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Commemorating Philip Roth means confronting his limitations head on
(JTA) — Next Sunday marks the 90th anniversary of Philip Roth’s birth. In celebration of the famed novelist’s work, a scholarly conference titled “Roth@90,” sponsored by the Philip Roth Society, will be held starting Wednesday at the Newark Public Library. That will be followed by a weekend of high-profile events — staged readings, panel discussions, a bus tour of Roth’s old Newark neighborhood — co-presented by the library and the New Jersey Performing Arts Center.
Exactly 10 years ago, we commemorated his 80th birthday in a similar fashion. Dozens of Roth scholars made learned presentations about his work, of which Roth attended exactly zero. Later that week, the author read aloud from his novel “Sabbath’s Theater” in front of hundreds of fans, friends and well wishers. The proceedings were televised on C-Span.
Roth was being acclaimed for having just wound down an exemplary career. With the exception of the Nobel Prize, what garland evaded him? Was there a high-culture literary platform where his name wasn’t a virtual watermark? Could he publish any novel without hundreds of reviews being written in newspapers across the world? Was there a serious fiction writer out there with greater renown?
So much has changed in the decade between the two conferences. To begin with, Roth died in 2018. In that same span, the country witnessed the election of Donald Trump and the fissure it exposed in society in general and the Jewish community in particular. America endured one convulsive racial reckoning after another. Finally, in October of 2017, the #MeToo movement gained massive public salience.
All of those events, along with digital media’s indomitable ascent, have combined to affect and reshape Roth’s literary legacy. That legacy is far less assured than all the (justified) praise and lionizing that will occur this week might suggest.
Let’s start with Jews. The Trump era yielded two seemingly irreconcilable data points. On the one hand, Jewish-Americans endured the Charlottesville riot, the Tree of Life synagogue attack and a stunning rise in antisemitic incidents. On the other, there was staunch support for Trump among Orthodox Jews and supporters of Israel’s right wing.
Leaving that conundrum for others to parse, I simply note that Orthodox Jews and right-wing Zionists are almost completely absent in Roth’s fiction. A young Roth wrote a sensitive portrait of Holocaust survivors who want to start a suburban yeshiva in “Eli the Fanatic.” He also sketched a militant religious-nationalist Zionist in “The Counterlife,” Mordecai Lippman, who, according to Roth biographer Blake Bailey (about whom more below), was based on Elyakim Haetzni, one of the so-called founding fathers of the settlement movement. In the same novel, a version of the narrator’s brother falls under the settlement leader’s sway.
And that’s it, across a half century of writing. For traditionalist Jewish readers, whose political and social influence in the United States and Israel is substantial and growing, Roth’s fiction is not a mirror, nor a signpost, nor a scroll upon which is inscribed some essential truth.
The Jews who populated his stories, the Jews he best understood, were of Ashkenazi descent, white, liberal, assimilated and secular. His courage was to valorize them over and against other Jews who viewed them as defective, lost or even as apostates. Thus Anne Frank in “The Ghost Writer” was portrayed as a patron saint of secular Judaism. Elsewhere, his stories abound in proud, professionally accomplished diaspora Jews. They rarely think about God. Synagogue attendance is reserved strictly for lifecycle events and High Holy Days, if that.
A novelist, of course, is not a political clairvoyant. However, the immediate future of Judaism is being greatly shaped by Jews whose population and influence are growing and whom Roth rarely portrayed. In this manner, another stellar writer like Cynthia Ozick — herself Orthodox and quite attuned to the mindset of her co-religionists — might fare better commercially and emerge as more relevant than her friend in the coming decades.
Roth didn’t just write about Jews. In my book “The Philip Roth We Don’t Know: Sex, Race and Autobiography,” I pointed out that depicting non-Jewish Black people was an unrecognized “obsessional theme” across his 28 novels and 25 short stories. Much to my dismay, I found Roth’s multi-decade treatment of his African and African-American characters often to be crude, thoughtless and sometimes racist.
