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How Philip Roth invented a myth called ‘Philip Roth’
Steven J. Zipperstein set to work on his own biography of Philip Roth before anyone knew that Roth’s authorized biography would be pulled from shelves after accusations of sexual misconduct by its author, Blake Bailey. Zipperstein and I first spoke when he was wrapping up his draft. He was pondering Roth’s legacy. He wanted to discuss a Roth-like character I had put in my novel, How I Won a Nobel Prize, in part because he was surprised to discover a younger writer riffing on Roth so openly.
Zipperstein’s book, Philip Roth: Stung By Life, which is part of Yale’s Jewish Lives series, distinguishes itself with an approach that focuses more on Roth’s intellectual and artistic development than on a comprehensive reconstruction of his sexual history. Though Roth was devoutly anti-religious, Jewishness is a major theme that provides a surprisingly sturdy handle with which to grasp the family ties and cultural traditions that remained Roth’s persistent obsessions on the page, even as he resisted them in life.
Zipperstein, who is a professor of Jewish history and culture at Stanford, delivers an admiring, thorough, and swift account of an immensely single-minded writer’s unabating struggles with ambition, romance and the politics of his time. The book also has some fascinating scoops‚ major interviews and materials to which Zipperstein alone had access. We had a lot to talk about, and this interview has been compressed for length and clarity.
Julius Taranto: Start with the obvious: Why did you devote so much time and thought to a Philip Roth biography when there were rival biographical efforts that you could not have known would go up in flames?
Steven Zipperstein: Roth first reached out to me after I published my book, Rosenfeld’s Lives, and we were in touch intermittently for years. I was persuaded that there was really a book to be written, that I could actually do something new, when I discovered the Yeshiva University tape and came to realize the vast discrepancy between what Roth actually experienced and what he believed he experienced and then recorded on the page.
The Yeshiva University tape is one of one of several remarkable bits of journalism on your part, unraveling a remarkable bit of self-mythologizing on Roth’s part.
As part of its 75th anniversary celebration in 1962, Yeshiva University sponsored a panel about the ethnic responsibilities of a writer. Roth, who had at this point published only Goodbye, Columbus, was a featured speaker alongside Ralph Ellison. What Roth remembers — he devotes an entire chapter to this incident in his memoir — is that it was an inquisition, the audience hated him. As a result he decided he wasn’t going to write about Jews anymore and devoted three excruciating years to his next novel in which there are no Jews, and it’s a defining moment in his life.
I learned that the event was taped. Roth had threatened the university with a lawsuit if it was published or aired, but he agreed to give me access. By the time I acquired it, Roth was already dying in the hospital, so the last conversation I had with him was about this tape. It contradicts his memory in every conceivable way. The audience loved him and laughed at his jokes. Those who disliked him rushed to the stage once the program ended. And their criticism was all that he recalled.
I now see Roth’s purported rejection by the Jewish mainstream as a tale he invented (and earnestly believed) in order to justify his preexisting sense of rage and alienation.
Rage was a crucial factor in Roth’s fiction from the beginning. One of the people who contacted me, partly because of the implosion of Blake Bailey’s biography, and because of the apparent difference between my life and Blake’s, was Maxine Groffsky, who hadn’t spoken to anyone before about her relationship with Roth. They’d dated for years, and she was in many ways the model for Brenda Patimkin, the girlfriend in Goodbye, Columbus. But, at least as I was able to reconstruct it, Maxine was little like Brenda Patimkin.
She wasn’t rich or high status, and Roth was never especially subservient to her, the way Neil Klugman is to Brenda.
Still, in fiction Roth gives us Brenda Patimkin. That’s a projection of his rage and ambition.
Where do you think that came from?
I wrestled in the book not to be reductionist. I try to suggest that to understand Roth, you really need to understand the interplay between Roth and mother. Her fastidiousness was through the roof. Roth and his brother Sandy wouldn’t even use the bathrooms in friends’ houses because none were as clean as theirs. That’s a category of a very special kind. It’s a feature of Roth’s life from the outset to figure out what it means for him to really want to satisfy her and at the same time to be aware of what Benjamin Taylor calls his “inner anarchy.”
Mickey Sabbath – a rageful, overweight, unkempt, disgraced, perverted puppeteer – seems like the character through which Roth expressed his “inner anarchy” in its least-filtered form.
