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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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Trump Touts ‘Peace Through Strength’ in State of the Union, but Results Are Mixed
US President Donald Trump gestures on the day he delivers the State of the Union address in the House Chamber of the US Capitol in Washington, DC, US, Feb. 24, 2026. Photo: REUTERS/NATHAN HOWARD
“Peace through strength” is a foreign policy motto that has served President Donald Trump well — when he has adhered to it.
In his hyper-partisan State of the Union address on Tuesday, there was a rare moment of strength through unity. When Trump noted the return of all Israeli hostages from Gaza, Republicans and Democrats alike — except for Congress’s most noxious members — joined in a standing ovation. Among the many conflicts Trump took credit for ending in his speech, the Gaza ceasefire is, perhaps, the one for which he deserves the most credit.
Trump praised Hamas for working to recover the bodies of the last captives despite the fact that a high-ranking Israeli military official said that the terrorist group did not assist in the recovery of the body of Ran Gvili, the final hostage rescued from Gaza.
Trump noted Gvili’s mother’s relief to bury her son. Speaker of the House Mike Johnson also humanized Israeli victims of violence by inviting as his guest the brother of an Israeli Embassy staffer gunned down in Washington, DC, while attending a Jewish event.
But what Israel watchers were looking for was a sign indicating whether Trump would strike Iran with military force. Not surprisingly, the president did not give the order from the dais or press a big red button to launch the operation. But he left his tea leaves out in the open.
Exaggerating somewhat, Trump noted the successful Operation Midnight Hammer from June 2025 that “obliterated Iran’s nuclear weapons program” but acknowledged that Iran is busy rebuilding its nuclear weapons capabilities.
Iranians may be forgiven for a certain skepticism about Trump’s intentions going forward — whether he will indeed display the strength needed to keep the peace. In January, at the height of the protests against the Islamic Republic, the US president told the Iranians demonstrating in the streets that “help is on its way” and warned Tehran to “stop killing protesters.” But the Islamic Republic drowned Trump’s red line in a sea of its citizens’ blood.
In the weeks leading up to the State of the Union, the US military moved two aircraft carrier strike groups into the region and landed a group of F-22 Raptor jets in Israel — a lot of firepower. But to justify an attack, Trump wants to demonstrate that he has exhausted the diplomatic route.
Noting the negotiations with Iran, Trump declared, “My preference is to solve this problem through diplomacy.” But, Trump stated, the Iranians haven’t forsworn nuclear weapons. Trump additionally mentioned the Islamic Republic’s ballistic missile program and its support of terrorist proxies as causes for concern.
Trump has also undermined his mantra through his unwillingness to seriously challenge Russia to end its aggression in Ukraine during his second term, let alone within the 24 hours he promised on the campaign trail.
During his State of the Union address, Trump said his administration is working “very hard” to end the war. But the effort has not yet borne fruit.
He lamented “the killing and slaughter between Russia and Ukraine, where 25,000 soldiers are dying each and every month.”
That was the only mention of the four-year-long war in nearly two hours of speaking. Trump appears frustrated that his Midas touch in international peacemaking has exceeded his grasp. But he partly has himself to blame for rushing headlong into negotiations without first maximizing military or economic pressure on Russia, attempting peace without demonstrating strength.
Trump could have proactively built negotiating leverage against Russian President Vladimir Putin by strengthening Ukraine’s ability to withstand the Russian onslaught while applying stronger sanctions on the Russian economy. Instead, he slashed military assistance for Kyiv and waited nine months to impose sanctions targeting Russian oil companies Rosneft and Lukoil. Even then, his administration has not enforced those sanctions, reducing their impact.
Trump rolled out the red carpet for Putin in August for what he thought would be a productive one-on-one meeting. Instead, Putin embarrassed the president by lecturing him on Russian history while refusing to back down from his maximalist demands.
