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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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At California Universities, Students Rally to Support Terrorists and Criticize Victims
University of California, Berkeley students on March 11, 2025. Photo: Reuters via Reuters Connect
Universities are supposed to expose students to difficult perspectives, not shield them from uncomfortable ones. But on many campuses, Jewish and Israeli voices are increasingly treated not as viewpoints to engage with, but as problems to manage or condemn.
Few recent incidents captured that shift more clearly than the reaction to a former Israeli hostage speaking at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA).
On April 14, UCLA Hillel hosted former Israeli hostage Omer Shem Tov to speak about his experience being held captive in Gaza following the October 7 attacks.
For most universities, hosting a survivor of mass kidnapping and terrorist violence would not seem particularly controversial. At UCLA, however, the event triggered a formal condemnation from the student government that quickly made national headlines.
Rather than merely protesting the event or disagreeing with its message, UCLA’s Undergraduate Students Association Council accused the visit of promoting “one-sided narratives that erase systems of oppression and occupation.” Student leaders further expressed “concern” that having Omer on campus would somehow “marginalize” and “silence” Palestinian and Arab students.
Furthermore, the letter, which reportedly passed with unanimous consent, was drafted on Yom HaShoah, the day set apart to mourn the Jewish victims of the Holocaust. More disturbingly, the student government intentionally excluded USAC General Representative Talia Davood from discussions surrounding the letter, despite her direct involvement in organizing the event with Hillel.
This reveals that the people condemning the event had little interest in actually hearing from anyone who disagreed with them — and proves they clearly did not act in good faith.
Davood was later questioned regarding the funding for the event, even though it did not come from the student government’s budget. So what exactly was the concern supposed to be, other than hostility toward the community that she, Hillel, and Omer represent?
The students’ reaction to Omer’s appearance exposed that rather than engage with voices they disagree with, these liberal students are trying to silence any voices or viewpoints they oppose.
When UCLA organizations such as Students for Justice in Palestine are freely permitted to organize activism on campus while Jewish cultural events are scrutinized and condemned, it reveals a deeply ideological and hostile climate at UCLA.
When pro-Palestinian activists on campus engage in violence, prevent Jewish students from attending class, and destroy university property, the administration drags its feet. But when Jewish students try to invite a speaker to campus, the administration refuses to support them.
For UCLA student Amit Cohen, the message communicated something much larger than disagreement over Middle East politics. “What I took from the letter is that Jewish students don’t belong on campus,” he said. “They condemned our story. They didn’t want to listen to it. It’s the most hypocritical thing I’ve ever read.”
But this hypocritical hostility extends beyond UCLA.
In the same month, UC Berkeley students hosted a convicted failed suicide bomber and justified the event using the same language about standing in solidarity with Palestinians. Of course, the event did not receive condemnation from Berkeley’s student government either.
The contrast would be laughable if it were not so revealing.
A moral inversion of reality is beginning to dominate parts of university culture. Certain forms of violence are granted moral context and institutional patience, while Israeli and Jewish suffering increasingly appears politically inconvenient to acknowledge too sympathetically.
When platforming a literal terrorist is framed as giving voice to the marginalized while a former hostage speaking about his captivity is considered beyond the pale, something is deeply wrong with the culture of those academic communities.
Students at UCLA have the power to influence the culture of their campus. They should not only speak out against this letter, but actively refuse to participate in the atmosphere that these disappointing student leaders are helping to cultivate.
The good news is that Jewish students at UCLA remain undeterred. As Amit Cohen affirmed, “We’ve been keeping our heads up. The UCLA Jewish community is going to stay strong.”
Destiny Lugo is a third year International Relations and Journalism student at Oral Roberts University in Tulsa, Oklahoma. She is a fellow for the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis (CAMERA). The views expressed are the opinion of the author, and don’t reflect those of CAMERA.
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How Israel Adds Economic Value and Technological Advancement to the United States
The lobby of Tel Aviv’s stock exchange. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.
In much of the public debate in the US, the relationship between Israel and the United States is often reduced to a simplistic and misleading story of unilateral American support. According to this view, Israel is portrayed as a dependent state sustained by American generosity.
Such a framing may be politically convenient for critics, but it fails to reflect the complexity and the mutual benefits of one of the most consequential alliances in modern geopolitics.
A more accurate reading shows a partnership that delivers strategic depth, military advantage, technological innovation, and economic gains for the United States, while reinforcing stability for allies around the world.
From a strategic standpoint, Israel functions as a critical anchor of stability for American interests in a region defined by volatility and shifting power struggles. It is one of the few consistent democratic partners the United States can rely on in an area where state collapse, militant movements, and authoritarian regimes often intersect. Israeli experience in counterterrorism and unconventional threats also contributes to this strategic value.
The economic dimension of this relationship is equally significant and often misunderstood. American assistance to Israel, frequently cited as evidence of imbalance, is in practice deeply integrated into the United States domestic economy. A substantial portion of defense related funding is actually a windfall for American defense contractors, supporting skilled employment across multiple states. This includes engineering, manufacturing, research, and logistics sectors that sustain high quality jobs and reinforce the American industrial base.