Familiarize yourself with the degrading portraiture we receive of Black people in “The Great American Novel” (1973), or a short story like “On the Air” (1970), and you might reconsider what Roth was after in “The Human Stain,” in which an academic who is accused of racism turns out to be an African American who had been “passing” as white and Jewish. The book, the 2001 Pen/Faulkner Award winner, is often seen as a sensitive treatment of racial issues in America, and perhaps as the author’s attempt to extend the hand of friendship to another oppressed minority.
In fact, my best guess is that, as with many Jewish writers post-1967, Roth was shaken by the deterioration of the Black-Jewish alliance. His frustrations were reflected in prose that often referenced Black communities in his hometown of Newark but showed little curiosity about their lives or sympathy for their plight.
Obviously, this type of literary rendering of African Americans — or any minority group — is disturbing and dated. Insensitive racial representation inspires calls for publishers to drop authors. They disappear from high-school or college syllabi. This bodes ominously for the afterlives of the titans of post-World War II American fiction, including John Updike, Saul Bellow Bellow and Norman Mailer, all three of whom have been accused of being racially insensitive and worse.
Roth’s marketability also seems to be sailing into a squall regarding gender. As women began demanding an accounting of sexual abuse and misogyny within the media, entertainment and other industries, numerous think-pieces wondered how the author of “Portnoy’s Complaint” — whose libidinous narrator identifies most of the women in his life by debasing nicknames — would fare in such an environment. Would he — should he — be “canceled”?
The question is more complex than his admirers and detractors make it out to be. No doubt, many of Roth’s male characters mistreated women. Accusations of Roth himself doing the same exist, but they are fairly rare, unsubstantiated and contested. The dilemma for researchers is that Roth was a deeply auto-fictional writer. You sense his presence in his stories — especially when protagonists share much of his biography, including Nathan Zuckerman and Peter Tarnopol, and when characters are named “Philip Roth.”
It’s hard not to speculate about the relation between the author and the many misogynistic fellows who cut an erotic swath through his pages. There will, of course, be readers who give him the benefit of the doubt. They might observe that Roth’s toxic males provide evidence of women’s experiences that needs to be explored, not censored.
Not helping him cleanse his reputation were the numerous allegations of sexual misconduct leveled against his hand-picked biographer, Blake Bailey. The ructions engulfing Bailey came to dominate the discourse about Roth, leading to a peculiar cancellation by proxy.
The episode also revealed that Roth had instructed his estate to eventually destroy a massive trove of personal papers he entrusted to Bailey. This led Aimee Pozorski (co-editor of Philip Roth Studies), myself and 20 other Roth scholars to issue a statement reminding his executors that “scholarship can only be advanced when qualified researchers engage freely with essential sources.”
As if all these concerns weren’t enough, his grim prophecies about the demise of an audience for serious literature seem to be coming true. “The book,” Roth worried, “can’t compete with the screen.” Meanwhile, the English major is in a very bad way, and the institution of tenure is under siege. Professors (insufferable as we might be) teach the next generation who to read and how to read. Writers might not like them, but they need them.
Roth is also getting the scrutiny that he was at pains to avoid in his lifetime. His disregard for scholars who might be critical of him always struck me, one such scholar, as misguided. Instead, he surrounded himself with friends — friends who had preternatural access to major media platforms. These friends built upon his own interpretations of his own work. It doesn’t mean they lacked wisdom. It just means that when they talked about Roth, they talked about what Roth wanted them to talk about. To wit: Jewish Newark, his sundry interpretations of his life, his pesky ex-wives and lovers, the close-mindedness of his critics, and so forth.
I think, in this cultural moment, it’s prudent to confront Roth’s limitations head on and chart one’s own path through his fiction. I pitch him to my students as a writer with some racial, religious and sexual hang-ups — who among us is innocent of those charges? I also present him as a bearer of unique and meaningful insights. Let scholars (while they still exist) parade those insights into sunlight.
