Uncategorized
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.
—
The post Commemorating Philip Roth means confronting his limitations head on appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
Uncategorized
Rahm Emanuel joins calls for end to US ‘financial aid’ to Israel
(JTA) — Rahm Emanuel has joined growing calls for the United States to end subsidies tied to its military sales to Israel, arguing that Israel should purchase weapons on the same terms as other U.S. allies.
“The days of taxpayers subsidizing Israel militarily, that’s over,” Emanuel said during an appearance on Bill Maher’s HBO Max show “Real Time.” “No more financial aid.”
Emanuel is the Jewish former mayor of Chicago who is seen as a likely 2028 Democratic presidential candidate. His comments come months after he said that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the Israeli government bore responsibility for the starvation of Palestinians in Gaza last summer.
Now, as support for Israel hits a record low among Democrats and party leaders increasingly move away from the United States’ longstanding backing of the country, calls to end U.S. military aid to Israel are gaining traction.
Last week, all but seven Senate Democrats voted to block the sales of certain weapons to Israel, marking a doubling in the number of lawmakers backing similar resolutions in just two years.
Emanuel, whose father was born in Jerusalem and who volunteered as a civilian with the Israeli army during the Gulf War in the 1990s, told Maher that Israel should be able to fund its own military — and implied that it might not meet the United States’ standards for being able to purchase U.S.-made weapons.
“Israel is a very wealthy nation. There should be no more taxpayer support for what they want to do and they get the same deal that any one of our allies do,” Emanuel said. “They have to abide by the laws of the United States if they’re going to buy X weapons, and that’s how it should be constructed.”
In January, Netanyahu said for the first time that he wanted to “taper off” U.S. military aid to Israel over the next decade until it reaches zero. His pledge was quickly met with support from South Carolina Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham, who said at the time, “We need not wait 10 years.”
Speaking of the joint U.S.-Israeli war in Iran, Emanuel said the move amounted to a “violation of a rule Israel’s had for 78 years,” arguing that Israel had long sought to avoid pulling the United States into conflicts with its neighbors.
“The United States should never spill any blood for the state of Israel’s security,” Emanuel said. “What happened here going into Iran with the United States and Israel fighting together, which has never happened in 78 years, is a major change in policy for the State of Israel, which comes with political risk, and now they’re seeing it.”
The post Rahm Emanuel joins calls for end to US ‘financial aid’ to Israel appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
Michigan Democrats nominate Eli Savit, progressive Jewish prosecutor, for state attorney general
(JTA) — A progressive Jewish county prosecutor won the endorsement of Michigan’s state Democratic Party over the weekend in his bid for state attorney general, at a convention that also spotlighted deep divides over Israel within the party.
Eli Savit beat out another county prosecutor for the chance to succeed Dana Nessel, the state’s current AG, who is also a Jewish Democrat. He will be the Democratic nominee on November’s ballot.
Unlike Savit, who remains largely embraced by the left, Nessel has made enemies among the state’s pro-Palestinian activist contingent for her role in aggressively prosecuting University of Michigan encampment protesters.
The 41-year-old Savit has since 2021 been the prosecutor of Washtenaw County, which includes Ann Arbor and the university. A former clerk for Jewish Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, he was endorsed by Sen. Bernie Sanders and elected in a mini-wave of progressive prosecutors that also included Chesa Boudin in San Francisco.
While Boudin was forced out following a 2022 recall, Savit has remained in Washtenaw’s good graces as he’s pushed progressive proposals including decriminalizing consentual sex work, not seeking prosecutions for psychedelics consumption and curbing cash bail.
Savit has called himself “a bona fide American Jew” and has invoked his identity when opposing policies such as President Trump’s first-term 2019 executive order defining Judaism as a nationality as part of an effort to target BDS movements on college campuses. He has said his father’s family came from “shtetls in Russia, Poland, and the Ukraine,” and that his mother, originally from Iowa, converted to Orthodox Judaism. He also wrote a letter to the Wall Street Journal in 2016 to dispute a column wondering why more Jews don’t vote Republican.
