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Philip Roth’s latest biographer wants Jews to read him again — without the guilt
It was a scandal right out of a Philip Roth novel: Days after the publication in 2021 of his long-awaited biography of Roth, author Blake Bailey was credibly accused of sexual misconduct. The publisher pulled the book, pulping all the copies.
Even before the uproar, many younger readers lumped Roth among the “great white males” of mid-20th-century literature, and throughout his career Roth was dogged by accusations that he was a misogynist, both in his fiction and his private life. The scandal seemed to confirm these accusations by proxy, conflating the author and his biographer.
Stanford historian Steven J. Zipperstein had already begun his own biography of Roth before the author died in 2018 and while Bailey’s book was under contract. “Philip Roth: Stung by Life,” part of Yale University Press’s “Jewish Lives” series, isn’t meant as a corrective to Bailey’s book or the fallout. But it does argue why Roth remains relevant and vital, especially to current Jewish discourse.
Writes Zipperstein: “He would probe nearly every aspect of contemporary Jewish life: the passions of Jewish childhood, the pleasures and anguish of postwar Jewish suburbia, Israel, diaspora, the Holocaust, circumcision, the interplay between the nice Jewish boy and the turbulent one deep inside.”
Zipperstein is the Daniel E. Koshland Professor in Jewish Culture and History at Stanford University, whose previous books include “Pogrom: Kishinev and the Tilt of History.” He first met Roth when he invited the author to speak to his colleagues and graduate students at Stanford. Roth showed up with a blonde woman in a silky blouse — not his wife at the time, actress Claire Bloom — and proceeded to spend the session flirting with her. His students were not amused.
They met again over the years under less antic circumstances and Roth gave his blessing to Zipperstein’s project. “We carried on a series of conversations, and he introduced me to his loyal entourage, and made it clear to them that they could share things with me that they otherwise might not have shared,” Zipperstein told me.
In our conversation, held over Zoom this week, Zipperstein and I spoke about how Roth scandalized the Jewish world with early works like “Goodbye, Columbus” and “Portnoy’s Complaint,” how he both resented and cherished his Jewish readers, and why so much of his prodigious output still holds up.
The interview was edited for length and clarity.
How did you come to write a biography of Philip Roth? He already had an authorized biographer, so what did you hope to bring to your book?
I’d met Roth years ago at Stanford — there’s a brief mention of it in the book. After I finished “Pogrom” there was this long pause before it came out [in 2018], and I started wondering what I might do next. I’d helped found the “Jewish Lives” series, and Roth seemed a pretty good fit.
But honestly, he’d been in my head long before that. I first read him in Partisan Review — a chapter from “Portnoy’s Complaint” called “Whacking Off” — just before I went off to the Chicago yeshiva. I was raised in an Orthodox family, wrestling with whether I could stay in that world. And Roth’s voice — it stuck with me. Not because of the masturbation, but because Portnoy has all this freedom and he’s miserable. That hit home. It told me that leaving the world I was raised in wasn’t going to be simple, and that freedom wouldn’t necessarily make me happy. That realization — about freedom and its discontents — has stayed with me my whole life as a historian.
Then, years later, I came across the recording of the Yeshiva University event in 1962 — the one Roth described as a kind of Spinoza-like excommunication. The tape told a completely different story. That was the moment I thought: there’s a book here, about the distance between Roth’s memory and reality.
Steven J. Zipperstein said his training as a historian helped him separate truth from fiction in writing his biography of Roth. (Yale University Press)
Let’s talk about that Yeshiva University event. Roth at the time was the young author of “Goodbye, Columbus,” which includes stories that some rabbis and others in the Jewish community said portrayed Jews in a negative light. Roth was invited to sit on a panel with Ralph Ellison and an Italian-American author to talk about “minority writers,” and Roth would later insist that the audience “hated” him. What did you find when you listened to the recording?