I’ve tried to illuminate that his fiction was preoccupied, for 50 years, by how individual and collective bodies (like the Jews) change. Transformation, metamorphosis, metempsychosis — his obsession with those themes, I’ve noticed in my classrooms, is shared by Gen Z. If the span between Roth@80 and Roth@90 has taught us anything, it is that Roth was right: Life is about radical, unpredictable flux. Now his own legacy is in flux. I wonder who will read Roth@100.
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A pioneering Reform synagogue makes way for a booming Iranian Jewish community
Temple Beth-El is an island of Reform Judaism in the Iranian milieu of deep Great Neck, a suburb on the North Shore of Long Island 35 minutes away from Manhattan by train. There are around two dozen synagogues in Great Neck; three of them are Reform, and two of those are tucked away at the edges of the peninsula. Temple Beth-El stands bravely at the center, with frontage on Middle Neck Road, the main street, just steps away from multiple Orthodox synagogues and kosher restaurants serving a spectrum of cuisines.
As an Iranian-American Jew from Great Neck, I’ve been to Temple Beth-El twice before: once, in middle school, for a classmate’s bar mitzvah, and then, in 2021, to get the COVID vaccine. I called it, simply, “the Ashkenazi synagogue.” Tonight, as the oldest synagogue in Great Neck prepares to downsize, I am here for the third time ever, for Friday night services.
Temple Beth-El formed in 1928, when Great Neck was dominated by Protestants. The presence of the synagogue made even more Jews from the city want to move east. Its rabbis were outspoken civil rights activists and hosted Martin Luther King, Jr. in 1967. Now, as Great Neck’s demographics shift further toward more religious Jews, Temple Beth-El’s congregation is shrinking. The synagogue is selling its property to an Iranian Orthodox yeshiva and will be leasing back a portion of it.
In the mid 1980s, Temple Beth-El had around 1,500 families, with a 500-person waiting list, said Stuart Botwinick, the synagogue’s executive director. Now, as members have died off and younger ones aren’t joining as quickly, it has around 400, and can’t fill up its main sanctuary on Rosh Hashanah. Wielding cold economic calculus, I can envision someone arguing that if fewer people choose to attend a synagogue, then whatever happens to it must be natural, or deserved. I can even envision myself arguing that. It’s not guilt, because I did nothing wrong, but as a member of the majority group, some sense of duty makes me want to see with my own eyes what is being lost.
A man hands me a siddur and wishes me a Shabbat shalom. The chapel is beautiful, with a dark wood vaulted ceiling, stained glass and hanging lanterns. I find a seat in the gender-integrated pews among some 30 congregants. I try to follow the prayers, but I don’t know any of the tunes — my home synagogue is not nearly this musical. I am surprised to see some men not wearing kippahs. Rebelliously, I stray from the page everyone else is on and flip briefly to the back of the siddur. There are lyrics to “Hatikvah,” “America the Beautiful,” “God Bless America,” “The Star-Spangled Banner” and, maybe worst of all, “O Canada.” My inner Satmar rebbe shudders.
Fortunately, national hymns are not part of tonight’s repertoire. From the bimah, the rabbi, Brian Stoller, outs me as a Forward reporter. The moment the service ends, several excited Ashkenazi seniors approach me; clearly, the name of this news outlet carries much more clout here than in my typical Great Neck circles.
Stoller holds an optimistic vision of Temple Beth-El’s future that emphasizes adult education and cultural arts above physical space. In other words, “we’re not here to be landlords,” says Jennifer Still-Schiff, a co-president of the synagogue sisterhood. Still, losing ownership and part of their space must be somewhat traumatic. Once the service ends, Howard Herman, an honorary vice president of the board who’s been a member since the 1980s, gives me a tour and shows me all of the things the synagogue will need to sell.
“We have this beautiful Judaica museum, and we’re going to be selling it or giving a lot of it away,” he says. Then he shows me the large sanctuary. We can’t find the light switch, so we turn on our cell phone flashlights to inspect a 55-foot-long sculpture behind the bimah: “The White Flame of the Six Million” by Louise Nevelson. In the sculpture, which integrates the Torah ark, shapes carved out from white wood represent the uniqueness of every life lost in the genocide. “We’re going to have to sell this,” Herman says. “Who can buy this?”
