[In the following essay, Felman examines the parallels between Jewish and gay identity as presented in Angels in America. Felman asserts that Kushner's play is ultimately about “Jewish male self-loathing in the twentieth century.”]

Tony Kushner's 1993 Pulitzer-Prize-winning play, Angels in America, is very gay. And Jewish. It's about assimilation, self-loathing, and men with lost souls; the betrayal of the faith and the abandonment of a moral vision. Depending on who the viewer is, there are two versions of the play, playing simultaneously. There's the deeply moving, virus-infected, goyishe-gay-who-divinely-hallucinates; plus Mr. married-Mormon-coming-out-of-the-closet to pill-popping-straight, soon-to-be-happy-ex, Mrs. Mormon—AIDS version. Then there's the culturally lost, wondering-in-secular-exile, ambivalent treyf, quasi-civil-libertarian-melting-pot-mess, full-of-self-deception, painfully revealing Jewish version, located in the extremely bizarre triumvirate of Roy Cohn, Ethel Rosenberg, and the imaginatively invented totally believable (character of) Louis Ironson. Ultimately, one plot informs the other as the characters move in out of their tightly woven, inter-related narratives. But Angels in America will always be my Jewish Fantasia on National Themes. It resounds in my ears like the long, hard, final sound of the shofar calling the People Israel to worship in a postmodern, Hillary Clinton-reconstructed, school-prayer-reinstated, third-wave-neo-Newt-Gingrich era. Where, lying at the foot of the Statue of Liberty, Jewish identity is in fragments while lost Jewish (read male) souls seek solace in the exact same, singular, superclean anus of a closeted, self-righteous, God-fearing married Mormon faggot. Yes, Angels is about Jewish male self-loathing in the twentieth century held tightly within the ever expanding embrace of Miss Liberty's very tired, porous hands.

Angels opens with a quintessential, North American Jewish moment: A very old rabbi with a heavy Eastern European accent, long beard, and stooped shoulders presides over the funeral of a woman who has spent the last ten years of her life at the Bronx Home of Aged Hebrews without a visit from her grandson, who lives minutes away. At the funeral, the rabbi reads out loud the names of the family mourners whose roster by the third generation is generously sprinkled with one Gentile appellation after another. For the Jew who dies alone without family or community, Kushner has written the new “Diaspora Kaddish.” Rabbi Chemolwitz publicly admits that he doesn't know the deceased Sarah Ironson or her family. But he knows Sarah's journey and the meaning of that journey, which in the end is more important than knowing the person herself. For it is in the irreversible departure from Eastern Europe to the climactic, but culturally dislocating arrival at Ellis Island where Jewish continuity is affirmed. Listen to the rabbi:

RABBI:
(He speaks sonorously, with a heavy Eastern European accent, unapologetically consulting a sheet of notes for the family names): … This woman. I did not know this woman. … She was … (He touches the coffin) … not a person but a whole kind of person, the ones who crossed the ocean, who brought with us to America the villages of Russia and Lithuania—and how we struggled, and how we fought, for the family, for the Jewish home, so that you would not grow up here, in this strange place, in the melting pot where nothing melted. …

By using the plural “we” rather than the singular “she,” the rabbi purposefully includes himself in the historic crossing of Ashkenazi Jews from the old country to the “new” country. And with the public insertion of himself into his “eulogy for the unknown,” he affirms Jewish continuity in spite of the fact that he is presiding over the funeral of a Jew he did not know for a family he does not know. Then, through the brilliant use of the second-person “you,” Kushner personalizes the impersonal space of the estranged Diaspora Jew from his/her cultural roots. Alone in the middle of a pitch-black stage with the coffin of our ancestors, the stooped rabbi stands facing the void. At the exact same moment, the audience is dramatically transformed into the future generations—not only of Sarah Ironson's family, but of the Jewish people in general. Then to us, as Jews, the rabbi speaks:

Descendants of this immigrant woman, you do not grow up in America, you and your children and their children with the goyische names. You do not live in America. No such place exists. Your clay is the clay of some Litvak shtetl, your air the air of the steppes—because she carried the old world on her back across the ocean, in a boat, and she put it down on Grand Concourse Avenue, or in Flatbush, and she worked that earth into your bones, and you pass it to your children, this ancient, ancient culture and home. (little pause.)