Well, Roth remembered it as this traumatic scene — the audience attacking him, shouting him down. But on the tape, the audience loves him! They’re laughing, applauding. The only confrontation comes from a few guys who come up to the stage afterward to argue.
What interested me wasn’t just that Roth misremembered it — it’s how he misremembered it. It tells you something about how he experienced the world. The people who criticize him are the ones who loom largest. That was revealing to me, both as a biographer and as someone who’s taught for decades. The people who dislike you — they’re the ones you remember.
But there is an almost literary bookend to that event: In 2014, the Jewish Theological Seminary awarded Roth an honorary doctorate. How did he react to that?
He was stunned! It was a casual decision by the institution, but a momentous decision as Philip saw it. He said in his speech, “This is the first time I’ve been applauded by Jews since my bar mitzvah.” He meant it sincerely.
Roth wasn’t a historian; he was a novelist. He remembered as he felt, not as it happened. My job was to separate those two things, not to punish him for it, but to understand the gap.
Roth once said, “The epithet ‘American Jewish writer’ has no meaning for me. If I’m not an American, I’m nothing.” As someone who insisted that he was first and foremost an American writer, as opposed to a Jewish writer, would he have liked being part of the *Jewish Lives” series?
Oh, I think so. He thought it was fair. We never talked about it directly, but I suspect he would’ve liked the company — King David, Solomon, Freud, Einstein.
There’s this anxiety about calling writers like Roth or [Saul] Bellow or [Bernard] Malamud “Jewish writers,” as though that makes them smaller. No one says Chekhov isn’t Russian enough. But say “Jewish writer” and people start to hedge.
I once said an American Jewish writer is someone who insists he’s not an American Jewish writer. Roth fit that perfectly.
There was a time when the Jewish experience was seen as a lens through which to understand modern life. Jews were central, not peripheral. Roth captured that paradox: Jews as both insiders and outsiders, too white and not white enough, privileged yet insecure. That ambivalence is his great theme.
“Portnoy’s Complaint” came out in 1969 and both delighted and scandalized readers with its descriptions of the narrator’s sexual adventures and fraught relationship with his Jewish parents. The reaction was extraordinary. I think it may be hard in our current era to imagine a literary novel selling so many copies and becoming such a part of the pop culture landscape.
[Critic] Adam Kirsch said it best — it was one of the last times a novel could set off the kind of cultural frenzy that today only Taylor Swift can provoke. The timing was perfect: Censorship had loosened, the sexual revolution was on, and “Portnoy” hit a nerve.
Roth claimed afterward that he didn’t want that kind of fame again. But of course he missed it. He hoped “Sabbath’s Theater” [his 1995 novel] would do it again. He knew it wouldn’t. He was mourning the loss of a serious readership, even as he kept writing as if it still existed.
Roth’s reputation seems tied up in how he portrayed women in his fiction and how he treated women in his personal life. You describe his serial relationships with many, many women, which often ended as soon as the sexual excitement wore off. At the same time, many of these same women remained loyal, and many gathered at his bedside as he lay dying, and some have written admiring memoirs. How did you approach that paradox?
I tried to be honest without being prurient. Roth decided very early that he was going to be a great writer — perhaps as great as Herman Melville or Kafka — and he came to conclude that there’s not a whole lot of discretionary time for relationships.
He’d fall in love hard, live with someone for two or three years, then move on. I didn’t moralize about it. Many of those women remained close to him. Others didn’t. He was loyal in his own way.
And his relationships with men, except for one significant detail, are not vastly dissimilar from those that he has with women. They’re utilitarian. Incredibly loyal friends hang on, because they’re so enamored by Roth and they feel deeply protective of Roth.
He also listened more intently than anyone I’ve ever met — though you were never sure whether it was you he was listening to, or the story he was going to write next.
Philip Roth receives an honorary doctorate at the Jewish Theological Seminary’s commencement in New York on May 22, 2014. (Ellen Dubin Photography)
Tell me about your book’s subtitle, “Stung By Life.”
