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
Palestinian-French lawmaker arrested after praising 1972 bomber of Ben Gurion Airport
(JTA) — French police detained Rima Hassan, a member of the European Parliament from France, on suspicion of “advocating for terrorism” after she quoted one of the perpetrators of a 1972 terror attack on an Israeli airport in a social media post.
Hassan, 33, was detained for several hours on Thursday by French authorities over a March 26 post in which she quoted an individual convicted of participating in the 1972 terror attack on Ben Gurion airport in Tel Aviv, which killed 26 people.
The post, which Hassan later deleted, included Japanese and Palestinian flags as well as a quote from Kozo Okamoto, a member of the terror group, which read, “I dedicated my youth to the Palestinian cause. As long as there is oppression, resistance will not only be a right, but a duty.”
The Paris prosecutor’s office said it had released Hassan and given her a court date of July 7 “to be tried on charges of advocating terrorism committed online.” If convicted, Hassan could face up to a seven-year jail term and a fine of up to 100,000 euros, or $115,290.
Hassan, who was elected to the European Parliament in 2024 for the French far-left party France Unbowed, has previously said that “Hamas’s actions are legitimate from an international perspective” and argued that Franco-Palestinians “must be able to join the Palestinian armed resistance.” She also participated in the Gaza-bound flotilla protesting Israel’s blockade of the enclave last June, and, last month, was denied entry into Canada ahead of a scheduled conference appearance.
The arrest came after two France-based antisemitism watchdogs, the International League Against Racism and Antisemitism and the European Jewish Organization, lodged complaints over Hassan’s post.
“Statements presenting the acts committed by terrorists in a favorable light constitute an apology for terrorism,” the European Jewish Organization wrote in a post on X on Thursday. “It is on this basis that the OJE has filed a complaint against RH for the statements made on X and for which she appears to have been placed in police custody today.”
The prosecutor’s office said that Hassan is under investigation in six additional cases, and that 16 other cases involving alleged online hate speech have been closed. Police are also separately investigating “substances resembling CBD and 3-MMC,” illegal drugs, that were found among her belongings.
In a post on X Friday, Hassan, who was born in Syria in a Palestinian refugee camp and has made pro-Palestinian advocacy and fierce criticism of Israel a hallmark of her political career, said that she was the “target of political, judicial, and media harassment.”
“This custody hearing was followed by a fifth summons this Friday, well illustrating the politico-judicial harassment that the Palestinian cause is enduring after more than 2 years of genocide and inaction on the part of our government,” wrote Hassan in a subsequent post.
French Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez dismissed claims that the case against Hassan was politically motivated, saying in a television appearance, “No one is above the law, especially on subjects as serious as the glorification of terrorism.”
The post Palestinian-French lawmaker arrested after praising 1972 bomber of Ben Gurion Airport appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
Michigan Democrats, Jewish leaders uneasy over Senate candidate’s alliance with Hasan Piker
(JTA) — Just weeks after an attack on a Michigan synagogue, a U.S. Senate candidate’s decision to campaign in the state with Hasan Piker — a streamer accused of antisemitic rhetoric — is prompting unease among Jewish leaders and fellow Democrats.
Abdul El-Sayed, a physician and former county health executive, is set to appear with Piker at two different Michigan universities on Tuesday.
The Hillel at Michigan State University said it was “deeply troubled” by Piker’s planned visit to campus, calling him a “known antisemite,” while at least one planned speaker, a state representative, backed out of the rallies citing the concerns of her Jewish constituents.
National Jewish leaders also criticized the planned events, with some comparing Piker to Nick Fuentes, the openly antisemitic livestreamer who has divided Republicans and others drawing a connection to the attack last month on Temple Israel.
“Abdul El-Sayed’s decision to host campaign rallies with Piker is not just alarming; it’s absolutely shocking. It reflects a broader trend: the dangerous normalization of antisemitism in our politics,” tweeted Jonathan Greenblatt, the head of the Anti-Defamation League. “That this is happening in Michigan, where Temple Israel was targeted in a violent antisemitic attack … makes it even more egregious.”