When the audience is secured as the next generation, the rabbi ends his eulogy with a bitter, painful admonition:

You can never make that crossing that she made, for such Great Voyages in this world do not any more exist. But every day of your lives the miles that voyage between that place and this one you cross. Every day. You understand me? In you that journey is. …

In us that Journey is. Even if we want to forget where we came from, we can't. It's impossible. The journey lives in us, in spite of us; not only as cultural, but also as spiritual inheritance.

By opening Angels with this scene, Kushner claims his rightful place in the Jewish lexicon of post-Holocaust writers confronting secular Jewish identity in the Diaspora. Yet the questions Angels ask around sexuality, autonomy, and cultural preservation belong within the ethnic, narrative tradition that began in the old country with Sholem Aleichem's Tevye, asking The Almighty for guidance in raising his Jewish daughters in a secular world. And that particular ethnic tradition continues on today (in the New World) with the “all-American, Jewish everyman” plays of Arthur Miller, Paddy Cheyefsky, Nathanael West, and Neil Simon's Broadway Bound. But Kushner, writing in a post-structuralist age, explodes the boundary of tribal sensitivities. He uses a sexuality clearly constructed outside of procreative, nuclear, heterosexual marriage as the postmodern metaphor for the new, self-loathing Willy Loman. Willy has become “Nelly,” and so very fey at that.

Louis Ironson is the post 'Nam, civil rights redux, contemporary Jewish Nelly. Not a likeable, hardly sympathetic liberal, Jew-boy fella. The son of good Jewish lefties and a failure by his own admission, he's a word processor working in the courthouse basement of the Court of Appeals in Brooklyn. (He never made it to law school.) After his grandmother's funeral, he confides to his shiksa boyfriend Prior Walter that he hasn't visited Bubbe Sarah for ten years; she reminded him too much of his mother. With this confession, Kushner appears to play into the Philip Roth/Norman Mailer, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, hate-your-mother-yiddische-mamma's-boy stereotype.

But Louis's absence from his family must also be read in the context of the historical abandonment of an entire people and the shame that abandonment produced. Louis doesn't visit Sarah because he is afraid of his mother's shame; the shame of the little feygelah who leaves home not to marry and make a fortune, but to fuck other little feygelahs, Jew and Gentile alike. Louis has internalized the family shame and projects this shame onto his grandmother. So he cannot visit her out of fear of revisiting his own (Jewish male) self-loathing. This singular act of abandonment of an immigrant grandmother, by a self-loathing Jew, forms the controlling metaphor upon which Kushner seeks to negotiate the question of morality in human relations in the age of AIDS.

Louis Ironson abandons his virus-infected lover just as he abandoned his grandmother. Ignorant of Jewish tradition and afraid of what he's about to do, Louis checks with the rabbi after Sarah's funeral.

LOUIS:
Rabbi, what does the Holy Writ say about someone who abandons someone he loves at a time of great need?
RABBI:
Why would a person do such a thing?
LOUIS:
Maybe because this person's sense of the world, that it will change for the better with struggle, maybe a person who has this new-Hegelian positivist sense of constant historical progress towards happiness or perfection or something, who feels very powerful because he feels connected to these forces, moving uphill all the time … maybe that person can't, um, incorporate sickness into his sense of how things are supposed to go. Maybe vomit … and sores and disease … really frighten him, maybe … he isn't so good with death.
RABBI:
The Holy Scriptures have nothing to say about such a person.

