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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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‘Loud, Bold, and Unchecked’: New Campus Antisemitism Report Card Fails the Ivy League
Harvard University campus on May 24, 2025, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Photo: Zhu Ziyu/VCG via Reuters Connect
StopAntisemitism, a Jewish civil rights advocacy group, has conferred mediocre and failing grades to over a dozen elite American colleges in a new annual report, citing the institutions’ failing to mount a meaningful response to the campus antisemitism crisis.
Of all the Ivy League universities assessed by StopAntisemitism, only three — Cornell University (C), Dartmouth College (B), and Princeton University (D) — merited higher than an “F.” StopAntisemitism, which is led by executive director Liora Rez, said other schools in the conference, such as Harvard University and Yale University, continue to offer Jewish students a hostile environment, citing as evidence feedback it has received from Jewish students who attend them.
“At Harvard, Jewish students report high levels of self-censorship and antisemitism, with federal authors finding the university showed ‘deliberate indifference.’ Despite new initiatives, the campus climate remains tense and accountability uncertain,” the report says. “At Yale, Jewish students faced harassment, exclusion, and blocked access, prompting a federal investigation. Despite policy changes, the campus remains hostile and unsafe for Jewish students.”
Other elite schools such as the University of Chicago, Northwestern University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Wesleyan University didn’t perform well either. Ds and Fs were given to the lot. Meanwhile, in the Washington, DC metropolitan region, a destination for students aspiring to future roles in government, American University and Georgetown University earned Ds.
“Even since the recent Gaza ceasefire agreement, antisemitism remains loud, bold, and unchecked, revealing that none of this is about Israel but instead is about Jew-hared, plain and simple,” the report says. “Coordinated protests, ideological harassment, and institutional apathy continue to endanger Jewish students. Families must confront the facts: Are you prepared to send tuition dollars to a school that allows your children to be threatened, targeted, and blamed simply for being Jewish?”
StopAntisemitism’s report tracks with opinions recently registered by Jewish students. Earlier this month, a significant portion of Jewish students at the University of Pennsylvania surveyed by the school’s Hillel chapter said antisemitism on their campus is severe enough to warrant hiding one’s Jewish identity. Additionally, 40 percent said it is difficult to be Jewish at Penn and 45 percent said they “feel uncomfortable or intimidated because of their Jewish identity or relationship with Israel.”
Meanwhile, the results showed a staggering 85 percent of survey participants reported hearing about, witnessing, or experiencing “something antisemitic.” Another 31 percent of Jewish Penn students said they feel the need to hide their Jewishness to avoid discrimination, which is sometimes present in the classroom, as 26 percent of respondents said they have “experienced antisemitic or anti-Israel comments from professors.”
As previously reported by The Algemeiner, American college campuses have seen numerous antisemitic incidents this academic year even as the federal government ramps up its efforts to combat antisemitism and higher education institutions bolster their anti-discrimination policies following an outcry from the Jewish community that its civil rights were not being recognized and protected.
In September, for example, two students forcefully gained entry into a Jewish fraternity’s off-campus house at Syracuse University on during Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, and heaved a bag of pork at a wall, causing its contents to splatter across the floor. In November, a Georgetown University-affiliated student newspaper issued an editorial which accused Israel of “genocide” and described the world’s lone Jewish state as an illegitimate entity that should be isolated. Days earlier, a local imam and graduate student at the City College of New York called for the imposition of sharia law on Americans and denigrated a Jewish professor during what began as an interfaith event but ended as another portent of rising anti-Jewish extremism in the US.
Jewish students told StopAntisemitism that the stories aren’t just headlines but representative of harrowing, lived experiences.
Fifty-eight percent of respondents to a survey the group conducted reported having “been a victim of antisemitism on campus” while 88 percent who brought the matter to campus officials said they were dissatisfied with the handling of the investigation. Sixty-five percent said they felt “unwelcome as a Jew in certain spaces” at some point and 61 percent said diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives do little in the way of reducing hatred.
