Hasidic private ambulance rescued the driver and left the child to die, the accident precipitated four days of violence, during which stores were looted, synagogues attacked, homes trashed and a Hasidic student was fatally stabbed.

The chants of ‘Heil Hitler’ and ‘Kill the Jews’ heard in Crown Heights crystallised a tendency that had already surfaced in the anti-Semitic pronouncements of the militant rap group Public Enemy and the gratuitously caricatured Jewish club owners of Spike Lee's Mo' Better Blues. They also fed the media firestorm already raging around Professor Leonard Jeffries, the popular chairman of the African-American Studies department at City College. Jeffries, who teaches that “rich Jews” financed the slave trade, made tabloid headlines with his assertion that “a conspiracy, planned and plotted and programmed out of Hollywood by people called Greenberg and Weisberg and Trigliani” had systematically denigrated black people. “Russian Jewry had a particular control over the movies, and with their financial partners, the Mafia, put together a financial system of destruction of black people.”

Ready made for exegesis by Dr Jeffries (or George Bush, who recently cast himself as “one lonely guy” battling against the “powerful political forces” of the pro-Israel lobby), Homicide is indifferent, if not hostile, to people of colour—evoking a shadowy network of powerful Jews who speak in a secret tongue and are concerned only with themselves. This clandestine society is as vast as it is unlikely—encompassing everything from retired Irgun commandos and European refugees to wealthy assimilationists and students of cabbala. (Jeffries would likely add the movie's producers to the melange—they must have underwritten this story for sinister reasons of their own.)

When detective Bobby Gold (Joe Mantegna) and his partner (William H. Macy) find a rookie cop pinned down in a candystore by a snarling guard dog, the absurd scenario darkens with the discovery of an old woman dead behind the counter, a Mogen David dangling from her neck. Black neighbours are already buzzing about the fortune the storekeeper supposedly kept in her basement when, as if by telepathy, her next of kin—a well-dressed doctor and his stylish daughter—materialise on the curb. Intuiting that Bobby is Jewish the same way they intuited the old woman's murder, the two demand that he be put on the case. We, of course, are already well aware that Bobby is a Jew—in his first scene a rampaging superior, black of course, has dressed him down as “a little kike.”

Shot in Baltimore, Homicide retails a generic asphalt jungle in which African-American officers run the police department and black cops routinely blame the white victims of senseless violence. That's the way it is, at least in Bobby's world. What really throws this seasoned cop off-kilter is having to deal with all manner of bitter, withholding, punitive Jews. Sent to the doctor's luxurious apartment because “someone took a shot at the Yids,” he's reproached for his indifference. Confused by the Yiddish he hears (if not the melancholy bass theme which must unavoidably accompany it), and angry to have been stuck with this case, Bobby phones his partner to ventilate. “They're not my fucking people,” he rants, oblivious of the comely Jewess (Rebecca Pidgeon) who has uncannily materialised in the background. “Do you hate yourself that much?,” she asks him, before vanishing from the plot.

In Homicide, as in medieval Christendom, Jews are defined by their ‘secret language’; as in the Mossad, they are measured by their muscle. Bobby fails on both counts. His reputation as a cop is based on his (crypto-Jewish) linguistic skill—his speciality is persuading cornered criminals to give up their hostages—but that's only a trick for the goyim. Even a traditional scholar turns muscular when faced with Bobby: “You say you're a Jew and you can't read Hebrew—what are you then?” It's a good question. Bobby Gold may not be the only Jew in the world ignorant of Hebrew, but it's hard to imagine any Jew so baffled by the mere existence of other Jews. Bobby has no companion, no family, no childhood memories. His background is a void, his only friend his Irish partner. By the end of the movie, he is an unhappy version of the abstract, essential Jew that Philip Roth evokes in the penultimate paragraph of The Counterlife: “A Jew without Jews, without Judaism, without Zionism, without Jewishness, without a temple or an army or even a pistol, a Jew clearly without a home, just the object itself, like a glass or an apple.”

Of course, Jews can always be defined by anti-Semites. In one of Homicide's least lovely scenes. Bobby reveals his repressed jüdische Selbsthaas—the appropriately German term for the condition of Jewish ‘self-hatred’—to a sympathetic Israeli woman. Because he was a Jew, Bobby confesses, the other cops thought he was a “pussy,” a “broad” a “clown.” It's a sequence that cries out for application of the so-called Jewish science—particularly as the movie's muscle Jews similarly regard Bobby as a wimp. To complete the syndrome by which some Jews can excoriate other Jews with the identical qualities that anti-Semites associate with all Jews, the neo-Nazi propaganda which Bobby subsequently discovers also makes much of supposed Jewish effeminacy.

“I am neither expecting people to call [Homicide,] anti-Semitic, nor will I be surprised if they do,” says Mamet. Whatever the movie is, it is scarcely the prime example of jüdische Selbsthaas. That distinction belongs to the Coen brothers' Barton Fink. At the period when that Cannes laureate is set, the virtual acme of worldwide anti-Semitism. America's two most potent Jewish stereotypes were the vulgar Hollywood mogul and the idealistic New York communist—both presumably battling for the hearts and minds of the working masses. That Barton Fink contemptuously locks these stereotypes in a sadomasochistic embrace without permitting either to comment on it—while the filmmakers themselves remain aloof—is as savagely reductive as the patter in a minstrel show.

Unlike the grotesquely derisive Barton Fink, Homicide has an agenda. Mamet wants to plumb the divided souls of American Jews, explain the militarisation of what, for a thousand years, had been a non-violent culture (issues which, in a more encoded, convoluted fashion, inform Woody Allen's Crimes and Misdemeanors). Is America perhaps a mirage? An innocent toy store conceals a Nazi propaganda shop; the realistic Jewish civilians all pack guns, while the delusional Jewish cop can't hold on to his. This uniformed schlemiel act reaches its nadir when Bobby is captured and cowed by a gang of Jewish elders who operate out of an abandoned Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society office and nosh a weird assortment of ‘Jewish’ food (salami, shlivovits, Jaffa oranges). There are aspects of Homicide that are truly ridiculous but, given the current cultural climate, you can't laugh at them.

The Jews in Homicide seem other to Mamet, Gold, and even themselves. The film proposes that there is an international Jewish conspiracy—or, rather, a counter-conspiracy—and what's more, it's a necessary one. The fantasies of Jews that haunt the Gentile mind return to spook the Jews as well.