It’s a phrase I found in a eulogy Roth wrote for his friend Richard Stern. He said Stern was “stung by life,” and I thought, that’s Roth.
He was perpetually shocked by existence — by what people do, by what happens to them, by what happens to him. Zuckerman, his alter ego, is defined by ambivalence — about women, about Jewishness, about America. Roth described everything well, but ambivalence best of all.
You’ve written books of history, and biographies of other Jewish literary figures, including the Zionist thinker Ahad Ha’am and Isaac Rosenfield, the American-Jewish writer who died in 1956 when he was only 38. What challenges did you find writing about a figure like Roth, who was still alive when you began work on the book, and what do you think you brought to it that maybe others couldn’t?
I’ve written and taught biography for years. Roth spent his entire life writing about himself, but not telling the truth about himself. That puzzle fascinated me.
Some Jewish figures — Isaiah Berlin, for example — chose biographers who didn’t quite understand the Jewish stuff. I wanted to do the opposite. I wanted to understand him from the inside out.
I loved his work before I started. I love it even more now. Words were my way out of a world where answers were predetermined by Maimonides. Roth fought that battle too —against dogma, against certainty, through language.
Sometimes I think Roth’s gifts as a comedian have overshadowed other qualities of his work — for example, everyone who read “Portnoy” remembers the slapstick about masturbation, but I love his lyrical descriptions of his old Weequahic neighborhood in Newark and heading down to the park to watch “the men” play softball. Was he worried that he’d be shelved in the “humor” section of the bookstore?
He liked to say he was a comic writer in the tradition of Kafka and [Heinrich] Heine — not Shecky Greene, [the Catskills comedian].
But yes, he could be incredibly funny. In many ways, “The Ghost Writer” [1979], as beautiful and lyrical as it is, is all written in order for Philip to have that punchline about Anne Frank.
The book’s narrator, Nathan Zuckerman, a writer like the young Roth, imagines that Anne has survived and that he can heal a rift with his family by bringing her home as his fianceé.
“Nathan, is she Jewish?” “Yes, she is!” “But who is she?” “Anne Frank.” In many ways, those were the lines that begat that brilliant book.
I also feel people overlook how much he wrestles with the Jewish condition — and not just Jewish mother jokes or nostalgia for the old Weequahic neighborhood. In books like “The Counterlife” and “Operation Shylock” Roth was writing about Zionism, assimilation, extremism and the tension between Israel and the diaspora when few other serious novelists were. Does he deserve to be more widely read as part of the very current Jewish debate over these topics?
Yes. I think in sort of more conservative, traditional Jewish quarters, he ended up being seen as an enemy of the Jews. But thinking about your question, it’s hard to think of any piece of extraordinary fiction that’s really made its way into the Jewish communal debate.
But Roth actually entered emphatically into the Jewish conversation. At one point in the late 1980s, Roth gives an interview to his friend Asher Milbauer. And he admits that the Jewish readership is his primary readership. He says writing as an American Jew is akin to writing for a small country where culture is paramount. As for other readers, he said, ”I have virtually no sense of my impact on the general audience.”
How would you describe that impact, and why should he still be read and admired?
Because he closes his eyes to nothing. He looks straight at the things we’d rather look away from — sex, aging, death, hypocrisy, joy. He writes about the child of good parents, the lover, the son, the dying man — all the selves we carry.
He shows how truth and illusion coexist, how clarity is always fragile. And he does it with language that’s alive. That’s what endures.
Does he still feel relevant to you?
Completely. Even among his contemporaries — [John] Updike, Bellow — Roth feels less dated. Maybe that’s because he was never comfortable. He kept interrogating everything, including himself.
That’s why he’s still with us. The rest of us are still trying to catch up.
Learn about Philip Roth’s “Portnoy’s Complaint” and other classics in a new course from My Jewish Learning: “Funny Story! The Best Jewish Humor Books of the Past 75 Years.” Taught by Andrew Silow-Carroll, the four-session course starts on Monday, Oct. 27 at 6 p.m. ET. Register here.
