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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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At Grossinger’s in the Catskills, Jews learned how to be American
Jewish resort culture in the Borscht Belt peaked in the mid-1950s when there were 538 hotels, 50,000 bungalows, and 1,000 boarding houses. Among the best known was Grossinger’s where Jewish singles mingled with the likes of Lucille Ball, Milton Berle and Elizabeth Taylor over the course of the resort’s more than seven-decade existence.
We Met at Grossinger’s, a documentary directed by Paula Eiselt (Under G-d, 93 Queen), explains how Grossinger’s became so successful despite the fact that its founder had only a sixth grade education. In 1900, at the age of 8, Jennie Grossinger immigrated with her family from Galicia, Austria to New York. She dropped out of school and began working as a buttonhole maker to help support her family, until her father became sick and they moved to the Catskills. Her father hoped to start a farm, but the family found the rocky land was better suited for a boarding house than crops. Jennie managed the inn while her mother oversaw the kitchen, and she eventually made enough money to purchase a larger building down the road.
The documentary features a range of interviewees, including Grossinger’s descendants, historians, and celebrities, such as Jackie Hoffman and Joel Grey, who frequented the resort. With its snappy editing and in-depth approach to the history of the culture, the film brings the past back to life and captures how the resort became ingrained in people’s personal lives.
Grossinger’s grandson Mitchell Etess estimates that thousands of couples met there. Hoffman says it’s where she had her first makeout session with a boy. Former employees say Grossinger’s elite guests motivated them to pursue better education and careers. Multiple interviewees say the resort was a home away from home.
Archival footage of people dancing, swimming, dining, and being entertained takes viewers back to the glitz and glamor of the Catskills in its heyday. Although Jewish resorts were founded in response to antisemitic exclusion at other places, the joy Jews were able to create for themselves diminishes the darkness of this bigotry.
The resorts gave Jews a place to escape antisemitism and be among people with a shared culture. For Holocaust survivors it provided the opportunity to connect with others who could understand their trauma. Jewish athletes like boxer Barney Ross (born David Rosofsky) relied on Grossinger’s as a place where they could train and get kosher food. Jews also got a crash course on assimilation, learning how to engage in American social activities like golfing and playing tennis without fear of judgment.
It wasn’t just Jews that fled to the Catskills. Bard College professor Myra Armstead’s grandparents moved there during the Great Migration and opened the Gratney M. Smith, a boarding house for Black workers and vacationers. Jackie Robinson was an invited guest at Grossinger’s and became friends with Jennie. The Jewish Vacation Guide, which pointed Jews to safe housing and dining in the area and around the country, inspired the Green Book, which provided the same functions for Black people.
But in the 1970s, when it became easier for Jews to vacation with non-Jews, the resorts became less of a necessity. Buildings in the city now had air conditioning, so people didn’t have to escape to the mountains for cooler weather. Teenagers and young adults began to prefer to spend their vacations with friends or doing activities that didn’t involve being attached at the hip to their parents or grandparents.
In 1987, a year after Grossinger’s closed, the lost culture it had once embodied was given renewed attention in Dirty Dancing. Although the film avoided explicit mentions of Judaism, the fictional Kellerman’s was based on Grossinger’s and the script was written by resort regular Eleanor Bergstein.
Now, younger generations are starting to take an interest in the Borscht Belt culture. The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel has exposed new audiences to this old form of Jewish vacation culture. Photographers Marisa Scheinfeld and Isaac Jeffreys have created photography collections of abandoned Catskill resorts. The Borscht Belt Museum teaches visitors about this bygone period.
But unlike fictional media and photos of the past, We Met at Grossinger’s offers firsthand accounts of life in the Catskills from those who lived it, adding a personal dimension to this new wave of Jewish nostalgia.
We Met at Grossinger’s will have its world premiere at DOC NYC on November 13, with subsequent screenings on November 16 and 19.
The post At Grossinger’s in the Catskills, Jews learned how to be American appeared first on The Forward.
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Why won’t pro-Palestinian protesters turn their attention to Darfur?
Here’s a stark fact: More people may have been killed in Sudan in just the past week than in Gaza in the past two years.
“They’re killing everyone that moves,” said Nathaniel Raymond, executive director at Yale’s Humanitarian Research Lab, in a recent interview with Mehdi Hasan. Raymond’s lab has tracked the carnage via satellite imagery, witnessing the slaughter of innocent civilians in real time.
And the main source for the weapons destroying the Black, non-Arab population in Darfur is the United Arab Emirates, one of the United States’ closest allies in the Middle East.