Savit also played a part in prosecuting the university’s pro-Palestinian protesters, although his role was smaller than Nessel’s. In 2024 his office filed felony charges against four protesters for allegedly assaulting police officers during a sit-in at the university president’s house. Some activists accused Savit and his assistant prosecutor of “betraying their constituents” and “doing so to protect the university’s investments in genocide and apartheid.” (Two of the charged were permitted to enter a diversion program for young offenders, while the other two pled down to misdemeanors.)
When it came to the more high-profile charges against some of the school’s encampment participants, Savit allowed Nessel’s statewide office to handle the cases. Nessel was then accused of being “biased,” a charge she labeled as antisemitic; she ultimately dropped the charges against the protesters.
The attorney who defended the protesters, Amir Makled, also won the Democratic Party’s nomination Sunday in his bid to oust a Jewish, pro-Israel member of the University of Michigan’s Board of Regents. Makled won the party’s support despite reports of past social media activity in which he had retweeted antisemitic conspiracy theorist Candace Owens and praised Hezbollah’s assassinated leader.
Savit also unreservedly condemned the Temple Israel attack in Michigan as antisemitic and stated, “There is a lot of grief, a lot of pain from people that may have loved ones, may have relatives who are in the regions, may even have lost loved ones and relatives. But at the end of the day, that certainly does not give license to launch attacks on Jewish community spaces.”
His statements drew a contrast with Michigan U.S. Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed, also a favorite of the state’s progressive wing, whose own condemnation of the attack had also invoked Israel’s war in Lebanon.
The post Michigan Democrats nominate Eli Savit, progressive Jewish prosecutor, for state attorney general appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
At soldiers’ graves, the rows keep growing: Israel’s Memorial Day is shaped by new loss
(JTA) — TEL AVIV — When Varda Morell stands by her son’s grave in Jerusalem’s Mount Herzl military cemetery this Memorial Day, the official ceremony unfolding nearby will barely register. That was true in the two Memorial Days since Maoz was killed in Gaza in February 2024. What she will see instead is a swath of fresh graves, the once-empty section where he is buried now completely full.
“Each time we’ve come to visit his grave, there’s another row and another row and another row,” she said.
Across Israel, families marking Memorial Day, known as Yom Hazikaron, are doing so this year against a backdrop of continued fighting, successive ceasefires and a steady stream of new casualties, turning what is meant to be a day of remembrance into one that, for many, isn’t rooted in the past. The Israeli government says 170 soldiers and security personnel were killed since Yom Hazikaron last year.
For the sixth consecutive year, the official ceremonies did not follow their traditional format, after successive disruptions that began with the pandemic and later included political turmoil, wildfires and wartime restrictions.
For Morell, the recent “cleared for publication” announcements naming soldiers killed in Lebanon have brought it all back. “My heart feels sick just thinking about it,” she said on her way to deliver a Memorial Day talk at her son’s paratrooper base. “I remember what those first days were like, and what those families are going through now that they’ve joined this club. The club that no one wants to be a part of.”
In recent years, a growing number of bereaved families have chosen to boycott official ceremonies altogether. More than 150 signed a letter last week urging coalition lawmakers not to speak at military cemeteries, saying their loved ones’ graves should not be used as a “political platform for divisive messages.” Many still gather at the graveside with their families or communities, while others have said it was too painful to visit on the day itself.
Orit Shimon, who lost her son Dotan in September 2024, said that after her daughter Nufar was killed in a traffic accident in 2013, she came to see Yom Hazikaron as “as holy as Yom Kippur,” marking it by visiting her grave and then returning home to watch television programs about fallen soldiers. But after her son was killed in Gaza, she stopped watching altogether. Her connection to him, she said, is not at his grave but in the photos and videos she returns to again and again.
This year, despite her husband’s objections, Shimon chose not to send out messages inviting people to come and pay their respects, but expects that neighbors from her West Bank settlement of Elazar will come anyway.
“We don’t need a Memorial Day — it’s for other people. Every day is Memorial Day for us,” she said.
Shimon was among more than 450 bereaved parents who spent the weekend ahead of Memorial Day together at a Tel Aviv hotel, part of an annual retreat organized by OneFamily, an Israeli nonprofit that supports families of fallen soldiers and victims of terror. The organization held its own Yom Hazikaron ceremony in Jerusalem, designed as a space for bereaved families to share their stories openly with one another, rather than participate in the formal national commemorations. A day after Memorial Day, on Israel’s Independence Day, OneFamily founder, Chantal Belzberg, will officially receive the Israel Prize for lifetime achievement.