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Israel’s enemies say it is anti-Christian. Jewish extremists are helping them make the case
One of the more damaging charges against Israel now circulating in the United States portrays the Jewish state as increasingly hostile to Christianity and Christians. The accusation has acquired considerable prominence in American media, where stories about attacks on clergy, harassment of worshippers, restrictions around Christian holy sites and violence against Christian communities have accumulated into a broader portrait of a country becoming inhospitable to one of the faiths born in the Holy Land.
The Washington Post recently devoted a major article to attacks on Christians in Israel and the government’s lackluster response, while other reporting has focused on Jews spitting at Christian clergy and pilgrims in Jerusalem, vandalism of Christian property and the April assault on a Roman Catholic nun near the Old City.
The nun’s case was particularly appalling: according to the subsequent indictment, a Jewish Israeli man chased the 48-year-old French Catholic sister, pushed her to the ground and kicked her after identifying her as a Christian nun. Israeli police arrested the suspect and prosecutors charged him with an assault motivated by religious hostility.
The Armenian Christians of Jerusalem have become another symbol of the phenomenon. Their community predates almost every modern political dispute over the city, with a continuous presence stretching back some 1,700 years. Yet Armenian clergy and residents have described repeated episodes of spitting, intimidation and abuse.
Israeli media in recent weeks described Israeli teenagers arriving at the headquarters of the Armenian Apostolic Church in the Old City and asking whether Christians were inside because they wanted to spit at them.
Scenes like these travel instantly around the world and provide ready-made material for anyone seeking to portray Israel as a place where Christians are despised. In fact, Israel’s Jewish extremists have no particular beef with Christians – but rather a conflict with, and often a hatred for, Arabs in general, of any religion.
Overall, the incidents are not representative of Christian life inside Israel. About 200,000 Christian citizens lived in the country at the end of 2025, most of them Arab Christians, and the community has continued to grow. Arab Christians have exceptionally high educational attainment and are disproportionately represented in Israeli higher education. Christians serve as judges, diplomats, doctors, academics and public officials, and their churches and institutions form a recognized part of Israeli public life. Moreover, the assault on the Catholic nun produced an arrest and indictment rather than tacit approval, and Israeli authorities regularly proclaim their commitment to Christian worship and the protection of Christian holy places.
Yet a radical Jewish fringe appears determined to furnish Israel’s enemies with the pictures, anecdotes and headlines required to transform an inflammatory accusation into a plausible story. The latest damaging example comes from Taybeh, the last predominantly Christian Palestinian village in the West Bank (and home to its only beer brewery).
Taybeh has endured months of tension and violence. In June, Israeli settlers obstructed Palestinians attempting to extinguish a large fire near the village, according to Palestinian firefighters and a local priest. Residents have complained of arson, vandalism, incursions onto private property and intimidation.
“The settlers can do whatever enters their heads,” said the Rev. Jack Abed of Taybeh’s Greek Orthodox community. “And every now and then we have rioting from settler youth who come into the village. They bring sheep with them to graze in our fields.”
This week the Israeli military responded by closing the village to Israelis, saying the measure followed violent attacks by Israelis in the area and was intended to protect local residents and maintain order.
The order illustrates two realities at once. The Israeli army is using military power to protect a Palestinian Christian community from Israeli Jewish extremists. This tells a very different story from the sweeping claim that the Israeli state has embarked upon a campaign against Christians. At the same time, the necessity of such a measure shows the extent of the problem Israel has permitted to develop.
Indeed, Israel Radio this week reported that there have been 660 cases of “nationalistic crime” by Jews in the West Bank in the first six months of 2026 – a 50 percent increase over the same period last year. The report, citing military sources, said six Palestinians were killed and 140 injured in these attacks. There are rarely long-term arrests and no settlers have been convicted in the deaths.
