Talk:The Wicked Son

I do not understand why someone wants to delete this page. I am summarizing the author's points by using quotes that are all footnoted. It is not a biased description of Mamet's words - that is why I am being so careful to use his own words. If the person who wants to delete it is calling Mamet biased, that is censorship. This is a published work by a famous author, whose ideas are already in the public marketplace of ideas. I found Mamet's ideas important and fascinating and wanted to share them.````Rosedora —Preceding unsigned comment added by Rosedora (talk • contribs) 04:49, 30 June 2008
 * The first thing you must understand is that anyone can nominate a page for deletion under the proposed deletion process. Just as equally, though, anyone can oppose that deletion.  It sounds like the person who nominated this article for deletion didn't think it through completely.  You can always ask that person on his or her talk page if you don't understand why they did something.
 * As for the article itself, it is a fine essay, but unfortunately not so good as an encyclopedia article. An encyclopedia article must get its information from third-party sources -- that is, things that other people have written about the article's topic.  In this case, the article would have to reference things that other people have written about The Wicked Son; referencing The Wicked Son itself is not sufficient.  Encyclopedias collect and summarize other sources; they do not analyze the topics themselves.
 * For more information, please read Your first article and the other helpful pages that are linked there.
 * -- Powers T 12:45, 1 July 2008 (UTC)
 * Yes, I agree with Powers view. However, I've added some sources to the article, which can help other editors and the article's creator to do what he suggests. Voceditenore (talk) 12:55, 1 July 2008 (UTC)

Hi - this is the original author. i have tried to follow your advice by improving format of footnotes and adding a bunch of references, including some more reviews and also books on same topic. i must have done something wrong, for page is now a mess, with footnotes and references intermixed and repeated, and most of my new ones not showing, and I couldn't get back in to fix it. waldenpond (talk) 15:29, 1 July 2008 (UTC)Rosedora

Criticism
I have not read this book, so I figure I'm in the target audience for this article. Unfortunately, the article comes across as highly biased, and also suffers from severe structural problems.

The abundance of extremely short paragraphs makes the article difficult to follow. The information is presented in a very meandering and rambling fashion. Quotations are frequently used, but are given little context. I'd call the article borderline incoherent. It could probably be improved by summarizing David Mamet's argument in two to four paragraphs that also outline the structure of the book. As it is, the thesis or narrative of the book is difficult to detect, although its title provides a substantial hint.

It seems that Mamet's primary claim is that Jews who are critical of Israel are only critical because they hate themselves. Whether or not I am correct in calling that his main point, it apparently forms a significant part of his argument. Needless to say, that is an extremely controversial idea, and one which many Jews would find deeply insulting. It is equally controversial and potentially insulting that Mamet charges all non-Jewish critics of Israel with anti-semitism. However, rather than acknowledging the inflammatory nature of Mamet's claims, the article's tone is reverent. Loaded and emotional language is used, such as, "He decries the hypocrisy that won’t admit this truth..." At times, the language borders on the poetic: "In the lavish bar mitzvah, Mamet sees the sin of the golden calf: in the absence of God, lapsed Jews worship Man, power, gold. It is self-worship, the idolatry of human power." I think the greatest affront is that the last three paragraphs are presented as factual, rather than representative of Mamet's controversial opinions!

I hate to criticize the article so harshly, and I apologize to those who have contributed to it. Nevertheless, the severe POV problems desperately need to be corrected, and the structure needs a complete overhaul.

Also, I'm pretty new to Wikipedia formatting, so I'm sorry if I messed anything up on this page. Bluemonkee (talk) 13:07, 9 February 2009 (UTC)


 * I completely agree with you. This article makes no attempt at all to present a balanced view of the book. Nor is it an acceptable Wikipedia article. As was stated before, this article should be primarily about what other reliable, verifiable, sources - independent of Mamet - have said about the work - not an original summary of what's in the work (by its very nature selective and opened to bias). But that message doesn't seem to have got through. Then, a series of editing mistakes by several editors left the article in a mess, plus added a "Press Quotes" section with cherry-picked quotes all in favour of the book, with no link to the original context in which they appeared. Then to top it all off, another editor, for some unexplained reason, summarily removed all links to reviews of the book, including ones that were highly critical of it. I'm going to re-add them here so someone can attempt to re-write this article. As it stands, it's inappropriate original research and should be deleted or redirected to David Mamet
 * David Margolick, Maybe I Am Chopped Liver, (Review of The Wicked Son), New York Times, November 5, 2006.
 * Abigail Radoszkowicz, Rites and wrongs, Jerusalem Post, November 16, 2006.
 * Shaun Smith, The only good Jew is a very angry Jew, Toronto Star, April 1, 2007
 * Tom Teicholz, David Mamet has one question—for the wicked son, The Jewish Journal, November 9, 2006
 * Voceditenore (talk) 15:25, 9 February 2009 (UTC)

I find it highly peculiar that the author of this article refers to "defenses of Israel that are full of facts, such as those by Alan Dershowitz in The Case for Israel". Dershowitz's "Case for Israel" has been entirely discredited by reputable scholars, and has been shown to be rife with plagiarism and falsification of sources. This is an obvious extreme POV reference to a biased and unreliable source which completely discredits this article. 76.173.75.227 (talk) 02:33, 4 February 2010 (UTC)