That sanctuary, where Temple Beth-El used to hold regular Shabbat services and now only holds High Holy Day services, seats almost 900 people. It will become part of the yeshiva’s space. Sisterhood co-president Rochelle Rosenbloom says the chapel, which seats about 250, will be enough to seat worshipers even on the High Holy Days. If it isn’t, she and Still-Shiff said, they can stagger two sets of services or have people watch the services on a TV in the lobby.
At a time when Great Neck was still mostly Christian, the existence of Temple Beth-El “was an essential sign that Jews could live in Great Neck and that there were enough of them, committed to religious participation through the Reform movement, to make it safe and desirable for others to try it out,” historian Judith Goldstein wrote in her book Inventing Great Neck. It was the peninsula’s only synagogue until 1941, when Temple Israel of Great Neck formed, said Brad Kolodny, an amateur historian of Long Island Jewish history. In the 1960s, Jews — particularly liberal, Reform Jews — began to outnumber Christians in Great Neck. Temple Beth-El had to build a bigger sanctuary. At times, even that sanctuary — the one with the Holocaust memorial sculpture — filled up, and administration had to set up overflow seating in other rooms.
Persian synagogues started cropping up in Great Neck after the Islamic Revolution in 1979. Great Neck has Iraqi and Syrian synagogues, too, plus several synagogues that are not officially Mizrahi but have Mizrahi congregants. Now, any car trying to drive on, say, Steamboat Road on a Saturday morning must use caution, as the sidewalks aren’t wide enough for the large groups of skipping children, bike-riding kippah-clad young men, and moms pushing double strollers in their Shabbat finest.
People in the Jewish world can get accused of being “Ashkenormative,” but since 1979, Great Neck has become Mizrahi-normative. When I was a child, a last name like “Weiss” or “Katz” connoted nothing to me, and for the longest time I assumed that my classmates whose hair was lighter than mine couldn’t possibly be Jewish. I used to watch The Nanny with my mom; one night, as Fran and Sylvia Fine peppered their speech with schleps, schvitzes, and other Yiddishisms, I asked my mom what language the characters were speaking. “I don’t know,” she said.
Fran was a prime example of what I eventually came to understand as the stereotype of the liberal American Jew, a character so familiar to American audiences that she could speak Yiddish and expect to be understood. But as the growth of the Orthodox community outpaces that of other denominations, I realize that stereotype is becoming less and less accurate. Forty-four percent of Jews ages 65 or older identify as Reform, but only 29% of Jews who are 18 to 30. And more concerningly: among people raised Reform, 12% of them are “no longer Jewish,” according to a 2020 Pew research study. When, in 1994, Fran Fine wished for “a husband and a house in Great Neck,” she was talking about a place already in flux, a place where a legacy of civil rights activism would soon give way to people who voted heavily for Donald Trump and helped elect George Santos.
When I told my mom I was writing about Temple Beth-El, she told me in an approving tone of voice that they lend out wheelchairs and other medical equipment for free, and collect donations from families of people who’ve died and no longer need theirs. Indeed, “social action” is an important value here: The synagogue also sends volunteers to an interfaith food pantry based at a local church, and some congregants volunteer to support undocumented immigrants, said Botwinick.
That willingness to look outward distinguishes Temple Beth-El from, say, my synagogue, and Botwinick argues many Iranian Jews benefit from it. “We believe that the Jewish community and the greater community actually falls in line with a lot of what we do and what we believe,” but doesn’t say so “because of cultural pressures,” Botwinick said. “Equal rights is important, health is important, caring for the immigrant community matters. It takes a strong voice — Temple Beth-El is that strong voice — to say these things matter.”
This is the most compelling thing anyone has told me for this story: that even Orthodox Jews benefit from having a Reform synagogue for a neighbor. If, for example, Temple Beth-El hadn’t opened as a vaccine hub, I struggle to see my synagogue, where many congregants are vaccine-skeptical, filling that gap.