I recently wrote in these pages about Jewish terrorists in the West Bank after extremists torched two mosques, burned cars and fields and attacked Palestinian motorists. One mosque in Qusra was burned and covered with revenge graffiti; another in Kur was set ablaze.
The violence belongs to a larger pattern of attacks on civilians, destruction of property and vigilante incursions into Palestinian communities. I described this as both a moral failure and a national-security disaster because every such episode creates another security problem for the Israeli soldiers and police who must contain the consequences, while simultaneously providing Hamas, Iran and Israel’s other enemies with propaganda more effective than much of what they could manufacture themselves.
The Christian dimension makes the strategic stupidity even more breathtaking. Israel depends upon deep reservoirs of sympathy among Christians around the world, especially in the United States, where tens of millions of evangelical Christians have provided some of the most consistent political support for the Jewish state. Christian attachment to Israel also extends far beyond evangelical politics to people who regard the survival of ancient Christian communities and access to the holy places of Jerusalem, Bethlehem and the Galilee as matters of profound spiritual importance.
Every video of an extremist spitting at a priest, every report of an Armenian Christian being harassed and every attack on a Christian Palestinian village chips away at that reservoir of goodwill. These extremists are weakening Israel’s security, staining Judaism and turning potential friends of Israel into skeptics and existing skeptics into enemies.
The military’s action in Taybeh is therefore welcome, and it is also woefully insufficient. Israel’s Oct. 27 election offers the possibility of a different approach. Should Netanyahu be defenestrated and a new government take office, a comprehensive crackdown on Jewish terrorism in the West Bank should rank among its first priorities. The task requires arrests, prosecutions and enforcement rather than declarations of concern after each fresh outrage.
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A Democratic upset in Connecticut — but Israel was not a factor
(JTA) — Luke Bronin scored a decisive victory over longtime Rep. John Larson in Connecticut’s Democratic primary Tuesday, marking another defeat for AIPAC which had backed the 14-term congressman.
The pro-Israel lobby group is increasingly viewed as politically toxic in Democratic primaries across the country, with several progressive candidates notching victories after making opposition to the group a centerpiece of their campaigns.
Israel and the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, however, were not at the forefront of the contest in Connecticut’s 1st Congressional District, reflecting a more nuanced picture regarding Democratic voters’ shifting sentiments toward Israel.
Bronin and Larson, the race’s two candidates with more traditionally pro-Israel positions, together won nearly 90% of the vote, with Bronin receiving 53% while Larson received 34%. The two progressive candidates in the race, Jillian Gilchrest and Ruth Fortune, who both accused Israel of genocide in Gaza, finished a distant third and fourth.
Bronin, 46, who has Jewish ancestry on his father’s side, is the former mayor of Hartford and also served in the Obama Administration as the Deputy Assistant Secretary for Terrorist Financing and Financial Crimes. His campaign largely centered on affordability and emphasizing the need for new leadership in the Democratic party.
“If we are going to fix this mess that we are in, we need to build a Democratic Party that is bringing a whole new energy to this fight,” Bronin told supporters following his victory.
Israel was not entirely absent from the campaign. Larson, who first took office in 1999, split with Bronin during a primary debate last month when Larson defended his recent vote in support of U.S. military aid to Israel.
“Yes, I voted in favor of making sure that Israel, our ally, is going to get the aid from the United States that it needs. But the Palestinians need humanitarian aid, and Donald Trump has got to enforce the law,” Larson said.
Bronin pushed back at Larson, replying, “Trusting Donald Trump to do the right thing is a mind-blowing example of putting hope over all of the evidence in front of us.”
While Larson had long supported Israel during his tenure in Congress, he has been critical of Israel’s prosecution of the war in Gaza and treatment of Palestinians and vocally opposed the United States’ war in Iran.