Trump’s negotiators, Steve Witkoff and son-in-law Jared Kushner, have accomplished just as little in the same period. With Russia continuing to demand Ukrainian territory in the Donbas that its military cannot take by force, the White House has leaned on Ukraine to make territorial concessions, believing this will unlock peace. But that’s both unacceptable to Kyiv and insufficient to satisfy Putin, whose ultimate objective is to dominate Ukraine as a whole.
To his credit, Trump extracted a commitment from NATO members to spend 5 percent of their GDP toward defense and other security-related priorities, improving burden sharing. But Washington has added needless strain to transatlantic ties by meddling in European domestic politics, launching a self-defeating trade war, and attempting to bully Denmark into ceding Greenland to the United States.
As Trump put it in his speech, “We have to be strong, because hopefully we will seldom have to use this great power.” Washington can best deter its enemies when it applies its “peace through strength” approach forcefully and consistently and when it nurtures strong alliances rather than upending them.
David May is a research manager and senior research analyst at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), where Dmitriy Shapiro is a research analyst and editor. For more analysis from the authors and FDD, please subscribe HERE. Follow David on X @DavidSamuelMay and Dmitriy @dmitriyshapiro. Follow FDD on X @FDD. FDD is a Washington, DC-based, nonpartisan research institute focusing on national security and foreign policy.
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Four Years After Russia’s Full-Scale Invasion, Peace Requires Leverage — Not Capitulation
Rescuers work at the site of the apartment building hit by a Russian drone during a Russian missile and drone strike, amid Russia’s attack on Ukraine, in Kyiv, Ukraine, Dec. 27, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Viacheslav Ratynskyi
Four years ago, Russian armored columns pushed toward Kyiv, expecting a swift collapse of the Ukrainian state. That collapse never came.
Russia failed in its central objective. Kyiv did not fall. Ukraine’s government did not crumble. NATO did not fracture. What Vladimir Putin sought to prevent remains intact: a sovereign, Western-aligned Ukraine.
Russia today occupies roughly one-fifth of Ukraine’s territory, including Crimea and large swaths of the Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia, and Kherson regions. Much of that territory was seized either in 2014 or during the early months of the 2022 invasion. Since then, Moscow’s gains have been incremental and costly, measured in devastated villages rather than decisive breakthroughs.
Ukraine, despite facing a significant infantry shortage, continues to hold Russia to incremental gains while inflicting heavy casualties. The war has killed or wounded hundreds of thousands of soldiers and displaced millions of civilians. Cities such as Mariupol, Bakhmut, and Severodonetsk lie in ruins.
But the consequences of this war extend far beyond Ukraine’s borders. Europe has begun to rearm, addressing chronic underinvestment in defense since the end of the Cold War. As a result of the Russian invasion, Finland and Sweden joined NATO, doubling the alliance’s border with Russia, a strategic setback the Kremlin apparently didn’t anticipate. Energy markets have been reshaped as European states have largely weaned themselves off Russian oil and gas. Washington and its allies have been forced to rethink deterrence, force posture, and industrial capacity for sustained conflict.
In Ukraine, Putin faces a dilemma: he cannot impose the outcome he wants on the battlefield, yet he refuses to scale back his maximalist demands. So, the Kremlin has turned negotiations into another front in the war. Moscow has sought to use diplomacy to split the United States from Ukraine and Europe and enlist US help in forcing Kyiv to swallow Putin’s terms. The Kremlin demands that Ukraine cede the remainder of its eastern Donbas region, abandon its aspirations of joining NATO, accept limits on its military’s size and capabilities, and enshrine legal protections for Russian cultural influence. In short, Putin seeks to achieve through diplomacy what Russia has failed to secure decisively through force.
That approach only works if Moscow believes time is on its side. At present, the Kremlin appears to calculate that Western political divisions will deepen and that Russia can eventually exhaust Ukraine’s resistance. Until Putin’s calculus changes, diplomacy without leverage will not moderate Russian objectives. It will entrench them.