Dr. Gary Zola, Temple Beth-El’s historian in residence, addressed the threats of decline facing Reform Judaism in a March 13 sermon, and said the synagogue’s long history should serve as a source of hope. “Let’s not forget that 98 years ago, a handful of Jewish scholars decided to create a Jewish community out of nothingness.”
“It is clear that the enervation of liberal Jewish life is a challenge,” he said, “but it’s a challenge that awaits our response.”
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Top British private Jewish school closing amid funding challenges
(JTA) — Immanuel College, a top-ranked Jewish private day school in the outskirts of London, announced on Tuesday that it will close its doors at the end of this year amid financial pressures and declining enrollment.
“This is an incredibly difficult and painful moment,” Daniel Levy, the chair of governors for the school, said in a statement. “Immanuel College has been a cornerstone of education and community life for more than 35 years, and we know how deeply this news will be felt by all those connected to it.”
The Modern Orthodox Jewish day school, which was ranked the U.K.’s top-performing Jewish school in The Sunday Times Parent Power Guide in 2025, is one of a small number of independent Jewish schools in the London area.
Founded in 1990 by Lord Immanuel Jakobovits, the former Chief Rabbi of the British Commonwealth, the school serves roughly 360 pupils ages 10-18. Last year, Immanuel College’s prep school also shut down due to “unprecedented financial pressures.”
The school sits alongside a much larger network of state-funded Jewish schools, including the prestigious JFS (formerly Jews’ Free School) and the Jewish Community Secondary School.
Levy said that the school was “committed to ensuring that every pupil is guided to the right next step,” and was working with schools across the Jewish and independent school landscape to find placements for its students. (Independent schools in the U.K. are fee-paying private schools, while state schools are government-funded and free to attend.)
A press release pinned the closure on a litany of factors, including “the introduction of VAT on independent school fees, rising operational costs driven by inflation and increased National Insurance contributions, and a decline in pupil numbers.”
VAT, or the U.K.’s value added tax, was applied to private schools in the country last year after they were previously exempted from it.
In the release, the school also said the decline in enrollment “reflects a broader trend across the sector, with a growing number of independent schools closing in recent years.”
“Additionally, changing dynamics within the Jewish education landscape, including the increased popularity of Jewish state schools, have contributed to reduced enrolment,” the release continued, adding that Immanuel faced ongoing annual losses exceeding £2 million, or $2.3 million.
Oliver Dowden, a British lawmaker and member of the Conservative Party, lamented the closure in a post on X, writing that it was “yet another victim of Labour’s VAT raid on private schools.”
“Very sad to learn of closure of the brilliant Immanuel College at the end of the current academic year. A real blow to Bushey and the Jewish community,” Dowden wrote, referring to the Hertfordshire village where Immanuel is located.
Writer and political analyst Arieh Kovler described the school as an “oddity” in the British Jewish educational landscape, writing in a post on X that it was “not religious enough for ‘black hat’ type modern Orthodox, not prestigious enough for parents who want excellent private schools, and parents who just want a Jewish school for their kids have many free state options now.”
According to Britain’s Institute for Jewish Policy Research, of the Jewish children enrolled in Jewish schools, 60 percent attend haredi (or “strictly”) Orthodox schools, a figure that does not include haredi Orthodox teenagers studying in yeshivot and seminaries not included in government data. In the 1990s, only 46 percent of Jewish students attended haredi schools.
For many parents and members of the British Jewish community, the loss of the school cut deep.
“At a time when our children’s strength in their own identity is so essential, it feels doubly tragic for a school that instills that Jewish pride to close,” Naomi Greenaway, an Immanuel College parent and journalist, wrote in an op-ed in The Jewish Chronicle. “But this tragedy is one that the Immanuel College community of parents, pupils, teachers, trustees, governors and alumni will have to mourn together.”