Bronin, meanwhile, has said he is against taxpayer money going toward funding offensive military aid to Israel, though he supports “defenses for civilians that protect civilian life against rockets and missiles and drones.”
“I think it’s hugely important that Israel exists as a safe, secure homeland for the Jewish people,” Bronin said when asked about his views on Israel on The Lisa Wexler Show in May. He also spoke out against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, explaining that the premier had “done enormous damage to Israel’s security, Israel’s standing in the world,” adding that “we have an obligation as a country to say what’s happening is not okay.”
Bronin slightly outraised Larson on the campaign trail, receiving roughly $3.1 million largely from individual donations from billionaires and large firms, while Larson received $2.7 million and relied more on donations from PACs, according to the Federal Election Commission.
Larson received roughly $120,000 in AIPAC-linked donations during the campaign cycle, according to the campaign finance database Open Secrets.
Bronin will now face Republican Amy Chai, a physician and mental health advocate, in the general election for the state’s first congressional district. The district, which spans Bristol, Hartford and Torrington, is home to 27,800 Jews, representing 3.9% of the total population, according to the Berman Jewish Data Bank.
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Jack Ukeles, who used data and idealism to shape Jewish communal life, dies at 89
(JTA) — Throughout a storied career of more than five decades that included key roles in teaching courses at elite universities, policy planning for city and state governments and community surveys for Jewish organizations around the world, Jack Ukeles had one consistent goal: to blend research, data and strategic problem-solving with idealism in making the world a better place.
Ukeles, who died July in Jerusalem at the age of 89, was widely and deeply admired as well for his integrity, wisdom and compassion on both a personal and professional level.
He was also one of the most prominent members of a cohort of Jewish social scientists who, from the 1980s through the 2000s, played a central role in setting the agenda for organized Jewish life. Philanthropists and nonprofit leaders sought their data and recommendations on hot-button issues like rising intermarriage, attachment to Israel, population trends and declining engagement with Jewish institutions.
In 1981, Ukeles joined the Jewish non-profit world as senior planning officer of the New York Federation of Jewish Philanthropies (now UJA-Federation of New York). He led the charity’s first scientific study of the New York area’s Jewish population, and major studies on senior services and Jewish poverty.
Five years later, he went out on his own, launching Ukeles Associates, Inc., and for 28 years led consulting projects combining his experience in policy research, planning and management for a range of secular and Jewish non-profits.
Speaking at the funeral in Jerusalem, where Ukeles and his wife, Mierle, lived since making aliyah in 2012, longtime friend and colleague Asher Ostrin predicted that Ukeles’s teaching, in both classrooms and nonprofit board rooms, will have a lasting effect, especially for American Jewry.
“Generations of Jewish communal professionals are his students, and are taught to reflect the method and values he held dear,” said Ostrin, an executive at the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee.
Those values were shaped growing up in a religious Zionist home, aware of the trauma his parents endured in Eastern Europe before settling in New York. Ukeles’s mother wanted a first-rate Jewish education for her only son, and after visiting a number of yeshivas, moved the family from The Bronx to Brooklyn so he could attend the Yeshiva of Flatbush, where he thrived academically and as student council president and member of the basketball team.
After seeing a newspaper ad announcing the opening of a university in Israel committed to integrating modern scholarship and traditional Jewish learning, he applied and was accepted in 1955 to Bar-Ilan University’s first class.
“My father was proud to be a member of that first class, and as a student leader there, he wanted to help build the school and be a part of its growth” in synthesizing secular and religious studies, his daughter Raquel Ukeles recalled. “But the administration wasn’t interested.” He was 18 at the time.
After a year in Israel, Ukeles attended a yeshiva and Brooklyn College, where he took courses in community planning, research and data. He received his B.A. in political science in 1959, and an M.A. in city planning two years later at the University of Pennsylvania. In 1962, Ukeles spent a year in New Delhi, India, as a Fulbright Fellow and returned to complete his Ph.D. at Penn in 1971.
