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American Jews evidently want to hear that lesson, but not necessarily because it is true. In fact, the most revealing aspect of the Leo Frank boomlet is that it comes at a time when antisemitism is waning, when pluralistic America accepts Jews, and when the most bilious friction involving Jews is between Jews themselves. Now that antisemitism no longer afflicts daily life for American Jews -- precisely because it no longer does so -- the memory of antisemitism serves as a balm for intra-Jewish tension on such issues as intermarriage, conversion standards and the peace process in Israel. If American Jews still had to worry not only about lynch mobs but the exclusionary policies of law firms, country clubs, choice neighborhoods and Ivy League colleges, as they did for the first half of this century, then they wouldn't get so perversely sentimental about the Frank case.

The Anti-Defamation League, an organization that exists to combat antisemitism, recently reported that such bigotry is subsiding among all Americans except for blacks. The ADL's director, Abraham Foxman, took the extraordinary step of publicly urging Jews to halt the vitriolic rhetoric of their internal debates. The American Jewish Committee, meanwhile, is considering shifting some of its attention and resources from Jewish-Christian relations to intra-Jewish relations.

Far from facing the implacable hatred that the Frank case manifested, American Jews are now demonstrably embraced by society as a whole. Congress now contains 34 Jews, two of whom, Sens. Frank Lautenberg, D-N.J., and Joseph Lieberman, D-Conn., are so comfortable with their identity that they refer to one another by their Yiddish names, Feyvl and Yossel. Jews are intermarrying at a rate surpassing 50 percent. "Seinfeld" was a hit even in Idaho. And contemporary Atlanta, far from the cauldron of white supremacy depicted in "Parade," boasts a rapidly growing Jewish population with its own synagogues, day schools, publications -- and rifts. Last year, the Jewish community there requested that the American Jewish Committee send an outside mediator to oversee a series of private discussions between polarized rabbis.

"It's almost a form of nostalgia," Joseph Rackman, the Manhattan attorney dispatched to lead those sessions, says of the Frank vogue. "It was nice and easy when the goyim was the enemy. That made it easy to know who your enemies were. But today if you're mad, who are you mad at? America is so inviting that the 'enemy' is a good."

Unable to reconcile the extreme flanks of rampant assimilation and rising fundamentalism, American Jewry is looking to a historically proven unifier in the form of antisemitism. When rabbi and historian Arthur Hertzberg surveyed the then-current scholarship on antisemitism in a 1993 essay for the New York Review of Books, he wrote, "In recent centuries, as Jews have been more and more divided among themselves, people such as the regretful apostate Heinrich Heine and the completely assimilated Theodore Herzl had only one cause in common with believing Jews: resistance to anti-Semites. Much of the support for the Jewish 'defense agencies' comes from Jews who have no other significant connection with the Jewish community. More important, a great many Jews really do believe that there is some unique, intransigent element in anti-Semitism which sets it apart from other prejudices and makes it immune to improvements in social conditions."

Both Mamet and Uhry in their recent writings attest to these beliefs. And both men's treatment of the Frank case departs in some telling ways from the way it was depicted in another modern version, the 1987 television miniseries "The Murder of Mary Phagan," which was based on a story by novelist Larry McMurtry, who is not Jewish.

Mamet has made a well-publicized return to observant Judaism in the last several years. This growing faith has coincided with a despairing view of Jewish life in America in his work. The strain first became prominent in his 1991 film "Homicide," in which Joe Mantegna portrayed a Jewish detective who endured discrimination from his colleagues in the station house and discovered anti-Jewish violence outside it. The 1997 Broadway production of Mamet's one-act drama "The Disappearance of the Jews" as part of a three-play bill collectively titled "The Old Neighborhood" found its central character, an author-surrogate named Bobby Gould, regretting his interfaith marriage. In one particularly blunt exchange, Bobby talks about his wife to an old friend who is also Jewish:

BOBBY: Well, listen to this, Joe, because I want to tell you what she says to me one night: "If you've been persecuted so long, eh, you must have brought it on yourself."

JOE: She said that?

BOBBY: Yes.

JOE: Wait a second. If we've been oppressed so long we must be doing it.

BOBBY: Yes.

In contrast to the conflicted Bobby, Joe has married a Jew and joined a synagogue. He speaks longingly of shtetlach and pushcarts, the stuff of ghetto life abroad and in an earlier America, and he harbors no illusions of this country welcoming its Jews. Of his late father, apparently a Holocaust survivor, Joe recalls: "I used to say, 'Papa, you're here now, it's over.' He would say, 'It will happen in your lifetime.' And I used to think he was a fool. But I know he was right."