For Kushner, speaking rabbinically, abandonment is an act of moral as well as spiritual impotence. For Jews—Israeli and Diaspora—abandonment is not only a twentieth-century (Jewish) leitmotif, but also a historical obsession. And, in the age of AIDS, both public: medical, governmental, and religious, and private: family, friends and colleagues, abandonment has become a controlling metaphor for gay suffering. Appropriately then, Kushner uses a gay Jew as cultural icon, representative of the “desertion dilemma,” so central to both the Jewish and gay communities.

Out of his internalized self-loathing, Louis abandons his grandmother—his roots. Because of his shame, he is unable to comprehend that he is about to abandon his lover, Prior, in the exact same way. With the creation of Louis Ironson—secular Jewish faggot that he is—Kushner locates the question of abandonment outside a religious context. Throughout Angels, Louis seeks to locate moral justification for the immoral abandonment of those he loves.

Enter the character of Roy Cohn, who has built a career on the totally fallacious moral justification of the stupendously grotesque, immoral act. Kushner uses Roy Cohn's assimilated, self-loathing Jew-boy persona to mirror the self-loathing Louis Ironson. Are they identical characters? In the play, Louis abandons his literal family, the-mother-of-his-mother. And he deserts his life-partner, sick with AIDS. Roy abandons his metaphoric mother, Ethel Rosenberg. And he forsakes his homosexual brothers by always fucking in a locked closet. Both men are isolationists, living in Galut—contemporary Jewish exile. Louis lives outside Jewish communal life, whereas Roy is completely acommunal. Thus, the narrative function of Roy Cohn in Angels is to create an alter ego for Louis, a point-counterpoint from which Kushner positions assimilated and estranged, very middle-class, Jewish male identity. In this context, the audience sits as the Bet Din, a Jewish court, judging the morality of Louis Ironson—the newly wandering, perpetually meandering, Diaspora Jew. Next to Roy Cohn, Louis looks good, or so it would appear.

But why make the central characters of your play self-loathing gay Jews? Because Kushner, himself a gay Jew, employs one identity to inform dramatically upon the other. Ultimately he uses the condition or state of Diaspora, male “Jewishness,” as cultural signifier for “gayness.” He draws thematic parallels between assimilation and self-loathing within the Jewish male psyche, and location and dislocation within the gay male psyche. (The only women in the play are dead, angels, or crazy.) And—for the first time in contemporary, mainstream, Broadway theater—Kushner dares to use the homosexual persona to reveal Jewish male neurosis. Thus, there is a certain post-structuralist symmetry being constructed around the social identities of Jewish and Queer. Kushner exposes the vices of one identity with the other, and vice versa.

The challenge, then, lies with the heterosexual audience, both Gentile and Jew. As innocent bystander, the Gentile must resist the desire to distance the self from these characters precisely because of their Jewishness and/or their homosexuality. But for the male, heterosexual Jew to identify himself with either Louis Ironson or Roy Cohn is a far more difficult predicament. To identify with them as Jews is to locate the exiled self in a pattern of familiar, albeit uncomfortable, neurosis about “Hebrew” circumcised maleness and to face the internalized shame of the classic pariah.

The queerness of Roy Cohn and Louis Ironson does not invalidate their Jewishness; on the contrary, it illuminates. For the author, the social (not to mention historical) link between Jew and homosexual is clearly potent. He knows personally that it is in the intersection between assimilation and self-loathing that both Jews and homosexuals are caught.

Kushner then collapses the borders between sexuality and ethnicity: A fragmented id becomes a fluid ego, although often a despised one at that. Finally, as if he is writing responsa to Harvey Fierstein's “mother” in the groundbreaking Torch Song Trilogy, when she forbids her son to mention Jewish and gay in the same Kaddish, Kushner refuses to split off the self. The problem is that what he offers in the characters of Louis and Roy, point-counterpoint, are too easy to reject precisely because they are so full of self-loathing. So Kushner strategically introduces (into the play) the “sacred” secular Jewish mother, Ethel Rosenberg, who was betrayed by all the prodigal Jewish sons: Irving R. Kaufman, Irving Saypol, Roy Cohn, and her own brother David Greenglass. She is the final link between the men, Jewish identity, assimilation and self-loathing. It is the presence of Ethel Rosenberg in Angels in America which calls into question Jewish male morality in the postmodern era.