This man who engages in daily exercise, who’s trim, who’s incredibly disciplined in his work habits: Mickey Sabbath is what he imagines he is on the inside. In Sabbath’s Theater, he’s undressing himself. He’s allowing the reader to come closer to all that he fears he could be, the person who he knows exists and that he keeps hidden. It’s a book very much in conversation with Maletta Pfeiffer.
They had an on-and-off affair for more than twenty years, and she’s the model for Drenka in Sabbath’s Theater.
I think Maletta more than anyone else becomes privy to Roth’s secrets because he’s convinced that he’s met someone who has an all but identical attitude toward life, towards sensuality and sexuality, and who for the longest time he greatly admires.
But he’s wrong, isn’t he? You spent time with Maletta, and she showed you her diaries and her unsent emails to Roth — documents she never showed to any other biographer or journalist. I’m going to quote from your book, because I think this has real importance for how we interpret the portrait of mutual sexual ecstasy in Sabbath’s Theater. In one of her draft emails in 1995, Maletta wrote: “All the things you did to me. You made me go and talk to whores. . . . That never excited me. I just did it to please you. . . . I never liked it. All the things I did with you. I cannot even write about them. What you put in the book.” It’s quite dark to reconsider Sabbath’s Theater with the understanding that the model for Drenka was often not as enthusiastic as Roth believed her to be.
In contrast to the accusations against Blake Bailey, there’s no evidence of any coercive behavior on Roth’s part in his sexual life – but it’s clear that his sense of Maletta was, I think, not altogether accurate.
She’s romanticized, both in fiction and in Roth’s mind. This relates to a theme that I picked up on in your description of the arc of his career. Alongside his ambivalent relationship to Jewishness and family life, there is a parallel ambivalence between sentimentality and irony. Early in his career, he is so critical of Jewish sentimentalists like Leon Uris and Herman Wouk. But he has his own version of sentimentality emerge later in his career, particularly in American Pastoral and The Plot Against America. He becomes nostalgic for his parents’ world, for FDR, for the sense of moral security that he imagines they had.
He wrestled with nostalgia. He hated nostalgia, and he hated the strengths of family life. He is seeking his whole life to be extraordinary. But he also fantasizes, overtly in Portnoy’s Complaint, about the joy of not needing to strive, the joy of being mediocre. Roth deeply admires his father and wishes on some level that he was like him but also knows in every orb of his body that he wouldn’t actually want to be like him, committed and monogamous and dutiful. He writes from that ambivalence time and time again. And I think, as I suggest in the book, that’s why Zuckerman is the stand-in that stays with Roth, in a contrast to Kepesh, who is more one-sided and selfish and disposable.
I sensed your special affection for The Ghost Writer. Its portrait of writing within domesticity is extraordinarily well-rounded. Perhaps in response to criticism from Irving Howe, Roth maintains a balance in The Ghost Writer that he wasn’t trying to maintain in other works. And you argue, persuasively, that Lonoff is not really a portrait of Bernard Malamud, as is commonly thought, but is much more profoundly Roth’s projection of his own future.
Roth worked assiduously against balance and proportion in many of his other books. Zuckerman inhabits Roth’s ambivalence, and Lonoff represents a future that Roth doesn’t want. Roth fears obscurity. He doesn’t want a body like Lonoff’s, but he fears down deep that this actually might end up being his body. That Hope might end up being his wife. He’s able to face his own terror, in this book and others, in ways that I find extraordinary, especially since beyond his writing desk he doesn’t manage that nearly as successfully.
You surface Roth’s notion that politics is the great generalizer, and literature the great particularizer, and that at a fundamental level, they really cannot abide one another. “How can you be an artist and renounce the nuance? But how can you be a politician and allow the nuance?” Did Roth have political commitments?
He’s a political liberal in the Clintonesque sense, without using it as a curse word. But as is true for many aspects of his life, he’s willing to challenge his presuppositions. That’s something he certainly does in American Pastoral, which probably satisfied readers like Norman Podhoretz rather too much. He does something not dissimilar in The Counterlife with regard to Israel. His own inclinations are dovish. That book was all the more powerful for me for its capacity to portray with a degree of sympathy extreme Israeli figures that Roth politically deplored. One of the characteristics of Roth that I ended up admiring the most was the way in which he so often excoriated his own commitments, challenged them, and exposed them for their own weaknesses.
He tells Benjamin Taylor that he cares intensely about his “moral reputation.” That not something that one expects from the author of Portnoy’s Complaint or Sabbath’s Theater. How would you describe the values that Roth wanted to be associated with? It can’t be mainstream civility.