So where are the American protesters?
A major reason American protesters have relentlessly focused their time and energy on Israel, they say, is that the U.S. is Israel’s most significant ally, as well as an arms supplier to the IDF. There are real actions the U.S. could take to sway the course of events in Israel, so protesters aim to influence the U.S. government to do so.
But the U.S. has ties to conflicts all over the world, especially in Sudan, where a major American ally is helping supply the weapons of slaughter. The idea that its ability to pressure Israel is unique, and therefore worthy of unique focus, is misguided.
“Only American pressure can stop the killing in Sudan,” wrote Alex De Waal, executive director of the World Peace Foundation, in Foreign Affairs. So why aren’t American activists, well, active?
A genocide to rival Rwanda
The UAE has $29 billion in active defense contracts with the U.S. It is also host to — and protected by — the 380th Air Expeditionary Wing and Jebel Ali Port, the U.S. Navy’s largest port of call in the Middle East.
And while UAE officials have denied that they are arming the Arab militia, known as the Rapid Support Forces, responsible for the genocide, diplomats, humanitarian groups and journalists have confirmed the link. Three of the same organizations that pro-Palestinian activists regularly cite in their brief against Israel — the United Nations, Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International — have established the UAE’s complicity.
Every crime American protesters accuse Israel of — killing civilians among military targets, rape, starvation as a weapon, destroying hospitals and killing patients in their beds — is happening now, at a far greater scale, in Darfur.
“Rebels hurl racial insults at fleeing women and children,” the Wall Street Journal reported. “Black women with long hair are systematically separated and raped.”
Humanitarian groups say the ongoing slaughter is likely to rival that of Rwanda genocide, and of the genocide that took place in the same Darfur region 30 years ago. That atrocity, led by a predecessor to the RSF, claimed 200,000 lives.
Why would the UAE supply weapons to be used in such a context? Perhaps because it uses Sudan’s mines to supply gold and other resources, and wants to stay on the good side of a group primed to exercise control over ongoing access.
“The war would be over if not for the UAE,” Cameron Hudson, a former chief of staff to successive U.S. presidential special envoys for Sudan, told the Wall Street Journal. “The only thing that is keeping them in this war is the overwhelming amount of military support that they’re receiving from the UAE.”
In the U.S., silence
So where are the protesters shouting at their representatives in town halls to suspend the recent $2 trillion investment agreement between the U.S. and UAE? Pushing sanctions against the UAE? Or demanding New York University shutter its Abu Dhabi campus?
Where are the movie stars and director refusing to engage with the UAE, which according to Variety is the “prime Middle East hub” for Hollywood production? Javier Bardem, who recently said he will no longer work with the Israeli film industry, filmed part of his last movie, F1, in Abu Dhabi last year. What if he said no more?
Imagine the impact if, instead of unveiling her new fragrance, Orebella, at a splashed-out event last week in Abu Dhabi, supermodel Bella Hadid announced that just as she calls relentlessly for the world to boycott Israel, she will no longer visit the Emirates until it ends funding for the genocide in Darfur?
This is not an argument for whataboutism, and none of this is to deflect attention from the injustices and suffering happening in the West Bank and Gaza. Everyone has a right to choose their battles. I don’t ask the Save the Whales people, “But what about the rainforest?”
But if someone is actively bombing the rainforest, today, as you read this — and your country is in bed with the bomb suppliers — then claiming to care about the planet and doing nothing is inexcusable.
“This is not only a crisis of violence but also a crisis of indifference,” wrote Reena Ghelani, CEO of Plan International in Al Jazeera. “Each day the world looks away.”
And the go-to excuse, that Americans lack leverage and influence over the slaughter, is utter BS.
The post Why won’t pro-Palestinian protesters turn their attention to Darfur? appeared first on The Forward.
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Toronto’s Mayor Encourages Antisemitic and Anti-Israel Harassment — as She Struggles to Govern the City
Toronto Mayor Olivia Chow speaks to reporters in Toronto, March 8, 2025. Photo: Christopher Katsarov/The Canadian Press via ZUMA Press via Reuters Connect
A ceasefire is holding in Gaza. In places like Ypsilanti, Michigan, and Bridgeport, Connecticut, where the mayor’s tenure was interrupted by a seven-year prison stint, local governments will have to drop their calls to end the war and get back to the boring business of running their cities.
Beleaguered Jewish residents across North America, who have gritted their teeth through an unprecedented spike in antisemitic attacks, are surely breathing a sigh of relief.
Earlier this month, however, Toronto Mayor Olivia Chow decided to dust off the Israel punching bag for one last go.
