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As landmark Saul Bellow documentary premieres, a look back at his life through the JTA archive
(JTA) — Given his place in the international literary canon, it’s hard to believe that there has never been a widely-released documentary made about the Jewish Nobel Prize winner Saul Bellow.
That’s about to change, as PBS debuts “American Masters: The Adventures of Saul Bellow” on Monday night.
The documentary, which was filmed by Israeli director Asaf Galay between 2016 and 2019 and features what is being touted as the last interview Philip Roth gave before his death in 2018, digs deep into Bellow’s personal life and inspirations. Many know about his successful novels and memorable (usually Jewish) characters, but as the film shows, Bellow had a turbulent personal life that involved five marriages. Several of his closest friends and family members felt betrayed or offended by how Bellow wrote unflattering characters closely based on them. His moderate conservative political leanings put him at odds with the ethos of the 1960s, and some saw his framing of occasional Black characters as racist.
But the film also devotes time to explaining — through interviews with scholars, other novelists and members of the Bellow clan — how Bellow’s deep-rooted sense of “otherness” as the son of Jewish immigrants influenced his work, and how he, in turn, influenced many Jewish American writers who followed him. Roth, for instance, says on camera that Bellow inspired him to create fuller Jewish characters in his own work.
To mark the milestone film, we looked back through all of the Saul Bellow content in the Jewish Telegraphic Agency’s archive. What emerged was a portrait of a leading Jewish intellectual of his time who was deeply invested in the Soviet Jewry movement and Israel, and who was beloved by the American Jewish community — despite his complicated relationship to his Jewishness and his bristling at being called a “Jewish writer.”
The Soviet Jewry movement
Bellow was born in 1915 in Canada to parents with Lithuanian ancestry who first immigrated from St. Petersburg, Russia. In the 1920s, when Bellow was 9, the family moved to Chicago. By the 1950s, the plight of Jews in the Soviet Union — who were forbidden from openly practicing their religion and from emigrating — had become a rallying cry for American Jews. As a 1958 JTA report shows, Bellow was passionate about the issue; in January of that year, he signed a letter to The New York Times about “the purge of Yiddish writers, the refusal of the current Soviet regime to permit a renaissance of Jewish culture and the existence of a quota system on Jews in education, professional and civil service fields.” Other signatories included fellow Jewish writers Irving Howe, Alfred Kazin and Lionel Trilling.
Saul Bellow, Anita Goshkin (his first wife) and their son Gregory Bellow, circa 1940. Bellow’s turbulent personal life involved five marriages. (Courtesy of the Bellow family)
He signed another letter to the Times on the topic in 1965, and in 1969 he circulated an appeal for cultural freedom for Jews to the Soviet Writers Union, getting other prominent writers such as Noam Chomsky and Nat Hentoff to sign. By 1970, the issue had become widely publicized, and Bellow stayed involved, signing onto a petition with several other thought leaders that asked: “Has the government of the Soviet Union no concern for human rights or for the decent opinion of mankind?”
Israel
Like many American Jews, Bellow had complicated feelings on Israel. “If you want everyone to love you, don’t discuss Israeli politics,” he once wrote.
In the 1970s, JTA reports show that he followed Israeli diplomacy closely and was a strong supporter of the Jewish state in the face of international criticism. In 1974, at a PEN press conference, he called for a boycott of UNESCO, the United Nations’ cultural heritage arm that has historically been very critical of Israeli policy.
In 1984, Bellow met with then-Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres, who was in the United States on an official state visit.
But Bellow wasn’t a blanket supporter of Israel — in 1979, he signed a letter protesting West Bank settlement expansion that was read at a rally of 30,000 people in Tel Aviv. In 1987, while in Haifa for a conference on his work, Bellow criticized the Israeli government for the way it handled the Jonathan Pollard spy case, bringing up an issue that still reverberates in Israel-Diaspora conversation — and in U.S. politics.
“I think the American Jews are very sensitive to the question of dual allegiance, and it is probably wrong of Israel to press this question because it is one which is very often used by antisemites,” Bellow said.
Nobel Prize
After garnering multiple National Book Awards and a Pulitzer Prize, Bellow won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1976. JTA’s report on the award noted that Bellow’s most recent book at the time, published right around the time of the Nobel announcements, was a memoir about his 1975 stay in Jerusalem, titled “To Jerusalem and Back.” The report added: “Two of his books, ‘Herzog,’ published in 1964 and ‘Mr. Sammler’s Planet,’ which won him the National Book Award in 1971, have been translated into Hebrew and were enthusiastically received by Israeli critics and public.”