The first scene when Ethel appears, Roy is very sick—so sick he can barely function and is about to collapse. In a chilling moment that leaves the audience psychically suspended, Ethel Rosenberg calls 911 for an ambulance to take Roy Cohn to the emergency room. Throughout Angels, Cohn reflects on his proudest moment; his greatest singular accomplishment—according to him—the epitome of his power (and the height of his assimilation and self-loathing) was when he persuaded Judge Kaufman to sentence Ethel to death in the electric chair. Kushner successfully exposes Roy's misogyny and internalized anti-Semitism. So when Ethel calls for the ambulance, it becomes apparent that she has come back to haunt her executioner and witness his demise. Kushner has made Roy Cohn, in the last weeks of his life, dependent on Ethel Rosenberg. Face to face, the Jewish son meets the (Jewish) mother he ruthlessly betrayed.

Ethel appears next at Cohn's hospital bedside. She announces that the end is near. Cohn is about to be disbarred, and Ethel has come back for the hearings. Slowly, almost imperceptibly, the balance of power shifts between the abandoned mother and the son who abandoned her. Until now, Roy was in charge. But with his impending disbarment, his total collapse, political and physical, is imminent.

At the same time, Louis has taken a lover, left the lover, and (near the end of Part Two) begged Prior to take him back. Tightening the symmetry in the play, Kushner parallels Roy's disbarment with Prior's refusal to take Louis back. Because of their immoral and unethical behavior, both Louis and Roy are thrown out and rejected by their own people. But unlike Louis, Roy has no shame. Thus, by the play's end, the characters of Louis Ironson and Roy Cohn are distinguishable. The audience slowly develops a limited sympathy (but never compassion) for Louis, whose lover will not take him back. But for Cohn, there is nothing. Ethel is there to witness it all. Her appearance at Roy Cohn's hospital bed, in the middle of the AIDS epidemic, is a coup de théâtre. Kushner has brought Ethel back to say Kaddish for Roy—the “infected” Jew for whom there is no prayer.

Framing the “Jewish Play” within the play, Kushner begins and ends Angels with a Kaddish. The first Kaddish was not just for Sarah Ironson, Louis's grandmother, but rather for an entire era, including a lost sense of Jewish peoplehood. The last Prayer For The Dead, coming almost at the end of Part Two in Perestroika, is truly a restructuring of the post-immigrant Jewish experience. The Kaddish has been transformed into a postmodern mourning prayer for lost Jewish souls. And it is in the final act of davening that Louis, Ethel, and Roy become the unholy triumvirate.

At the request of Prior's nurse, Belize (who stole Cohn's personal supply of AZT), Louis has come unwillingly to say Kaddish for Cohn. When he begins, Louis mixes up several Hebrew prayers until, out of nowhere, Ethel appears at the foot of the bed to lead Louis in the Kaddish. In this moment, Kushner exposes the true condition of the exiled Jew. Louis is the post-Holocaust Jew who quotes Hegel, but does not even know the Kaddish. He is truly lost; the product of his own shame and self-loathing, he cannot mourn properly. And Ethel, dead already forty-two years and for whom we still say Kaddish, is the only one who knows the words.

The scene is both emotionally satisfying—Roy Cohn is disbarred and finally dead—and disquieting. The new Diaspora Jew wanders around in Galut, intellectually informed, but culturally ignorant, sexually despised, and profoundly isolated. This, then, is the consequence of Louis's abandonment of those he loves. Having been only for himself—who is he? A combination of Willy Loman redux and Tevye's nightmare of a son-in-law. And who are we, Jews, Gentiles, and heterosexuals who disassociate ourselves from Louis Ironson, as though his dilemma is not ours? In the Diaspora, as Tony Kushner deftly shows with his “Gay Fantasia on National Themes,” the question of abandonment simmers in the melting pot, boiling over whenever the temperature gets too hot, scalding everybody in sight.