Rabbi Alex Chapper, the leader of the Borehamwood & Elstree United Synagogue in England, wrote in a post on Facebook that the closure served as a reminder of “just how important Jewish education is for our community.”
“It must never be taken for granted, outsourced, or undervalued,” Chapper wrote. “Instead, we should redouble our commitment to supporting the education of the next generation, so they can build a proud, knowledgeable, and confident Jewish future.”
The Hertfordshire Friends of Israel also mourned the closure in a post on Facebook, writing, “This is more than just a school closure story, it’s about a community, a legacy and the growing pressures on Jewish education across the UK.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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Hochul pushes 25-foot buffer around New York houses of worship as Mamdani wavers on local bills
New York Gov. Kathy Hochul on Tuesday doubled down on her support for proposed legislation that would create a 25-foot buffer zone around houses of worship statewide, stepping into a growing debate over public safety and free speech in a move that puts her at odds with New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani.
Hochul, who is running for reelection this year, pushed the plan ahead of a final budget agreement with the state Legislature, now more than two weeks past its April 1 deadline. It comes as Mamdani has declined to say whether he will sign a more limited measure passed by the City Council aimed at curbing disruptive demonstrations outside synagogues and schools.
“I want to get that done,” Hochul, speaking alongside Jewish leaders and law enforcement officials, said about her proposed 25-foot buffer, which would be upheld by police around places of worship. “That is common sense. It’s a statement when people leave their homes, that they will feel safe from harassment.” She added that the fear of Jews facing antisemitic attacks and harassment “is not a hypothetical. It is happening. It has happened, and the effects are lingering.”
The governor’s proposal marks a more aggressive statewide approach than the one recently passed by the New York City Council, led by Speaker Julie Menin, who is Jewish, as anti-Jewish incidents continue to make up a majority of reported hate crimes in New York. The Council’s package of bills directs the NYPD to develop a plan within 45 days for managing protests near houses of worship and educational institutions. The synagogue-focused measure passed 44–5 — a veto-proof margin — while a companion bill addressing protests near schools cleared the chamber with a narrower majority.
Mamdani, a strident critic of Israel who rose to power aligned with pro-Palestinian activism, has not committed to signing or vetoing the legislation, citing “serious concerns” raised by free speech advocates and pro-Palestinian supporters about limiting New Yorkers’ constitutional rights. Under city law, the bills could also become law automatically if he takes no action within 30 days.
The mayor, however, did publicly express objections to the Council’s initial proposal to establish buffer zones of up to 100 feet outside synagogues. “I wouldn’t sign any legislation that we find to be outside of the bounds of the law,” he said. The perimeter proposal was omitted in the final version of the bill following reservations expressed by Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch, who cautioned that a one-size-fits-all rule might not withstand legal challenge and could prove unworkable across neighborhoods with vastly different street layouts.
A City Hall spokesperson referred to Mamdani’s previous statements when asked for comment on the Hochul proposal. The state measure could supersede any action he takes.
The proposals emerged following disruptive protests outside houses of worship in recent months centered on events promoting immigration to and real estate in Israel, at Park Avenue Synagogue in Manhattan and Young Israel of Kew Gardens Hills in Queens.
Hochul was uncompromising about her approach. “I believe I have the right to protect people’s constitutional right to free exercise of religion,” she told reporters. “And so if that needs to be tested in court, bring it on.”
Hochul, who endorsed Mamdani in the mayoral election last year, has maintained a warm relationship with Jewish leaders since becoming governor. If passed, the buffer zone bill could bolster her chances among the state’s more than one million Jewish voters against Bruce Blakeman, the Republican candidate and the first Jewish executive of Nassau County on Long Island. In 2022, former Rep. Lee Zeldin came within five percentage points of winning the governor’s race, powered by strong Jewish support.
Hochul made the announcement to call for an additional $70 million in funding for the state’s Securing Communities Against Hate Crimes program, which provides grants to protect vulnerable institutions, as well as a new online system for reporting bias incidents. Hochul has already allocated $131 million in grants for a total of 1,745 security projects since taking office in 2021.
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