“The 2025 findings prove that antisemitism on campus is systemic, not episodic. It is embedded in the culture, policies, and power structures of higher education,” the report concludes. “Jewish students who report harassment are routinely dismissed, ignored, or retraumatized. Administrators hide behind “process,” either because they too are afraid or, worse, because they are complicit. Faculty validate and amplify extremist rhetoric, some even teaching it in class. And DEI offices, the very departments tasked with protecting minority students, often serve as engines of anti-Jewish hostility.”
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
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Hamas Expands European Reach, Posing ‘High Likelihood’ of Terror Attack in Next Six Months, Intel Report Warns
Palestinian Hamas terrorists stand guard at a site as Hamas says it continues to search for the bodies of deceased hostages, in Beit Lahiya in the northern Gaza Strip, Dec. 3, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Stringer
Hamas operatives have pushed far beyond Gaza, embedding themselves across Europe — and now posing a growing threat inside the United Kingdom, where covert arms caches and active attack plots have put intelligence services on high alert, according to a new report.
Even though Hamas has traditionally focused its operations in Israel, Gaza, and the West Bank, the Palestinian terrorist group has been steadily cultivating foreign attack capabilities — a trend highlighted in a new report obtained by The Daily Mirror, which warns of a looming threat of Hamas-led attacks in Europe.
Intelligence assessments indicate that the terrorist group, backed for years by Iran, Qatar, and Turkey, has been gradually expanding its presence in Europe through a network of charities, NGOs, and criminal gangs, with Israeli diplomatic missions, Israel-linked businesses, and Jewish religious sites among its top targets.
The report also notes that the group has not only stockpiled weapons such as AK-47s and ammunition but is increasingly turning to drone warfare, bolstered by backing from Lebanon and Iran and supported by Eastern European crime networks that help it acquire advanced weaponry.
“The Oct. 7, 2023, assault fundamentally altered Israel’s threat perceptions, but also reshaped Hamas’s calculations,” the report says, referring to the Hamas-led invasion of and massacre across southern Israel.
“Following catastrophic damage to its infrastructure in Gaza and significant leadership attrition, the group’s remaining command nodes particularly those in Lebanon began activating contingency plans long under development,” it continues.
“The organization’s leadership now appears more willing to accept the strategic risks of external operations. If Hamas sustains further attrition, external operations may grow in relative importance within the group’s strategy,” the intelligence report adds.
According to the United Kingdom’s domestic counter-intelligence and security agency, MI5, and the Joint Terrorism Analysis Center, the current threat level of a terror attack in the UK is assessed to be “substantial.”
Over the next six months, the report warns, there is a “high likelihood of continued attempts at external operations, particularly in Europe, as Hamas seeks to demonstrate resilience.”
This assessment comes amid multiple intelligence findings showing that Hamas has expanded its terrorist operations beyond the Middle East, leveraging a long-established network of weapons caches, criminal alliances, and covert infrastructure quietly built across Europe over the years.
In October, West Point’s Combating Terrorism Center released a study detailing how Hamas leaders in Lebanon have directed operatives to establish “foreign operator” cells across Europe, collaborating with organized crime networks to acquire weapons and target Jewish communities abroad.
For example, a failed Hamas plot involved an alleged operative in Germany traveling to Lebanon to “receive orders from the Qassam Brigades [Hamas’s military wing] to set up an arms depot for Hamas in Bulgaria,” part of a broader, multi-year effort to cache weapons across Europe.
German authorities foiled the plan, detaining four Hamas members in late 2023 on suspicion of planning attacks.
Earlier this year, the four suspects went on trial in Berlin in what prosecutors described as Germany’s first-ever case against members of the Palestinian terrorist group.
During the investigation, German authorities also found evidence on a defendant’s USB device showing that the Hamas operatives were planning attacks on specific sites in Germany, including the Israeli embassy in Berlin.
Similar weapons depots were established in Denmark, Poland, and other European countries, with Hamas members repeatedly trying to retrieve them to support their operations and plan potential attacks.
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Jerusalem-Based Policy Center Seeks to Forge Inroads With US Lawmakers to Safeguard Israel’s Capital
Thousands of Jews gather for a mass prayer for the hostages in Gaza at the Western Wall in the Old City of Jerusalem, Jan. 10, 2024. Photo: Yaacov Cohen
Amid increasing uncertainty over the future of the US-Israel relationship, a Jerusalem-based organization committed to safeguarding Israel’s capital city has decamped to Washington, DC in an attempt to make inroads with federal lawmakers in the US.