Beyond defense production, the technological ecosystem known as Silicon Wadi has become an important extension of global innovation networks. Major American technology companies maintain significant research and development operations in Israel, not out of symbolism but out of necessity.
Israeli engineers and entrepreneurs have played central roles in advances in cybersecurity, semiconductor development, artificial intelligence applications, and medical technology. These contributions are embedded in everyday American life, from secure banking systems to consumer electronics and enterprise infrastructure. Thousands of companies founded or co-founded by Israelis operate in the United States, contributing to job creation, tax revenues, and technological competitiveness.
Every American uses products and technologies that were developed in Israel, by Israelis.
The impact of Israeli innovation extends well beyond the United States as well. Agricultural technologies pioneered in Israel, particularly in water management and irrigation efficiency, have been deployed in countries facing severe food security challenges. India has incorporated such systems to improve agricultural yields and resource efficiency across large farming regions. Across Africa and Asia, desalination and water reuse technologies developed in Israel are helping communities adapt to climate-related scarcity.
These examples illustrate a broader reality. Israel functions as a hub of applied innovation, often developing solutions under conditions of constraint that are later adapted globally. This dynamic produces a multiplier effect that benefits not only the United States but also a wide range of international partners.
At a time when global politics is increasingly defined by technological competition, asymmetric warfare, and resource insecurity, the value of this partnership becomes even more apparent. The United States and Israel form a cooperative model that enhances both national security and economic resilience.
The suggestion that Israel represents a burden on the United States does not withstand close examination. It overlooks the strategic advantages, the economic integration, and the technological interdependence that define the relationship. Rather than a one sided arrangement, this alliance operates as a mutually reinforcing system that strengthens both nations and extends benefits to allies across the democratic world.
The partnership between Israel and the United States is not merely a matter of foreign policy tradition or diplomatic preference. It is a strategic asset that advances shared interests in security, innovation, and global stability. In an era of increasing uncertainty, such alliances are not optional. They are essential.
Sabine Sterk is the CEO of Time To Stand Up For Israel
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How the Jewish People Can Unite: A Lesson From Yavne and the Mishnah
Image of the first complete Mishnah. Photo: The British Library.
On May 13, at a national conference in Jerusalem dedicated to repairing Israeli society and building a shared civic future, Israel’s President, Isaac Herzog, warned that division had become the country’s most urgent internal threat.
I was surprised to learn recently that Jewish unity was elusive even in the dire circumstances of the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, the largest Jewish revolt against Nazi Germany during World War II — when a few hundred poorly armed Jewish fighters held off a much larger and far better equipped German army for almost a month. (The uprising ended 83 years ago, on May 19.)
During the uprising, there were two Jewish rebel forces: the ZOB (members of left wing groups, such as HaShomer HaTzair and the Bund), and a parallel organization, the ZZW (made up of youth from the political right — Betar and the Revisionists). While the two organizations cooperated to some extent and fought the Germans in parallel, they were never a unified force. Of course, it didn’t really matter. The German army was far too powerful for a few hundred inadequately armed insurgents.
Obviously the current day State of Israel — and its 78 year history — proves that Jewish cooperation does happen. Another example that comes to my mind is the Jewish experience nearly 2,000 years ago at Yavne, a town on the coastal plain of the Holy Land. That was when Rabbi Yohanan ben Zakai ensured Jewish continuity after the destruction of Jerusalem and the Second Temple in 70 CE, by establishing a Jewish academy at Yavne and reconstituting the Sanhedrin.
Jewish society during the lead up to the First Roman-Jewish war was a sectarian society dominated by two groups — the Pharisees, the group responsible for the establishment of the synagogue as a focus of Jewish life outside the Temple, and the Sadducees, the priestly caste that administered the Temple.
Both groups shared the same written scriptures and many traditions. But they differed in that the Pharisees believed in resurrection after death and in the authority of the Oral Law, as well as the Torah. The Sadducees did not.
One American scholar, Shaye J. D. Cohen, describes how the rabbis who gathered in Yavne ended Jewish sectarianism and created a society that tolerated and even encouraged vigorous debate. The result was the abandonment of sectarian labels such as Pharisees and Sadducees, and the writing of the Mishnah.
In all likelihood, most of the rabbis at Yavne were Pharisees, and the centerpiece of Sadducee life, the Second Temple, was gone. However, there is no indication that the rabbis of Yavne were motivated by Pharisaic triumphalism. The goal was not exclusivity, but rather elasticity. Cohen notes that the Mishnah is the “first work of Jewish antiquity which ascribes conflicting legal opinions to named individuals who, in spite of their disagreements, belong to the same fraternity. This mutual tolerance is the enduring legacy of Yavneh.”
A year before he passed away, the late Rabbi Jonathan Sacks published what he titled Seven Principles for Maintaining Jewish Peoplehood. The list includes points such as the need to keep talking, to listen to one another, and to respect one another. But most important of all, never seek victory. I think this is what the rabbis at Yavne understood very well. Rabbi Sacks’ message to the diverse factions that make up Israel’s political and social fabric would be, “Do not think in terms of victory or defeat. Think in terms of the good of the Jewish people.”
Jacob Sivak, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, is a retired professor, University of Waterloo.