SOURCE: Hoberman, J. Review of Homicide, by David Mamet. Sight and Sound 1, no. 7 (November 1991): 15-16.

In the following review, Hoberman focuses on the portrayal of tensions between Jews and African Americans in Homicide.

With the unselfconscious absorption of someone working something out for himself, David Mamet has concocted an urban policier that has a deracinated Jewish detective searching for his identity in a grim world of tribal violence. Homicide ostensibly pits Jews against blacks and Jews against neo-Nazis, but its underlying vision is that of Jews against the world. Mamet is a master of unpleasantness, but his latest is awful in a particularly timely way. Perhaps inspired by the new and widespread post-Gulf War concern for Israel reported among American Jews, as well as by the resurgence of political anti-Semitism in the former Soviet empire, Homicide opens in New York after a summer of black-Jewish tensions.

Times Square...