The Jerusalem Center for Applied Policy (JCAP), a research and policy center, aims to help protect and bolster the security, sovereignty, economy, and international standing of “Israel’s indivisible capital” in the face of “existential challenges,” according to its website.
To expand its mission, JCAP has opened a new office in Washington, DC, where some its principals are currently touring to meet with lawmakers on Capitol Hill.
As part of its work, JCAP seeks to mitigate potential threats from terrorist groups and their sponsors and has adopted the goal of spreading awareness about Islamist propaganda campaigns targeting the West, arguing that malevolent entities are trying to undermine the legitimacy of Western democracies and corrode them from within.
Chaim Silverstein, founder and chairman of JCAP, told The Algemeiner in an interview in Washington, DC this week that protecting Jerusalem is critical to preserving the security and existence of Israel from terrorists. He described Jerusalem as “the heart of Israel,” arguing that adversarial entities understand that “if they harm the head” of the Jewish state, “the rest of the body will implode.”
Silverstein added that Jerusalem is particularly vulnerable because it is home to Israel’s largest Arab population, explaining that countries such as Turkey and Iran have been effectively radicalizing Arab citizens of Israel with the hope of turning them against their home and “Islamicizing” Jerusalem.
“Radical Islamic enemies are trying to destroy Jerusalem,” he said, stressing that they want to “liberate it for Islam.”
Thus, according to Silverstein, JCAP “formulates policy initiatives” to protect Jerusalem from looming threats. The organization maintains a “unique approach” to combatting Islamic extremism, he argued, touting its extensive efforts to monitor and track the Muslim Brotherhood’s global Islamist network. JCAP aims to share the organization’s findings and methodologies with US lawmakers, equipping them with the ability to thwart extremism in their own borders, Silverstein said.
JCAP aims to enhance “Jerusalem’s international standing through proactive diplomacy while countering the influence of hostile international agitators,” its website states, adding that the goal is “advancing strategic partnerships and advocacy to reinforce Jerusalem’s role as Israel’s united and sovereign capital.”
In addition to information about terrorist cells, JCAP also wants to spread awareness about the pervasive influence campaign waged by Qatar against Israel and Western countries. According to Silverstein, Qatar has attempted to soften its image through elevating its prominence in sports, entertainment, and academia while simultaneously spreading misinformation regarding Israel’s domestic policies and military campaign in Gaza. Moreover, he argued that this influence campaign aims to spark chaos within the borders of Western countries such as Canada, Australia, and the US.
US Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines warned in 2024 that actors tied to adversarial governments such as Iran have encouraged and provided financial support to rampant protests opposing Israel’s defensive military operations against the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas in Gaza.
Meanwhile, analysts have revealed in recent reports that Qatar, a longtime supporter of Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood’s global network more broadly, has spent tens of billions of dollars to influence US policy making and public opinion in Doha’s favor. At the same time, the country has provided the Hamas-run government in Gaza with an estimated $1.8 billion and allows the terrorist group to host an office in Doha.
JCAP acknowledged that the popularity of Israel has declined precipitously in the US, complicating efforts to forge strong ties with certain American lawmakers. Nonetheless, the organization said it believes that US policymakers will understand that their national security interests are intertwined with Israel’s. The organization suggested that despite the souring reputation of the Jewish state among younger US voters, the American military and defense industry still recognize that Israel is a valuable asset. Moreover, the group claimed that their mission — focusing more on Jerusalem rather than Israel writ large — helps to emphasize the shared Christian-Jewish Biblical heritage of the land rather than politics.
Amid the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza, many recent polls have shown a precipitous decline in support of Israel among Democrats and, increasingly, even Republicans, especially younger voters.
Though JCAP claims to stay neutral on domestic US issues, it explicitly identifies as “pro-Trump,” praising US President Donald Trump’s policies toward Israel. The group hopes to form inroads with the Trump administration and Republicans to help guide policies on Israel.