What he values above all is freedom as he understands it. And what he’s hoping a biographer will do is to portray him as someone who spends his life exploring the wages of freedom and the underbelly of unfreedom – hence his political commitment to liberalism, and hence his deploring ideologues who disparage freedom. He’s immensely preoccupied with his reputation, but he also takes incredible risks with it. He is insistent that those risks are unavoidable for a writer and that to avoid them means inevitable mediocrity.
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I was born after 9/11. I still carry the memories of that day.
Earlier this week, I was talking with my mother over the phone about her experience on 9/11. She walked me through the familiar parts — how she was in our Upper West Side apartment when she learned about the attacks from a relative, how she went to the garage to get the car so they could drive to a friend’s house upstate once she realized the attacks were acts of terror. There were still hijacked planes in the air, and she worried New York City might be targeted again. Then, she said, “This part is going to make me cry.”
I hadn’t remembered what came next, but suddenly it came back to me. “Oh no, me too,” I said.
While she waited for my father to come back uptown from his office in the Financial District, she stopped inside a fire station across from the garage. Inside was a lone firefighter, who’d stayed behind to man the station while the rest of his company was inside the towers. He was watching the news on television, and my mom stood next to him, watching too, when the towers fell.
“We just lost so many men,” he said.
I wasn’t there when it happened; I wasn’t even alive. But I’d heard this story before, I’d walked dozens of times past that same fire station, which now has a plaque commemorating the seven firefighters who died on 9/11. Hearing the story again on the phone, I found myself walking down the streets of Washington D.C., bawling.
I’m 23, born a year-and-a-half after 9/11. Most Americans my age learned about the attacks in school, as history. I’m part of the 16% who learned through family or friends.
The discovery happened by accident, when I was in kindergarten. My mom and I were in a children’s store on the Upper West Side, when we started flipping through a picture book about the history of New York City. Most of the book was unremarkable, but the end was unexpected: a scene of the smoldering twin towers.
I forget what exactly happened next, but here’s what I do remember: My mom was upset that the shop hadn’t provided a warning about the book’s end, and I was confused about why she was upset. I was five, too young to understand the image and never one to let a question go unanswered; I must have pestered her until she offered up an explanation.
She hadn’t been prepared to tell me about terrorism. She’d been evading the topic for some time, telling half-truths to avoid it. When I’d ask her why we had to take our shoes off in line at the airport, she’d just say it was to make sure no one had anything dangerous, leaving out the part about how a man had tried to get on a flight with bombs hidden in his shoes.
“9/11 is a huge thing for a parent to have to tell a kid about,” my mom told me this week. “You were a happy kid, and I didn’t want you to get scared or traumatized.”
The events, and impacts, of that day slowly unfolded for me as the years passed. I learned that my father had watched from Battery Park as the South Tower fell; he ran westward as plumes of smoke billowed toward him. I learned that my parents had friends who’d died in the towers, one of whom was the father of a boy I grew up with. I remember going to the 9/11 Memorial and Museum when it opened in 2014, feeling sick as I watched footage of people jumping out of the towers.
The New York Times recently interviewed dozens of Gen Z Americans about 9/11. I was struck by how disconnected many felt from the event. “It’s hard to feel sad about something that you don’t remember,” said Annika Heegaard, a 25-year-old now living in New York.
But for me, 9/11 doesn’t feel quite so far away. By now I’ve lived through other mass casualty events, like the Parkland shooting and the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks. But 9/11 is the only tragedy that my family members had such a direct connection to. “It was devastating,” my mom said.
I think the reason I can remember the exact moment I found out about 9/11 is because it changed my view of the world. I remember being almost unable to comprehend that anyone would do what the hijackers did. I wasn’t, as my mom feared, traumatized by learning about the attacks; I didn’t fear for my safety each day. But the knowledge was in some ways a loss of innocence — a discovery that people could do awful things and that the world wasn’t as safe a place as I had assumed.
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The DSA’s latest win was not about Israel — and it hurts the Jewish community to insist it was
When Democratic socialist David Morales defeated the incumbent mayor of Providence, Brett Smiley, in a historic primary win this week in Rhode Island, the election quickly became part of a narrative that has been coalescing around progressive political wins in the last year — the election of Zohran Mamdani as mayor of New York City, Abdul El-Sayed’s primary win in Michigan, the sweep of DSA-backed candidates in New York City’s recent primaries. The idea is that this race was all about Israel — that it turned on a struggle between Zionists and pro-Palestinian activists.