(Bellow wasn’t the only Jew to win a Nobel that year: Milton Friedman won the economics prize, Baruch Blumberg shared the medicine prize and Burton Richter shared the physics prize.)
Bellow, center, with his fifth wife Janis Freedman-Bellow and longtime friend Allan Bloom, who is the subject of Bellow’s last novel, “Ravelstein.” (Courtesy of the Bellow family)
A “Jewish writer”?
The Anti-Defamation League also gave Bellow an award in 1976. According to a JTA report, Seymour Graubard, honorary national chairman of the ADL at the time, said that Bellow “has correctly rejected all efforts to pigeonhole him as a ‘Jewish writer.’ Rather, he has simply found in the Jewish experience those common strains of humanity that are part of all of us — and therein lies his greatness as an American writer.”
Debate over whether or not Bellow should be labeled a “Jewish writer,” and what that meant, dogged him for much of his career. After his death in 2005, at 89, a New York Jewish Week obituary focused on Bellow as “a literary giant who did not want to be bound by the tag of Jewish writer.”
“Mr. Bellow bridled at being considered a Jewish writer, though his early novels, most notably 1944’s ‘The Victim,’ dealt with anti-Semitism and featured characters who spoke Yiddish and Russian,” Steve Lipman wrote.
Bellow’s biographer James Atlas added in the obituary: “He always said he was a writer first, an American second and Jewish third. But all three were elements of his genius. His greatest contribution was that he was able to write fiction that had tremendous philosophical depth.”
In a JTA essay at the time of Bellow’s death, academic and fiction writer John J. Clayton argued: “No good writer wants to be pigeonholed or limited in scope. But he is deeply a Jewish writer — not just a Jew by birth.
“Jewish culture, Jewish sensibility, a Jewish sense of holiness in the everyday, permeate his work.”
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A farewell to Hampshire College, site of my Yiddish awakening
Zay gezunt Hampshire College. That’s where as an undergrad student worker, I first studied Yiddish at the OG Yiddish Book Center of Amherst, Massachusetts, down the road from the genteel Lord Jeffrey Inn, across the street from uber-sensitive poet lady Emily Dickinson’s alte heym.
In nearby Holyoke, in an old mill turned Yiddish book storage loft, away from the genius of Dickinson’s dybbuk, I earned my way shelving the Book Center’s staggering amounts of the collected works of Sholem Aleichem — most likely purchased as a subscriber premium by turn of the century Forverts readers — and only surpassed by the unspeakable numbers of Yiddish volumes of Guy De Maupassant. I hoisted those onto shelves as well while getting educated about Nico and the Velvet Underground which blared from speakers. Back in the 1980’s that was multitasking.
And dayge nisht, no worries — I got my klezmer awakening there too, via a Walkman and audio cassettes while laboring as a photo history slide librarian for my advisor and favorite professor, filmmaker Abraham Ravett, who is set to retire next month (can you retire if your workplace closes?).
Splayed out across acres of stunning apple orchards that once belonged to the Stiles family, Hampshire College had neither a Hillel chapter nor a Chabad nor any organized sports nor fraternities — but there was a coed sauna, plenty of rolfing on the snow outside said sauna, a successful student run food coop, an acclaimed ultimate frisbee team and a beloved outdoor program that led to my first heron sightings just like in the movie On Golden Pond.
It also had Len Glick, Elvis’ former induction physician who co-taught modern Jewish history, along with his younger historian colleague Aaron Berman, whose office door was anointed with a poster that offered a Marxist view of baseball. It was 1984 and I was hot off seeing Streisand’s film version of Yentl. I’d polished off most of Bashevis’ tomes back home, memorized my Bubby’s photo album of Eastern European Jewry as envisioned in Visniac’s A Vanished World, and collided into Marlene Booth’s documentary about the Yiddishists of Raananah who took up space in an audacious dream of a utopian summer community in Orange County, New York. Tayere Leyener, dear reader, that’s all it took.