Shifting that calculation requires raising the cost of continued aggression and making Putin understand that neither Western will nor Ukrainian resistance will break. The United States retains significant tools to do so. Rather than slashing military assistance for Kyiv as the Trump administration has done, additional support can help Ukraine increase the price Russia pays for its battlefield advances. Strictly enforcing and building upon existing sanctions, particularly on the energy revenues that finance the war, can tighten economic pressure on the Kremlin.
Pressure, steadily applied, can shape negotiating behavior. Concessions offered prematurely are counterproductive. By leaning on Kyiv to bend to Moscow’s demands, Washington risks reinforcing Kremlin intransigence. And by rushing into negotiations without first establishing leverage, the Trump administration wasted valuable time.
Ending the war is a worthy objective. But the terms matter. A settlement that emboldens Russian revanchism or merely grants Moscow time to rearm for a follow-on war would damage US interests — with implications extending well beyond Ukraine. It would undermine the credibility of US security guarantees, destabilize Europe’s security architecture, and shift American strategic bandwidth away from higher-priority theaters.
Four years into this war, the lesson is not that diplomacy is futile. It is that diplomacy must be facilitated with strength. The United States still possesses the tools to create that leverage. Using them is not escalation. It’s smart negotiating.
Keti Korkiya is a research analyst in the Russia Program at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD).
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The Jewish Audacity to Have Vision Against All Odds
Rabbi Yosef Shlomo Kahaneman in June 1953. Photo: Phto Birnfeld, Tel Aviv / National Library of Israel, Schwadron collection via Wikimedia Commons
We have all suffered the frustration of dealing with construction delays. But the news this week out of Spain should give us all pause. In Barcelona, cranes gently hoisted the final 12-ton section into place completing the central tower of the Sagrada Família cathedral, bringing the structure to its full height of 172.5 meters and officially making it the tallest church in the world. The construction project has finally been completed … after 144 years.
You read that right. Ground was broken in 1882. A year later, the eccentric architect Antoni Gaudí began the project in earnest. He devoted the remainder of his life to Sagrada Família, and died a century ago, in 1926, with less than a quarter of it built.
Wars intervened. Funding evaporated. Portions of his original models were destroyed. George Orwell dismissed it as “one of the most hideous buildings in the world,” and remarked wryly that the anarchists who controlled Barcelona while he lived there showed poor taste in not blowing it up.
And yet, finally, this week, crowds gathered to watch as cranes completed a vision that originated in the 19th century. It is hard to think of anything more bizarre in our age of instant results and overnight success than a project that spans nearly a century and a half — except perhaps the audacity of the man who designed it knowing full well he would never live to see it finished.
Gaudí once remarked, almost casually, “My client is not in a hurry,” meaning God. It was a line delivered with a shrug, but it contained his entire philosophy. What Gaudí saw in his mind’s eye would emerge, and he knew it.
What makes the story so extraordinary is that Gaudí was not sketching fantasy in the vague hope that some future engineer would figure out how to put it all together.
Gaudí constructed meticulous scale models. He calculated load-bearing curves with obsessive care. He suspended chains from ceilings and used mirrors to study how gravity naturally shaped arches, effectively reverse-engineering physics long before computer modeling made such things easy.
His vision was undeniably romantic — but it was also rigorously disciplined. He imagined something magnificent, and then he subjected that imagination to mathematics, materials, and method. He was planning, deliberately and patiently, toward a future he knew with absolute certainty he would never live to see.
The Jewish people understand that kind of vision very well. Amid the Second World War, as European Jewish life lay in smoking ruins and every yeshivah had been obliterated together with their students and rabbinic faculty, one man in Eretz Yisrael began speaking about the future in a way that made some of his contemporaries quietly wonder whether grief had unhinged him.
His name was Rabbi Yosef Shlomo Kahaneman, but he is better known as the Ponevezher Rav. He managed to escape the inferno of Europe, but his community in Ponevezh had been annihilated, along with his beloved yeshiva — once one of the crown jewels of prewar Lithuania.