A Jewish Telegraphic Agency story on Morales’s win features a quote from the founder of the Rhode Island-Israel Collaborative that Morales’s campaign was “fueled by pro-Palestinians and Israeli haters.” The founder of the far-right Rhode Island Coalition for Israel called some of Morales’ stances “anti-Israel and anti-Jewish.” Jewish Insider published a story the day before the primary headlined, “Antisemitism roils Providence mayoral race.” The Times of Israel’s story on the election is titled, “Jewish mayor of Providence loses Democratic primary to anti-Israel challenger.” (Smiley converted to Judaism in 2024, and made a controversial visit to Israel in 2025.)
But this narrative is false: Israel did not play a decisive role in this election. In reality, Morales was laser-focused on affordability, and — like most progressive candidates this year — rarely, if ever, brought up Israel unprompted. Indeed, the defining issue for the Morales campaign was not Israel, but rent stabilization.
Last April, Smiley vetoed legislation passed by Providence’s City Council to cap annual rent hikes at 4%. This ordinance is desperately needed: A recent study found that Providence is the least affordable city for renters in the country. Longtime residents are getting priced out, and essentially everyone who rents — and renters comprise 59% of the households in the city — understands that our trajectory is simply not sustainable.
By vetoing the most significant-ever attempt to bring this crisis under control, Smiley made this a race about a challenger fighting to make Providence affordable and an incumbent prioritizing his corporate donors, who gave Smiley a historically large $1.3 war chest for his campaign. (Morales had less than $300,000, largely from individual donors.)
This issue served as precisely the kind of defining contrast that pro-Israel Super PAC spending became in recent congressional elections elsewhere. Support from AIPAC has provided an impossible-to-obscure contrast to Democratic primary voters in races such as Illinois’s 9th Congressional District, New York’s 10th Congressional District, and Michigan’s Senate primary. But in Providence, the scandal wasn’t AIPAC donors — it was the wealthy developers and corporate landlords who funded Smiley’s campaign.
It is true that Morales criticized Smiley’s active participation in the Combat Antisemitism Movement, a project so Trumpian that the Jewish Federations of North America and Jewish Council for Public Affairs both left the group after it released a video claiming that diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts are antisemitic. Morales also came out in support of a ballot initiative that would require the City of Providence to divest from the debt of foreign countries “conducting ethnic cleansing, apartheid, illegal military occupation, or genocide,” as determined by U.S. and international law. Some of Morales’s supporters — and in particular some portion of his army of campaign volunteers — were undoubtedly motivated by an appreciation for Morales’s willingness to take a moral stance. But it simply wasn’t a top five, or even (by my estimation) a top 10 issue in this race.
And I don’t understand the inclination to claim otherwise. Certainly it doesn’t make sense for members of the Israel lobby; after all, having another election be lost due to voters’ anger over a politician’s fealty to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is not good for their political project. But more importantly, these allegations — particularly the false claim that this race was somehow “roiled” by antisemitism — are harmful to Rhode Island’s Jewish community as a whole.
Take, for example, the “antisemitism” referenced by Jewish Insider, which consisted, in total, of a few instances in which a Hitler mustache and devil horns were drawn on Smiley’s campaign signs. Of course, defacing political signs is never good, and Morales immediately condemned the vandalism. But as a Jewish former elected official who experienced actual antisemitism over the course of my time in Rhode Island politics, I have to laugh at the idea that this graffiti was antisemitic.
To compare someone to Hitler is basically to say they’re the worst person ever. It’s often a problematic comparison (because almost nobody is actually as evil as Hitler), but it’s not antisemitic to say, in effect, “Hitler was bad, and so is this other guy.” And vandals were drawing devil’s horns on pictures of Smiley years before he converted. In fact, I don’t think the average Providence voter even knows Smiley is Jewish; it’s certainly not an important part of his political identity, given that he literally wasn’t yet Jewish when he first won election to the mayor’s office in 2022, or during his prior run for the seat in 2014.
Antisemitism is a real and growing problem — in our country, and here in Rhode Island. Just a few years ago, dozens of swastika-brandishing neo-Nazis rallied a block from my home. Every time that cynical politicians cry wolf on this threat, they are minimizing its danger in the eyes of most people, making our community less prepared to respond to actual incidents of antisemitism when they occur.