El-Sayed has defended his decision to campaign with Piker, including to Greenblatt, saying that he agrees with Piker on some issues but not others. Their points of agreement, he said, include “the way that AIPAC has decimated our politics and made us think that the most important goal of our foreign policy is to backstop Israel.”
He recently told a pro-Palestinian podcast that Piker’s past comments have been “taken out of context,” adding that Piker represents “where the disaffected people are” and that the streamer “has taken great pains to condemn any attempt to tie the government of Israel to the Jewish people.”
The campaign stops come as both Piker and El-Sayed — both Muslim progressives — face scrutiny over their comments about Jews and Israel.
Piker has increasingly divided Democrats, with a Jewish congressman from Illinois recently calling him “an unapologetic antisemite” even as some of his colleagues have continued to appear with him on his streaming show and in real life.
El-Sayed, meanwhile, grew up in a heavily Jewish suburb of Detroit and has the endorsement of some progressive Jews including former U.S. Rep. Andy Levin. He raised eyebrows with his response to the Temple Israel attack last month — he condemned the attack but also criticized Israel’s offensive in Lebanon, where the attacker’s brother was killed — as well as his reluctance to comment on the death of Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
A former security official with El-Sayed’s campaign recently told a local blog that he had witnessed comments from the candidate that the staffer thought would “give credibility to the claims of [El-Sayed’s] antisemitism and pro-Islamist regimes/factions” before resigning. The blog did not report any specifics.
“Personally, I regret and feel shame for excusing antisemitism and for not leaving sooner,” the former staffer said.
El-Sayed and Piker are set to appear with Rep. Summer Lee of Pennsylvania as well as candidates for local office, at both MSU and the University of Michigan.
In the leadup to the rallies, one of El-Sayed’s primary opponents, state Sen. Mallory McMorrow, as well as the head of the AJC compared Piker to white nationalist Nick Fuentes, who has celebrated Hitler and attacked “organized Jewry.”
Piker’s most vociferous critics have pointed to a history of his comments in which, among other things, he has denied or downplayed that rape took place during the Oct. 7 attacks and compared Houthi rebels to Anne Frank.
Piker rejects allegations of antisemitism. But in a recent interview he expressed regret over some of his more extreme rhetoric, including referring to Haredi Orthodox Jews as “inbred,” and offered additional context for some of his other remarks spotlighted by Greenblatt and other critics including the centrist Democratic group Third Way.
He has also said it is “Islamophobic to say: ‘Oh, this Muslim critic of Israel who has the majority opinion on Israel should not be going to a campaign rally.’”
El-Sayed has suggested that Piker’s critics are more broadly conflating criticism of Israel with antisemitism.
“I love and revere the Jewish people because I love ALL people. And I criticize Israel’s genocide because I love ALL people. I pray someday you understand,” El-Sayed tweeted in response to Greenblatt’s criticism of his association with Piker.
In a subsequent video, the candidate pointed out that former Vice President Kamala Harris invited Piker to stream at the 2024 Democratic National Convention, during her bid for president. He said he would not apologize “for every single video that people put up there that Hasan said this or Hasan said that” — and that he thought the progressive cause was larger than those critiques.
“Any Democrat who tells you that you cannot speak with some group of people because of one offensive thing that they might have said is missing the point of what it means to actually bring people into a legitimate mainstream policy where we can actually fight for the things we need and deserve,” El-Sayed said.
Third Way has called on El-Sayed to outline specifically where his views and Piker’s differ.
“If you insist on campaigning with an extremist like Piker just weeks after an attack on Jews at Temple Israel in Michigan, voters in your state deserve to know what you truly believe and how closely you align with his most abhorrent views,” wrote the group’s president, Jonathan Cowan. He asked six questions including, “Do you also dismiss the mass rape of Jewish and Israeli women by Hamas?” and “Do you believe as he does that ‘Hamas is a thousand times better’ than the Israeli state?”
At least one planned participant, Ann Arbor-based state Rep. Carrie Rheingans, has backed out of the rallies. She told local media that she still endorses El-Sayed and has “heard him denounce antisemitism vehemently multiple times,” but added, “I don’t appreciate many of Piker’s antisemitic comments… Maybe Hasan Piker has some room to learn how his comments affect other people, but I have to say, Jews, Muslims, and Arabs in Michigan are hurting for a lot of really good reasons right now.”