I knew my final paper was going to be about women and Yiddish. Well, I recall Len saying, if you want to investigate Bashevis’ inspiration for his Yentl and research women writers and women’s lives in Yiddish, you’re going to have to learn Yiddish; there isn’t much about that available in translation. Why don’t you go over to the Yiddish Book Center, he continued, and talk to them. And just like that, I found myself on the top floor of an old elementary school in Amherst, spending evenings learning Yiddish and my days trying to grasp enough of it to complete my assignment.
I’d love to tell you that just like Yentl, I too spent hours bent over tomes, deep in study, but as previously disclosed, Hampshire had much to distract and much to offer. And besides, I had books to shelve, boxes to unpack and roads to travel, joining the center’s trips to pick up YET MORE Yiddish books. My mazel was that Hampshire hosted the Book Center’s first summer seminars. Once longtime staffer Frieda Howards and I finished inspecting attendees’ dorm rooms, making sure the beds had hospital corners, I was warmly invited to attend lectures.
Hampshire hosted artists and activists like Yippie founder Abbie Hoffman. When Hampshire alum and Yiddish Book Center founder Aron Lansky talked about him, he highlighted all the Yiddish influences in Hoffman’s Steal This Book, as well as the Yiddish-inflected tensions of the Chicago 7 trials. All this came to a head when I met Yiddish lesbian poet, child survivor and hero to Jewish feminists Irena Klepfisz. A Bundist descendant, keeper of the flame, she — vu den — called a hastily gathered group into action. If we wanted Yiddish women’s writing to be translated, we were the translating liberators we were waiting for, so to speak. It was on us.
Tayere leyner/dear reader, I could, like so many Yiddish authors, go on in depth without so much as a break for a comma or a paragraph, such was the depth of my mazel at Hampshire. Ok, a bisl more. There was the weekend trip with Lansky and local poet and Book Center staffer Gene Zeiger to the Newport Folk Festival to hear Joan Baez sing. There was the summer Yiddish genius Naomi Seidman was a fellow at the Book Center — thanks to Seidman, that was my summer of Nico, the Velvet Underground, of reading Ginsberg’s “Howl,” and much much more. That was the summer I interned for the filmmaker Marlene Booth who was making a film about that Yiddish newspaper everyone talked about, the one I recalled picking up for my bubby. I spent time in my cooperative household on campus, bent over an audio transcription machine, typing out interview after interview with Forverts readers, spellbound by their love for it and activism on its behalf as it fell on hard times.
And reader, though Hampshire will likely close for good, you and I now know that if not for Hampshire College, where now upon a nice parcel of that former apple orchard sits the Yiddish Book Center in all its well earned koved, I and many like me, would not spend our days bending over our morgue of Forverts photos, back issues and more, reaching back over time to keep remembering our past and making it available for future generations.
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Moderation cuts leave most extremist, antisemitic content on Instagram unchecked, ADL finds
(JTA) — White supremacist networks, terror group supporters and Nazi merchandise vendors have gone largely unchecked on Instagram amid weakened content moderation by its parent company Meta, according to a new analysis by the Anti-Defamation League.
Instagram failed to remove 93% of hateful and extremist content reported by the ADL’s researchers, a figure the watchdog said demonstrated a “systemic failure” to protect users, according to the report published on Wednesday. The content included accounts and posts linked to white supremacist networks, groups that are designated as foreign terrorist organizations by the U.S. government and vendors selling Nazi merchandise.
The report comes over a year after Meta’s CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, announced that the company would do away with its fact-check program and stop using automation to detect and remove hate speech.
“Instagram is developing into a hub for hate and antisemitism, and our research demonstrates this clearly,” Jonathan Greenblatt, the CEO and national director of the ADL, said in a statement. “Meta’s moderation rollback has created a permissive environment where extremists thrive, bad actors turn Instagram’s own features into amplification tools for hate, and as a result, vulnerable communities suffer.”
While Elon Musk’s decision to permit formerly banned extremist account-holders to return to X has made his platform the most prominent avatar of social media’s abandonment of moderation, Meta has undergone a similar shift more recently. The ADL has sparred with Musk and X in the past as well.
Meta still does not allow “organizations or individuals that proclaim a violent mission or are engaged in violence to have a presence on our platforms,” according to the company’s community standards, which also say the company removes “dehumanizing speech” and “harmful stereotypes.” But it has also scaled back its capacity to enforce the rules.