Even worse, when some partisans of Israel claim that everyone who dares to say Israel is committing genocide and apartheid is an antisemite — that is, someone who hates all Jews — the implication is that Israel’s wars and violence against Palestinians are somehow projects undertaken by all Jews, rather than the crimes of a specific far-right government and its supporters. And if you repeat that message often enough, some people are going to start believing it — which certainly does not make me or my young Jewish sons safer.
David Morales ran on a pledge to build a Providence for all. “All” includes members of the Jewish community, many of whom — including myself, and Morales’s campaign manager and field director, to name just a few — are excited to support his vision. It is to no one’s benefit — least of all Providence’s Jews — to try to seed conflict and distrust in what should be a moment of profound hope and possibility for our whole city.
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Jewish and Muslim leaders avoided the hardest interfaith topic for years, and now face a ‘massive fault line’
It’s been a quarter century since a wave of distrust and violence against Muslims swept across America in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001 terror attacks. But in some pockets of New York City and across the U.S., Jewish neighbors extended a hand of friendship and an interfaith movement was reborn.
Dialogues turned into dinners. Dinners spawned theatrical collaborations. Collaborations turned out volunteers to feed the homeless and sent interfaith teams to Capitol Hill.
Still, as the Palestinian uprising known as the Second Intifada continued to unfold in the Middle East, even the most promising partnerships avoided the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
“We deliberately parked it on the side,” said Daisy Khan, the former executive director of American Society for Muslim Advancement and founder of the Women’s Islamic Initiative. “We called it the elephant in the room that none of us could handle.”
Now, 25 years after the terrorist attacks that inspired a movement, leaders realize that silence was a critical mistake.
As this year’s Jewish High Holidays, a time of remembrance and repentance, begin at sundown on the 25th anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks, American Jewish leaders are reflecting on mistakes made and words they wish they could take back, confronting rising antisemitism, and along with their longtime Muslim partners, asking: Where do we go from here?
“Rosh Hashanah is known as Yom Hazikaron, the day of remembrance,” said Rabbi Joshua Davidson of Manhattan’s Temple Emanu-El, adding that remembrance usually refers to the hope that God will remember the covenant with the Jewish people. “When you talk about a day of remembrance, you also talk about the experiences that have shaped us into who we are. 9/11 certainly is an experience that has shaped us into who we are. Anyone who lived in New York is forever changed by that day.”
Interfaith bridge-building
On Sept. 11, 2001, Davidson was a young associate rabbi at another Manhattan institution, Central Synagogue. Feeling otherwise helpless that morning as the towers fell, he headed straight to the nearby mosque on 55th Street to assure his Muslim neighbors that they would not be judged by the actions of the terrorists – his instinct born from years of interfaith dialogue already underway.
The same instinct led President George W. Bush to the Islamic Center of Washington D.C., a week later to proclaim, “Islam is peace.” But that perspective did not prevail in all corners.
Prominent evangelical figures condemned Islam as “evil and wicked.” Mosques were set ablaze, and the Justice Department in the three months after the attacks labeled nine murders as “possible hate crimes.” Despite the community’s fear, the term “Islamophobia” was not widely embraced, as if it was a product of Muslims’ imaginations.
“So many American Muslims were experiencing the anxiety that President Bush recognized right away,” Davidson told the Forward. “So 9/11 crystallized for many the importance of the work of interfaith bridge building … We can learn from one another. When the world becomes complicated and your own community is in jeopardy or is being targeted, you realize how valuable it is to have those friendships.”
Those existing friendships and the ground rules that had sustained them laid the foundation for the aftermath of Sept. 11 and propelled many individuals and groups working behind the scenes to publicly counter what seemed to be an anti-Muslim zeitgeist. While the previous approach to interfaith work had been intimate Shabbat dinners, Ramadan iftars, and discussion groups, the new approach involved rallies, live performances and large-scale programs.
On the morning of Sept. 12, Israeli cellist Udi Bar-David called someone with whom he had collaborated a few times – Majid Alsayegh, an Iraqi-born Muslim engineer and architect in Philadelphia. Determined to offer a constructive response, they formed a team and in Spring 2002 launched a nonprofit for creative intercultural exchanges.
“Because of the tensions of Muslim and Jewish, Arabic and Jewish communities, because of the violence, we felt we needed to speak up and do more,” Alsayegh told the Forward, “to help them understand that dialogue in many forms, including music, is much more powerful than shooting each other.”