MSU Hillel, meanwhile, did not mention El-Sayed by name in its statement.
“At a time when Jewish students are experiencing heightened fear and vulnerability — especially in the wake of the recent attack on Temple Israel in West Bloomfield — this choice is especially concerning,” the Hillel chapter wrote on Instagram. “Hosting individuals like Hasan Piker who consistently use harmful, inflammatory and antisemitic rhetoric creates a hostile environment for Jewish students, threatening their security and belonging.”
The comparisons between Piker and Fuentes have opened a new flashpoint in debates over the role that streaming personalities are playing in American politics.
“In Piker’s case, his record speaks for itself, the same with Nick Fuentes. I don’t need to go into details about who they are or what they represent,” Ted Deutch, CEO of the American Jewish Committee, told Jewish Insider while urging Democrats not to associate with Piker. “Neither one of them belongs in the middle of the political process as a result of candidates choosing to put them there.”
In a statement, AJC Detroit, the region’s Jewish community relations arm, cautioned associating with both Piker and Fuentes but also did not name any candidates.
“AJC has reached out to leaders of both parties to warn about the dangers of platforming extremists like Hasan Piker and Nick Fuentes and helping them spread their virulent antisemitism,” spokesperson Amy Sapeika wrote. “With increasing polarization and the rise of extremism from the far left and far right, both parties need to make clear that antisemites like them have no place on their stages.”
The comparison is also shaping the Senate race directly. Piker “is somebody who says extremely offensive things in order to generate clicks and views and followers, which is not entirely different from somebody like Nick Fuentes,” McMorrow told Jewish Insider.
The other Democratic candidate in the Senate primary, Rep. Haley Stevens, said El-Sayed was “choosing to campaign with someone who has a history of antisemitic rhetoric” but did not make a Fuentes comparison. (Elissa Slotkin, the state’s centrist Jewish senator who is not up for reelection this year, said she wasn’t familiar with Piker’s rhetoric but that it “sounds deeply antisemitic.”)
Stevens, who is not Jewish, is generally seen as a centrist candidate preferred by AIPAC, the pro-Israel lobby that has emerged as a bogeyman in Democratic politics. McMorrow, who has a Jewish husband and Jewish child, is battling El-Sayed for the progressive mantle: She has the endorsement of liberal Zionist group J Street and has said Israel committed genocide in Gaza.
The post Michigan Democrats, Jewish leaders uneasy over Senate candidate’s alliance with Hasan Piker appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
Over Half of All New York City Hate Crimes Have Targeted Jews Since Mamdani Took Office, Police Says
New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani holds a press conference at the New York City Office of Emergency Management, as a major winter storm spreads across a large swath of the United States, in Brooklyn, New York City, US, Jan. 25, 2026. Photo: REUTERS/Bing Guan
The majority of all hate crimes in New York City over the first three months of this year have targeted Jews, according to new data released by the New York Police Department (NYPD).
The striking figures, announced last week by NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch, will likely fuel criticism of New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who took office on Jan. 1 and has been accused of promoting antisemitism and not doing enough to denounce violence against Jews.
“Confirmed hate crimes increased nearly 12 percent this quarter citywide. We continue to see that the vast majority of our hate crimes are antisemitic in nature,” Tisch said on Thursday in an appearance at 1 Police Plaza with Mamdani to discuss the overall crime data for the year.
“In fact, in the first quarter of 2026, more than half of all confirmed hate crimes, or 55 percent, were antisemitic, despite Jews only making up approximately 10 percent of the population of New York City,” the police commissioner added.
Explaining that the NYPD Hate Crimes Task Force “determines whether an incident meets the legal standard for hate crime under New York state law,” Tisch announced that “as of today, and for the first time, our monthly hate crime data will include two clear, accurate sets of numbers. Reported hate crimes, those flagged for investigation by the task force and confirmed hate crimes as determined by the task force.”