Speaking at a fundraiser for The National Council of Canadian Muslims in Brampton — Canada 7th largest city — Chow claimed, “the genocide in Gaza impact [sic] us all.”
Encouraged by the audience’s applause, she then got personal: Chow told the audience that when her mother was 13, Chow’s grandmother died of dysentery as a result of Imperial Japan’s invasion of China during World War II, leaving Chow’s mother alone to care for her siblings.
Reasonable people can disagree about the proportionality of Israel’s response to the barbarity of Hamas and fellow terror groups’ attack on October 7, 2023. But to compare it to a war whose explicit goal was conquest — and which resulted in an estimated 20 million Chinese deaths — is more of an apples to elephants comparison than apples to oranges.
More troubling was Mayor Chow’s glib use of the phrase “genocide.”
A sculptor by training — who spent her professional career in mostly local politics, with a stint as a member of parliament for Canada’s perennial also-ran socialist party — Chow is not well qualified to be making legal conclusions.
The timing was particularly ham-fisted, given the fact that only days earlier, reports had surfaced of a massacre in Sudan, one in which the blood of more than 2,000 unarmed civilians ran so deep that it could be seen in satellite images.
In Israel, the country’s roughly 6,600 Sudanese refugees see little daylight between the murderers of Darfur and Hamas.
But for devout leftists, when an Arab-supremacist Muslim paramilitary murders African Muslims, the Intersectional Bingo scorecard gets to be a confusing place.
Nevertheless, if one is looking to lob the “genocide” grenade or to find modern comparisons to the Rape of Nanjing, Sudan would be the most intellectually honest place to start. One suspects the applause from the Brampton crowd would have been somewhat thin if Chow had gone there.
Ultimately, Chow was hoping to score political points to salvage a re-election campaign that seemed assured months ago and is suddenly sagging.
Her predecessor, John Tory, beat her soundly in 2014, but after winning 62% of the vote and a third term in 2022, he abruptly resigned less than four months later after it emerged that he had a consensual extramarital affair with a staffer.
Chow won a snap election in which she was the sole candidate on the left, and was buoyed by the support of an outfit called Progress Toronto. With an election scheduled for next October, she suddenly finds herself governing a city that has woken up to its many problems, including public safety, a crumbling public transit system, and a lack of affordable housing.
More alarming for the mayor, Torontonians seem to have reached the audacious conclusion that the problems might have something to do with her leadership.
With talk of a Tory comeback, and centrist Councillor Brad Bradford openly campaigning, the road suddenly looks a lot bumpier for Chow.
It would appear that Toronto’s Jewish community has also had enough. After two years of harassment, intimidation, vandalism, and arson, Toronto’s Jewish community might have naively believed the Gaza ceasefire would bring it peace.
At my own synagogue, which is one of the city’s oldest and has been in operation since 1914, High Holiday services are usually held in the main synagogue building, with overflow at the nearby Jewish Community Centre. This year, there was no service in the main building, presumably to focus the large security presence at a single location.
In addition to being warned of “heightened security,” congregants were told that there would be no Yom Kippur food drive to support a local charity this year, and that they should instead donate cash. Think about that for a moment: when Toronto Jews want to commemorate their holiest day of the year by donating non-perishable goods to a non-Jewish charity, they now have to consider the possibility of being blown up in a terror attack.
The week after Chow made her comments was a busy one for the city’s antisemites and Israel haters. On Tuesday, a Toronto synagogue was vandalized for the 10th time in 18 months.
The following day, a group at Toronto Metropolitan University called Students Supporting Israel held an event at which speakers from the IDF came to share their stories. The organizers had been refused a permit on campus, so they held the event off-campus and took steps to keep the location secret.
Nevertheless, they were hunted down by protestors organized by Students for Justice in Palestine, some of whom stormed the building, broke a glass door, and caused minor injuries to one of the IDF vets.
Five arrests were made, and the university offered a milquetoast statement. Given the light touch approach Canadian authorities tend to apply in such cases, it seems unlikely the perpetrators will face any consequences.
Welcome to Canada in 2025.
Advocacy group B’nai Brith has circulated a petition to the city’s integrity commissioner alleging that the mayor’s comments violated the city’s code of conduct for members of council. It remains to be seen whether that allegation will hold up. But hopefully the message will be received regardless: while Toronto has no foreign policy, it does have many serious problems, including rampant intimidation of the Jewish community. If the current mayor isn’t up to fixing these problems, voters should find someone else who will.
Ian Cooper is a Toronto-based lawyer.