The changes, which Zuckerberg billed as a “trade-off” between catching hateful content and reducing the number of “innocent people’s posts and accounts that we accidentally take down,” drew criticism from Jewish groups, including the World Jewish Congress and CyberWell.
Of the 253 posts that the ADL’s Center on Extremism reported earlier this year, Instagram removed only 11 accounts and 8 posts, according to the new report, titled “How Meta’s Content Moderation Changes Risk Turning Instagram into a Hub for Hate.” In 20 cases, the watchdog said that Instagram said it lacked the bandwidth to review the reports.
The report also found a number of accounts that were linked or indirectly linked to terrorist groups, including at least 23 accounts that spread Islamic State and Al-Qaida Propaganda, as well as 33 accounts with direct or indirect connections to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.
While Meta has maintained a ban on official accounts run by Nick Fuentes, the avowed white supremacist and antisemite at the center of a growing divide in the Republican party, the ADL study found that his content is shared on the platform by 105 Instagram accounts affiliated with Fuentes’ Groyper movement, which combined had over 1.4 million followers as of January 2026.
One Southern California-based merchandising company, Curb Stomp MFG, which sells apparel with Nazi symbols including Sonnenrads, Totenkopfs and SS bolts, and its owner had garnered over 3.2 million views on hateful content posted to Instagram, according to the study.
Oren Segal, the senior vice president for counter-extremism and intelligence for the ADL, said in a statement that the lack of content moderation on the platform amounted to a “public safety crisis,” adding that the company’s “decision to gut content moderation puts Instagram at risk of being a megaphone for the world’s most dangerous antisemites and extremists.”
Releasing the report ahead of a Meta shareholder meeting, the ADL is calling on the company to “reinstate proactive moderation measures against violative content.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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JD Vance heckled over Middle East policy at conservative event
(JTA) — Vice President JD Vance was interrupted by antiwar hecklers during a Turning Point USA event on Tuesday, underscoring growing backlash over U.S. policy in the Middle East among young Republicans.
“Jesus Christ does not support genocide,” one person shouted out during the event at the University of Georgia. Shortly after, a voice yelled out, “You’re killing children! You’re bombing children!”
“I agree,” Vance responded. “Jesus Christ certainly does not support genocide, whoever yelled that out from the dark.”
But he said the audience should be thankful for the Trump administration’s negotiation of a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas.
“You know who’s the person who got a peace agreement in Gaza? Donald J. Trump,” Vance said. “So if you want to complain about what happened in Gaza, why don’t you complain about Joe Biden and the last administration? We’re the administration that solved that problem.”
Vance also addressed criticism of the Iran war later in his remarks during the evening. “I recognize that young voters do not love the policy we have in the Middle East, OK,” he said, adding, “I understand.”
The incident at Turning Point USA, an influential youth organization in conservative politics that was founded by Charlie Kirk, a conservative activist who was killed last September, comes as the Republican party has faced blowback over the Iran war from top conservative activists, including Tucker Carlson.
Carlson, who has disparaged the joint U.S.-Israeli war with Iran and increasingly spread anti-Israel and antisemitic conspiracy theories on his show, has long maintained a relationship with Vance, whose refusal to rebuke the commentator has drawn scrutiny from Jewish conservative leaders.
While roughly seven in ten Republicans support the war with Iran, favorable views of Israel have declined among young Republicans in recent years, with 57% of Republicans ages 18 to 49 having an unfavorable opinion of Israel, up from 50% last year, according to the Pew Research Center.
Vance has defended the war in public despite reports he privately opposed entering the conflict. He urged the crowd to remain politically engaged despite potential disagreement with the administration.
“I’m not saying you to have to agree with me on every issue,” Vance said. “What I am saying is: Don’t get disengaged because you disagree with the administration on one topic. Get more involved, make your voice heard even more. That is how we ultimately take the country back.”
When asked by an attendee which “influencers” he would recommend young people listen to, Vance pointed to the popular podcaster Theo Von, who last June asked the vice president on his show about the “genocide” in Gaza. During that appearance, Vance rebuffed the idea that Israel was committing genocide.
The Turning Point USA event came shortly after Vance sparred with Pope Leo XIV over the pope’s criticism of the war. He said on Friday that “God does not bless any conflict” and that Christians should never be on the side of those who drop bombs.
Vance, who is Catholic, offered a different view. “Was God on the side of the Americans who liberated France from the Nazis?” he said. “I certainly think the answer is yes.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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