In the fictionalized Leo Frank of "The Old Religion," Mamet has in a sense fused Bobby and Joe into a single character. As Frank thinks back on his life prior to the murder charge, and specifically to a day's outing with some of Atlanta's assimilated Jewish gentry, Mamet writes, "Was ever a man in such a happy position as this? The coffee? The friends? The breeze from the lake, the breakfast? No. A man could live all the years allocated to the earth and not see a more lovely morning."

It's not just Atlanta that Frank in his naiveté extols; it's America. So when American justice convicts Frank, he in turn convicts America. Democracy is nothing but "the rule of the Mob" [capitals Mamet's]. Converting to Christianity would no sooner save him, Frank realizes, than it did the Marranos of Inquisition-era Spain. Frank takes solace only in the recovery of his Jewish identity. While in prison, he learns Hebrew, studies Torah, comes to regret having violated the Sabbath by wearing a watch. The deepening of his Jewish identity, then, is the outgrowth of his persecution by Christians -- the upside, one might say, of the blood libel.

Where Mamet's work is caustic, Alfred Uhry's is usually sweet-tempered. He won the Pulitzer Prize and national fame for "Driving Miss Daisy," a sentimental memory play about the bond between a Jewish widow in Atlanta, based upon Uhry's mother, and her black chauffeur. If anything, the drama too neatly finessed the complicated ties between Jewish families, who deemed themselves racially enlightened, and their black servants. Then, with "The Last Night of Ballyhoo," his Tony Award-winning 1997 comedy, Uhry turned his forgiving vision to the rancor between Atlanta's German Jews, with their Christmas trees and ham dinners, and the newly arrived Eastern European Orthodox. The courtship of Sunny Freitag and Joe Farkas, a source of humorous tension for much of the play, ends doubly happily: The two not only marry but bring their feuding relatives together for Sabbath prayers at the final curtain. Not coincidentally, Uhry set the play in 1939. The implication, of course, is that Atlanta's fractious Jews, and America's, have no choice but to settle their differences when the Nazi blitzkreig is racing across Europe.

That theme of unity through oppression fully animates "Parade," as Uhry himself made clear in an essay for the New York Times. "They blended discreetly and successfully into the Southern way of life," he wrote of Atlanta's Jews. "But the Frank case changed that. Suddenly, they were just Jews. It was Europe all over again. Their windows were broken and their lives were threatened. Never mind that many of them had been in Georgia for 60 years. Never mind that their fathers had fought and, in some instances, died for the Glorious Lost Cause."

Uhry and Mamet are both historically accurate in their portrayal of the virulent antisemitism of Atlanta during the Frank case. But the miniseries "The Murder of Mary Phagan," with four hours of broadcast time at its disposal, went into much greater factual detail than did either "Parade" or "The Old Religion" while establishing a markedly different tone.

To begin with, the film made Frank only a supporting player. The title character, of course, is Phagan, and the central figure is Gov. Slaton, played by Jack Lemmon. Far more than the Uhry and Mamet works, "The Murder of Mary Phagan" emphasizes the class resentment that poor, once-rural whites like Phagan's family felt at the Northerners for whom they labored in urban factories. On the other hand, the movie presents an almost mannerly lynching scene and altogether omits a previous attack in which an inmate slashed Frank's throat. And because it ends with Georgia's official, albeit belated, exoneration of Frank, it strikes a closing note of justice.

Did it make a difference that "The Murder of Mary Phagan" was not the product of Jewish artists while "Parade" and "The Old Religion" were? One cannot help but think so. And if so, then what does it mean that Mamet and Uhry -- and Oney and the Pegasus company -- have plunged more than 80 years into the past to revisit an atrocity?

Historical memory is central to Jewish identity, and in remembering the lynching of Leo Frank, American Jews are making the same kind of tribal connection they make in remembering the Holocaust, the pogroms, the Exodus story. But they are using the past less to explicate the present than to obscure it. At one level, who can blame them? The present has a body of ultra-Orthodox rabbis declaring Reform and Conservative branches "not Judaism at all"; the president of the Jewish Theological Seminary, a Conservative institution, attacking the legitimacy of Israel's Chief Rabbinate; a right-wing Jew placing a bomb in a Florida synagogue to protest a speech there by Shimon Peres, an architect of the Oslo accords. The examples go on and on.

Even brilliant art, though, has its limits as a palliative. As Joseph Rackman of the American Jewish Committee put it, "Today, if you wrote a play or a book and had a more-observant Jew marrying a less-observant Jew -- or a convert -- how could you have a happy ending?"
SALON | Jan. 12, 1999

Samuel G. Freedman, a frequent contributor to Salon, is a professor of journalism at Columbia University. He is working on a book about the schisms in modern American Jewry.