Seeking to help audiences listen with less anger, more empathy, artists from B’nai Jeshurun, a synagogue on New York’s Upper West Side, teamed up with Methodists and Muslims to present hard truths gathered from more than 100 New Yorkers. The project titled “Same Difference” later became a documentary.
In the years that followed, connections became more purposeful and direct. In 2008, Rabbi Marc Schneier’s Foundation for Ethnic Understanding launched an annual Weekend of Twinning, which paired scores of synagogues and mosques to explore the parallels and similarities within their traditions. It also enabled them to compare notes about the discrimination each faced as religious minorities and band together to fight the hatred that targeted both.
Khan cherishes the time she spent in synagogues and the friendships she formed there.
“We had such deep ties and such deep relations we weren’t afraid to go to bat for one another,” Khan said. “I think those relationships have even served us to this day.”
‘A massive fault line’
Still, cracks began to show. In 2010, Khan and her husband at the time, Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, proposed Cordoba House, a mosque and community center in Lower Manhattan. Modeled after JCCs across the country and named for a city in Spain that once had been a center of peaceful coexistence, the proposed facility would offer prayer space, a wedding venue and a swimming pool.
Opponents focused on the location: two blocks from Ground Zero. Many Jewish leaders endorsed the project. Abe Foxman, longtime leader of the Anti-Defamation League, did not.
“We believe that in this place of tragedy and pain and anguish … if you want to heal, the best way to heal is not to do it in your face.”
Foxman, who died in May, never apologized for his remarks, but his successor Jonathan Greenblatt later acknowledged “we were wrong, plain and simple.”
In 2011, when U.S. Congressman Peter King of New York, then-chairman of the Homeland Security Committee, held hearings on Capitol Hill denouncing the radicalization inside American mosques, Jewish friends showed their support by helping to organize a “Today, I am Muslim too” rally in Times Square.
Those shows of solidarity grew throughout the years. Jewish partners joined crowds at airports to protest the Trump administration’s executive order on immigration. Congregations helped each other pick up the pieces when their houses of worship or sacred sites came under assault. But the tougher conversation, probing where people stood on the Middle East conflict and why, remained largely untouched.
As anyone in interfaith relations or diplomacy of any kind will tell you, constructive conversations are best had before there’s a crisis. That crisis arrived on Oct. 7, 2023, when Hamas attacked Israel, murdering more than 1,200 and taking 250 hostages. The war that followed in Gaza sparked virulent protests on college campuses and in public squares and a spike in antisemitic incidents. It also created a chasm of grief too deep and wide for many partnerships to survive.
“When Gaza happened, it created a massive fault line,” Khan said. “For Jews it reinforced existential fears about Jewish safety. For the Palestinians: ‘It’s our existential thing too. We feel we’re getting wiped out.’”
But because many conversation partners had for years avoided the hardest topic of all, they missed the opportunity to feel the emotional weight carried on both sides and hold that tension. When the grief, trauma and fear of Oct. 7 was thrust upon them, leaders could not adequately navigate the emotional landscape to offer moral clarity or comfort, Khan said.
“We could have called for calm,” she said. “We could’ve said that human loss is terrible. We could’ve said a lot of things that calmed people down. None of that happened. It became very tribal.”
Laboratory phase
Dr. Ari Gordon, director of Muslim Jewish Relations for American Jewish Committee, said while some Muslim partners have walked away from their joint advocacy work, some have stayed in touch. Khan and Alsayegh remain committed and hold out hope that their Muslim peers will return and give it another try.
“Everyone in this space has had the hits they’ve taken after Oct. 7,” Gordon said. “Relationships are a long-term investment. They can take dips and turns, peaks and valleys. On a personal level, as a friend, you have the right to say I want to engage with a person. I don’t want to. As a Jewish community we have a responsibility to keep our doors open.”
But it’s also important to keep the trajectory and time frame in perspective. The transformation of Christian-Jewish relations offers a lesson in that regard.
“The idea that a relationship can be beset by conflict and challenges for centuries and undergo transformation,” he said, “is one that I carry in my mind all the time.”
Gordon calls the past 25 years a “laboratory phase of Muslim-Jewish relations.” The Shabbat dinners, iftars, dialogue groups, coalitions, concerts – they all have fortified a connective tissue between American Muslims and Jews that did not exist 25 years ago.
“That trust may not have been sufficient to meet the stress test of October 7 and the continued war but it was definitely there and it didn’t go away,” he said. “After October 7 we entered a new phase and it’s one where we’re not going to go back to the way it used to be, but build something new.”
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