The Ponevezher Rav’s world had been erased. Most people in his position would have focused on survival, on securing a modest foothold in a fragile new country, on mourning what could never be restored. Instead, he focused on rebuilding — not cautiously, but on a scale that seemed to defy the broken reality around him.
One day in 1944, even as the Holocaust still raged and the fate of millions hung in the balance, Rav Kahaneman climbed a barren hill in Bnei Brak and declared that he intended to build the greatest yeshiva in the world.
And then, astonishingly, he began raising funds. People thought he had lost his mind. There were barely any serious yeshiva students in Eretz Yisrael at the time. The economy was fragile. The British Mandate was unstable. Arab opposition to Jewish statehood was intensifying by the day. The idea of constructing a vast Torah citadel under those conditions felt detached from reality, almost delusional.
But the building went up anyway — stone by stone, floor by floor — until a grand edifice crowned the hill. When it opened, the cavernous beit midrash stood largely empty. A handful of students sat in a corner learning Gemara in a vast space designed for over a thousand yeshiva boys.
The image must have been surreal: a monumental structure with barely enough students to fill a corner. As it was going up, someone had asked the Ponevezher Rav whether this enormous building was not, perhaps, a touch ambitious. Would it not be wiser to start modestly and expand later?
His response has echoed through the decades: You do not build a small yeshiva and hope it becomes great. You build a great yeshiva — and then you fill it.
He could already see what others could not yet see — generations of students, the hum of Torah, and the glorious restoration of what was destroyed. Because the vision in his mind was so vivid, for him it wasn’t a vision; it was reality. And in time, it became reality.
It is precisely this energy that pulses through the Haftarah for Parshat Tetzaveh (Ez. 43:10–27), which contains one of Ezekiel’s most remarkable prophecies. He is not standing in bustling Jerusalem. He is in exile. The First Temple has been destroyed, its vessels looted, its glory extinguished, and the Jewish nation has been dragged to Babylonia in chains. The present is bleak, and the future seems hopeless.
And yet, in that very setting, God instructs Ezekiel to talk to the people about the Temple to be rebuilt in Jerusalem. The prophecy is dazzling, comprising a meticulous blueprint for the Temple, down to the smallest detail. We are given architectural plans, dimensions, measurements, and procedures, along with a seven-day dedication sequence laid out with methodical clarity.
Can you imagine how this must have sounded to a beleaguered nation whose hopes for revival could easily have been dismissed as delusional? They are sitting by the rivers of Babylon, mourning what has been lost — and the prophet is discussing the floor plan of a Temple that does not yet exist. It borders on ridiculous.
But that is exactly the point. When you can picture the future clearly enough — when you can measure it, describe it, and it vividly inhabits your imagination — you begin, quietly but powerfully, to live differently in the present.
Gaudí did not live to see his church completed, but the clarity of his plans ensured that generations of architects, artisans, and engineers could continue his work long after he was gone. The Ponevezher Rav did not know how many students would one day fill his massive yeshiva, but his refusal to think small created the conditions in which greatness could take root.
Ezekiel’s generation did not rebuild the Temple, but they were handed something powerful: a design that made hope structured and concrete rather than sentimental and abstract. There is a profound difference between fantasy and vision. Fantasy floats, untethered from reality, comforting but meaningless. Vision, by contrast, submits itself to measurement. It accepts the discipline of detail. And most importantly, it draws plans.
In our own lives, we often hesitate to articulate what we truly hope for because we are afraid it may never materialize. We temper our ambitions, soften our aspirations, and downsize our dreams in order to shield ourselves from disappointment. We build small because small feels safer.
But Judaism has never been a small-building civilization. Three times a day we pray for the rebuilding of Jerusalem, in deliberate, specific language. It is blueprint before redemption. The Jewish story is about seeing beyond the current constraints, and then proceeding methodically in quiet determination.
And one day — sometimes decades later, sometimes a century later — the cranes come down, the halls fill with voices, and the towers stand complete.
The author is a rabbi in Beverly Hills, California.