The Failure of Multiculturalism
Jerry Seinfeld got it right when he praised the black-and-white cookie on Seinfeld: “Two races of flavor living side by side in harmony. . . . If people would only look to the cookie, all our problems would be solved.”
And what would happen if that 1994 episode of the show, “The Dinner Party,” aired today? I assume Jerry would find himself widely denounced as racially insensitive, and NBC would get very nervous, not that it would even allow such an episode to air today.
Seinfeld emphasized the importance of getting some vanilla and some chocolate in each bite: fusion, as opposed to separatism, was Jerry’s vision of cookie fellowship. Today, fusion cuisine may be a hot trend, but it also faces the nightsticks of the cultural-appropriation police. Does food bring us together or highlight our differences? The question arises in a light, cute feel-good dramedy, Abe, that sets out to applaud the bridge-building properties of food but winds up doing the opposite, seemingly without its director even being aware.
Abe (which is being released digitally and via VOD services) is sure to attract attention over at Anthony Weiner and Huma Abedin’s place: It’s about a 12-year-old kid (played by Noah Schapp of Stranger Things) who is being raised in a secular Brooklyn household where the mother’s side of the family are Israeli Jews and the father’s side are Palestinian Muslims. The parents want no part of Middle Eastern feuds and have done what generations of previous Americans have done: raise their kid as simply an American. Even the title of the film is a declaration of neutrality: “Abe,” the boy’s preferred handle, evades the question of whether he is “Ibrahim,” as his Palestinian grandparents think of him, or “Abraham,” his name to his Israeli relatives.
The parents want Abe to be neither Muslim nor Jewish; the boy’s father even serves him a pork sandwich. Yet Abe wants to be both Muslim and Jewish — to have two reasons to reject that pork. He announces that he wants a bar mitzvah even as he fasts for Ramadan. This makes no sense to either side — sorry, it’s one or the other, the grandparents tell him — but Abe is applying foodie principles to his identity. His true religion is cuisine. He’s already an advanced cook who loves to merge cuisines of different ethnicities in inventive ways and flourishes under the tutelage of an Afro-Brazilian chef, Chico (Seu George), who runs a popular street booth selling delectables on the Brooklyn waterfront.
The message of Abe is that food brings us together: What’s more fun than wacky mashups like Chinese food in a taco? This kind of melting-pot thinking is characteristic of Chico and his compatriots from the famously inclusive Brazil. The Brazilians come from various racial and ethnic groups, but there are no cultural barriers among them, either interpersonally or in the food they cook. The only rule is that whatever tastes good together belongs together.
Yet at home, Abe’s grandparents can’t keep their politics away from the dinner table, where things have a tendency to get huffy. “You’re occupying our land,” and all that. Abe’s plan to use his culinary talents to heal rifts turns out to be disastrous at a Thanksgiving feast that intends to celebrate both Palestinian and Israeli traditions yet serves only to remind everyone about the various sources of disputation back in the Middle East. Charges of cultural appropriation fly.
Directed by a Brazilian, Fernando Grostein Andrade, and written by two Palestinian-Americans, Lameece Issaq and Jacob Kade, Abe boxes itself into a corner it can’t get out of, so the hurried third act amounts to a cop-out that avoids the conflict. No one in the film realizes this, but Abe would have been better off if, instead of a multicultural feast, he had presented for Thanksgiving a buffet of desultory mashed potatoes, watery corn, and insipid squash to go with bland turkey. The way to achieve peace, on this all-American holiday, would have been to serve up a robustly inoffensive all-American meal that everyone could quietly pretend to like.
As Abe does the opposite, Abe delivers an unintended seminar in how bristling multiculturalism tears people apart; we shouldn’t break into factions when we break bread. So an upbeat film turns dispiriting as it reminds us that Mideast-style tribal thinking increasingly gets attached to food. With their sensitivity to cultural appropriation and squabbling about who holds an ancestral claim to which delicacy, Abe’s grandparents sound like nothing so much as Oberlin students.