During his graduate school years, Ukeles turned a summer job in the New York City planning department into a three-year position. He helped produce the first data-driven analysis of New York City’s housing needs, and was part of a team that reshaped the city’s approach to urban renewal.
He then turned to academia, starting a long-term pattern of moving back and forth between university posts — including the New School, where he later became chairman of the first urban policy graduate program in the U.S. — and designing and leading civil service and financial reforms in New York through the mayor’s office under Abe Beame and Ed Koch.
On behalf of Jewish organizations, he conducted a 2006 survey of Atlanta’s Jewish population that confirmed the explosive growth of Jewish communities in the Sun Belt, and co-authored a 2002 community study showing how Russian immigrants and Orthodox Jews were changing the face of New York City Jewry.
Ukeles was he co-authopr of a 2012 study showing that New York City area’s Jewish population was on the rise again, thanks largely to the growth of Orthodox households.(Spencer Platt/Getty Images)
In 2009, he wrote a report on how nonprofits can turn the severe economic downturn into opportunity. Drawing on his experience in city management, he advised nonprofits neither to panic nor deny the reality of squeezed budgets.
“You can forget about strategy if you do not have courage, if you do not have big ideas, or if you do not have vision, and most importantly, if you do not have compassion,” he said in a lecture that year drawing on the report. “In fact, without the ‘right stuff,’ you are in the wrong line of work.”
Family members noted that the common thread in Ukeles’s career in academia, city government and non-profits was to deal with difficult problems by making decisions based on real data, not theoretical ideas, and to bring the stakeholders around the table to make the best — or sometimes least worst — decisions based on need and priority.
Elie Kaunfer, CEO and president of the Hadar Institute, a center of Jewish life and learning, said that when Ukeles conducted the first formal evaluation of the organization in 2011, “he taught me so much about what kind of questions to ask — not just about experience of the program but ultimate impact on people’s lives.”
John Ruskay, former CEO of UJA-Federation, described him as “a loyal friend and dear colleague who I and so many others turned to repeatedly for counsel, for wisdom, for ‘chizuk’” (inner strength).
Sometimes his counsel came with critique. Steve Bayme, a former American Jewish Committee executive and longtime Ukeles friend, noted: “Jack knew how to offer constructive criticism and even occasional rebuke in ways that colleagues, including those in senior communal positions, could hear and absorb.”
Alan Gill, who served as CEO of the JDC, praised Ukeles for “his expertise in challenging and guiding us.” He said Ukeles “yelled at us” once, which was unheard of from consultants who tended to be dispassionate and analytical, he noted. But the outburst had “a positive effect,” Gill added, reminding JDC staff how much “the mission and work mattered” to Ukeles.
That sense of heartfelt criticism also applied to Ukeles’s devotion to, and frustration with, the state of Israel in recent years. He agonized over the growth of extremism in the haredi Orthodox community and Jewish settler violence, and he spoke out in pieces he published in The Times of Israel.
“Jack loved the Jewish people,” said Sally Gottesman, who was hired by Ukeles as a young consultant in 1997. Now an activist-philanthropist focused on gender and justice in the Jewish community, Gottesman said Ukeles was “a mentor and master teacher” and praised his efforts to promote equality for women.
A prime example was his support for and great pride in the accomplishments of his wife, Mierle, who in seeking to blend art with waste management became the official artist-in-residence of the NYC Department of Sanitation, a volunteer position she has held since 1977. Her unique career was the focus of an award-winning 2025 documentary, “Maintenance Artist.”
“Jack was my heart and soul,” she said. “His support, championing my being a free artist and a full person, all through the years, extending as well to his supporting the work of many other women artists of our time, was without a peer, without an end.”
In addition to his wife, Ukuleles is survived by his daughters, Raquel, who is head of collections at the National Library of Israel, and Yael, a product market manager and founder of two non-profit Israeli environmental education programs, and a son, Meir, who works with an Israel-based VC fund investing in startups.
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