Amir Avivi, a retired top IDF official and founder of the Israel Defense and Security Forum, was slated to give an address over Shabbat on the regional geopolitical context. The weekend came just after successive ceasefires, first with Iran and then with Hezbollah, at a time when many Israelis argued the fighting had ended before the job was done — a question that, for some bereaved parents, was more acute, as they grappled with whether their sons’ deaths had been in vain.
But his message, Avivi said before the session, was “packed with optimism.”
“We need to look at the whole picture, not every ceasefire is the end of the world,” Avivi said, pointing to what he described as Israel’s string of gains since Oct. 7, from the degradation of Hamas and Hezbollah to the campaign against the regime in Tehran. “Who would have imagined America fighting side by side with Israel to take out an existential threat? I fully believe a golden age is coming.”
In another session, led by Eti Ablin, a clinical social worker and bereavement specialist, the discussion turned to the months and years after the loss. Some spoke about going from ceremony to ceremony in the first year, while others said that over time, the visits and calls from supporters had become less frequent.
One woman said that in the months after her son was killed, the constant presence of visitors had felt overwhelming, but that in the years since, she had noticed neighbors crossing the street to avoid her.
Another parent, whose son was killed at the Nova music festival, described organizing a birthday gathering in his memory that drew hundreds of people. “It’s up to us to make people come,” he said, before breaking down.
Ablin, who co-chairs a national forum on grief and bereavement, said hope requires an active effort. “Hope is not the same as saying, ‘it will be okay,’” she said. “There’s no expiration date to the pain. So you have to put boundaries around it and learn how to find your way out of it.”
Tali Marom from Ra’anana, whose son Roee, a squad commander, was killed early in the war, said that idea resonated. “We learn to live alongside the pit of despair and we build exit strategies for when we fall into it,” she said.
Being with other bereaved parents, she said, was one of those ways out.
“I don’t know how I would have gotten through this Shabbat without this,” she said, gesturing to the room. “I may not know who that woman is over there, but I know what she’s going through.”
At dinner, the conversation turned to a law requiring bereaved parents to sign off on combat service for surviving children. Marom said she had been asked to approve such a request for her daughter, describing it as a burden she had never imagined.
Another parent said he had to sign repeatedly as his son crossed into Lebanon during operations, because each crossing of an international border required renewed authorization, forcing him to confront the emotional weight of that decision each time.
“Thank God I don’t have that to deal with as well,” a third parent said.
Other discussions turned to what people did with their children’s belongings after their deaths.
Nechama Aharon, from Pardes Hanna, whose son Yogev was killed on Oct. 7 battling Hamas at the Kissufim base in the Gaza envelope, said she has no intention of parting with any of his belongings, saying it matters more to her than visiting his grave, which she does twice a year — on the anniversary of his death and on Memorial Day.
“No matter what happens, I’ll never touch anything in his room. I’m leaving absolutely everything the way it was,” she said. “I know that he might not be with me physically, but this way I feel like I’m preserving his memory.”
Shimon said that, for her, holding on to her son had come to mean making sense of the way he died.
“For a long time, I couldn’t think about anything except that I no longer had my son,” she said. “Another year has passed in which he could have been alive, and he’s not. But slowly I came to realize he didn’t die in a car accident. He was doing what he wanted to do. He went to bring the hostages back. His death was not meaningless.”
Morell said she has tried to preserve her son’s memory through projects in his name, including a film about his life for friends, family and Jewish communities in the United States, where she grew up, to connect to his story.
She contrasted the experience with America’s Memorial Day, describing it as largely detached from the reality of loss, marked more by sales and barbecues than remembrance.
“Here it’s so different,” she said. “It’s so moving to me that thousands and thousands of people, many of whom are strangers, come to pay their respects. And we know that even when we’re not around any more, a soldier will be sent to stand by Maoz’s grave. His legacy will live on. That gives us a lot of comfort.”
The post At soldiers’ graves, the rows keep growing: Israel’s Memorial Day is shaped by new loss appeared first on The Forward.