Stewart railed with honesty against hypocrisy

By Rabbi Ben Kamin

Rabbi Ben Kamin
Rabbi Ben Kamin

ENCINITAS, California — He grew up in New Jersey being bullied as a Jew and retains little religious identification.  His last name was Leibowitz but he changed it to his middle name, Stuart, and was more or less estranged from his Slavic father.  The strain was driven by ethnic complexities.  Jon Stewart is like most of us: uncomfortable in his own skin, looking for a place to alight.

The cosmic Johnny Carson cloaked his personal torment and considerable rage with cornhusker antics and fancy suits.  We were able to sense that Jon Stewart has a deep, churning inner life dark enough to make his postmodern sarcasm authentic and urgent.  Carson and even Jay Leno perfumed their neuroses with gestures and gimmicks.  We looked at Jon Stewart and we saw mirrored our terminal disgust with politicians and our gnawing dread of jihadists.

Stewart worked at Woolworth’s, tended bars, played soccer, and dabbled in leftist texts and philosophies.   He has been a puppeteer, a busboy, and a pot head.  He got by at the College of William and Mary.  He used his razor-sharp sarcasm and humor to camouflage a significant amount of self-hate; he has often used the word “weirdo” to describe himself.

Jon Stewart has always been an honest enigma and his departure as emcee of The Daily Show this week is a real blow to what’s left of the unaffected in American television and commentary.  This brilliant, lively host, author, and satirist lacked any guile.  He has serviced a cynical era with an uncommon amalgam of insight, anger, self-mockery, and genuine grief for a declining moral culture.  He simply doesn’t pretend his pain.

Decidedly unlike the majority of plastic television talking heads, Jon Stewart is real.  His adolescent and college passage through the Vietnam and Watergate epochs truly skewed his view of American exceptionalism.  His eyes are hollowed with disenchantment; his mouth is pursed with anger; his expression is sullen with the knowledge that we just aren’t what we used to be.

I liked it when Stewart chose to basically shut down recently, in the aftermath of the horrific, racial mass murder at “Mother Emanuel” Church in Charleston.  “I have nothing to say,” he murmured, reaching not for the jocular but for what was left of our hearts.  It was a trademark moment of his anguished eloquence.

Something tells me that Jon Stewart is generally out of words and so he speaks for all of us.  Godspeed.

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Rabbi Kamin is an author and freelance writer.  You may comment to him at ben.kamin@sdjewishworld.com