Tisch called this approach “the gold standard for reporting on hate crimes, and that is what we are going to do going forward. This will ensure that the public has an accurate and timely and more robust view than ever of hate crime activity in New York City.”
Tisch’s comments came amid an ongoing surge in antisemitic hate crimes across New York City. In January, for example, such crimes skyrocketed by 182 percent during Mamdani’s first month in office compared to the same period last year.
Jews were also targeted in the majority (54 percent) of all hate crimes perpetrated in New York City in 2024, according to data issued by the NYPD. A recent report released in December by the Mayor’s Office to Combat Antisemitism noted that figure rose to a staggering 62 percent in the first quarter of 2025.
Under Mamdani, however, Jewish New Yorkers have expressed particular alarm about their safety.
A far-left democratic socialist and anti-Zionist, Mamdani has refused to recognize Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state; supported boycotts of all Israeli-tied entities; and failed to explicitly condemn the phrase “globalize the intifada,” which has been used to call for violence against Jews and Israelis around the world.
Last week, the mayor said that New York was welcoming to people of all backgrounds.
“This is a city where everyone who lives here should know that they belong across these five boroughs. There is no person of any faith that should ever be made to feel as if this is not their home, that this is not a place where they can be safe,” he said. “And frankly, we are looking to build a city where the threshold is not simply safety. We want this to be a city where New Yorkers are cherished, where they are celebrated. And we know that that is the case for many. And still, there is so much more work to be done to ensure that is the case for all.”
Hours after taking office, Mamdani revoked multiple executive orders enacted by his predecessor to combat antisemitism.
Among the most controversial actions was Mamdani’s decision to undo New York City’s adoption of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s (IHRA) working definition of antisemitism, a framework widely used by governments and law enforcement around the world to identify contemporary antisemitic behavior. The definition has been widely accepted by Jewish groups and lawmakers across the political spectrum, and it is now used by hundreds of governing institutions, including the US State Department, European Union, and United Nations.
In February, a group of New York City politicians and civic leaders sued Mamdani, charging that members of his administration had stonewalled Freedom of Information Law (FOIL) requests related to his choice to cancel the executive order embracing the IHRA definition of antisemitism, a move supported by the mayor’s inner core of radical, anti-Zionist activists.
A reporter at 1 Police Plaza asked about the nature of New York City’s hate crimes and if they had grown more violent. Mamdani’s response notably avoided mentioning the Jewish community by name, despite the NYPD’s focus specifically on antisemitic attacks.
“So, the hate crimes that we are seeing are really, like, very across the board. It could be something — an act of violence. It could be drawing a symbol on a wall, like, for example, a swastika,” Tisch added. “So, I don’t want to characterize them in that way. What I can tell you is that the NYPD has released this month, the gold standard for data about hate crimes. We’ve done this in consultation with experts in the field. And that is data about reported crimes and data about confirmed crimes.”
Concluding the questions, Tisch said, “And so now everyone has access to both pieces of information, and that will continue into the future. I want to make sure that we are incredibly transparent about data because data is power, and I also don’t want to continue or perpetuate the practice of releasing bad data that doesn’t help draw meaningful conclusions.”
Despite Tisch’s comments, not everyone supports the city’s so-called “gold standard” change to hate crime data reporting, which some critics argue is conveniently timed to sanitize the administration’s record on rising antisemitism.
“We’re all watching the manufacturing of propaganda in real time,” Rabbi Chaim Steinmetz of Congregation Kehilath Jeshurun on the Upper East Side, told the New York Post. “They’ll change the method of counting antisemitic crimes and literally six months later the mayor’s office will claim that antisemitism has dropped.”
Elisha Wiesel, son of the Nobel laureate and Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel, shared Steinmetz’s suspicions, telling the Post that “I think there should be a loud outcry telling them to change it back.”
Former NYPD Detective Michael Alcazar, an adjunct professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, called the much-lauded data style an example of “textbook fudging the numbers,” adding, “It’s going to look like they’re combating hate crimes, but they’re not being transparent.”
Alcazar said that if the NYPD really sought transparency, “then they should show the number of complaints they actually receive and what the investigations yielded.”