There was something bracing when playwright David Mamet came out as a Jew. Not that he ever hid it, but starting about two decades ago, the Pulitzer Prize winner began writing about Jewish life with the muscularity and pungency that marked his plays and movies. His 1991 film Homicide even put the Jewish question at the center of its plot: An assimilated, self-denying Jewish cop is drawn into an investigation that uncovers a Jewish terrorist cell that fights neo-Nazis.

It would take another column to explain why committed Jews need celebrities to validate their own Jewishness. But Mamet’s identity isn’t the usual “I’m so proud of my Jewish roots” testimony of so many celebrity Jews. It’s been a journey that has paralleled his mainstream career, inspiring essays, a novel, a children’s book, and even a collection of Torah commentaries written with Boston Rabbi Lawrence Kushner.

Mamet’s engagement offered the promise that, by combining a Hollywood worldliness with a deep study of Jewish tradition, he might map out new territory, perhaps invent a Jewish language for those disenchanted with the synagogues and Hebrew schools they grew up in.

Fat &%$#* chance, as a Mamet character might say. In his new book The Wicked Son: Anti-Semitism, Self-hatred, and the Jews, Mamet seems to be channeling that bitter, disdainful Sunday school teacher who would ridicule your Hebrew accent while muttering “a pox on Columbus.” It is a jeremiad with many targets: Jews who refuse to take their Judaism seriously, Jews who refuse to take anti-Semitism seriously, and gentiles who refuse to agree with him about Israel. If that sounds like a book by Alan Dershowitz, don’t be fooled: So angry is Mamet in this book, so repulsed by those who find their “religion and race repulsive,” that he comes off like the depressed relative in Richard Lewis’ joke, who sits around the house listening to the soundtrack of The Pawnbroker.

In The Wicked Son — the reference is to the Passover seder and the child who distances himself from the family ritual — Mamet creates a strawmensch that he calls the “emancipated Jew.” Having embraced the majority culture, this emancipated Jew asserts that “all Jews are risible, corrupt, sordid, misguided, or cruel.” Such contempt for one’s own is indistinguishable from the gentile’s anti-Semitism. “I say that all objections to the race and religion, as race or religion, by Jews, are examples of anti-Semitism and traceable back…to the common and effective proposition ‘all Jews are evil,’” he writes (emphasis in original).

Phew. The problem with this contention is contained in the word “all.” I have nothing but contempt for professional apostates like Noam Chomsky and Norman G. Finkelstein, but I bet even they can count a few Jews whom they wouldn’t consider risible and corrupt. (It’s telling that Mamet’s model for an emancipated Jew is a character from a novel, Roth’s Letting Go, and not a real person. That’s because he is not recognizable as a real person.)

As for “all objections to the race and religion” being anti-Semitic: If you removed from Jewish communal life arguments among Jews who find fault with other Jews’ beliefs and practices, you’d end up with — I don’t know, Presbyterianism, maybe. We Jews are a contemptuous lot and save some of our juiciest contempt for each other. That doesn’t mean we hate ourselves or our Judaism.

But let’s say we do. Let’s say our suburban upbringings, uninspiring Jewish educations, and childhood traumas at the hands of cheek-pinching great aunts led us to put Judaism behind us. What’s baffling is why Mamet cannot find a measure of empathy for persons who find neither solace nor stimulation in a “six-thousand-year-old tradition.” Instead, Mamet lumps such people in with anti-Semites, calling their disdain or indifference indistinguishable from “racial prejudice.”

As odd as it is to say about one of our most prolific authors, Mamet’s problem is a lack of imagination. In reducing self-hatred to anti-Semitism (in fact, in even using the word self-hatred without irony or qualification), Mamet is unable or unwilling to imagine why a Jew born in the United States in the 20th century — in fact, a Jew born on planet Earth after 1803 — might cast aside his or her Jewish identity.

In fact, Mamet’s description of his Hollywood life makes abundantly clear why someone might look elsewhere for the “thrill of belonging.” That’s Mamet’s phrase, and it comes from a chapter in which he describes the profound sense of community he feels when among show people. What has he found on movie sets? “Filial piety, humor, language, a responsibility to learn and instruct, a sense of timelessness and history.”

Whether he knows it or not, Mamet has just described a religious community. But Mamet doesn’t use this insight to empathize with the assimilated Jew who finds his own “thrill of belonging” on a college faculty, or in a political movement, or with a town soccer league. Instead, in the very next chapter, he accuses the “acquiescent apikoros” — apostate — of cowardice and sloth.

Mamet’s slim volume wouldn’t be of concern if his were the only voice of “traditionalism” writing dismissively of the “disengaged.” I hear the same tone among Jewish educators who scold the synagogue movements for their lack of “doctrinal rigor” and who berate assimilated Jews for the “selfish” choices they have made.

Their anger, however, won’t change a single mind. What will bring “emancipated Jews” back to Judaism are the sorts of communities of which Mamet writes so evocatively, where “love of community,” “love of knowledge,” and “the joy of immersion in history” combine to create “the tribe of which one dreams.”

When the wicked son asks, “What is the meaning of this tradition to you?” can there be a more compelling answer than that?