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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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In ‘31 Candles,’ a manchild becomes bar mitzvah to court his crush
In the thick of 31 Candles, a cockeyed rom-com about a 30-something’s ploy to become an adult bar mitzvah to get closer to a childhood crush, a one-night stand observes a jar of pickles in the kitchen of our hero’s Brooklyn apartment.
“Really?” she asks.
“I’m embracing cultural stereotypes,” he tells her, “What do you want me to do?”
To speak for myself: less.
Entering a now crowded field of rabbinically-inspired romantic comedies, the film — written, directed and edited by Jonah Feingold who also stars — wears its influences on its snide sleeve. A Nora Ephron autumn. Woody Allen-esque narration and titles. New York is a character!
Feingold plays Leo Kadner, a director for Lifetime and Hallmark Channel-coded Christmas films (Feingold, in real life, helmed the 2023 streamer EXmas). When he reconnects with an old flame from camp at his nephew’s bris, and learns she tutors b’nai mitzvah, he decides it’s finally time to become a man and make falling in love his bar mitzvah project.
There’s only one snag, beyond the obvious ick of the subterfuge: Feingold’s tutor, Eva (Sarah Coffey) is not the least bit interested. While the two have some kidding chemistry, it’s not a love match. The movie knows it — but the audience catches on quicker than it does.
There’s an element of subversion in Feingold’s approach, but the humor is packed in the same old schmaltz.
Leo’s mom (Jackie Sandler) somehow orders an off-the-menu martini at Barney Greengrass, while his father mentions a great uncle who invested with Jeffrey Epstein. Zabar’s black-and-white cookies play a featured role. Caroline Aaron (who already starred in a much better adult bar mitzvah film) as Leo’s grandmother, listens to his spiel on dating apps and the etiquette of Instagraming with your “situationship” at a shiva.
Watching Feingold confide in Aaron, I wondered who this movie was for. Its weekday screenings at Quad Cinema in the Village and at Movies of Delray in Florida would suggest an older crowd. A seminal discussion of an OTPHJ (over the pants handjob) and the celebrity dating app Raya suggests a younger audience that would likely groan at this sub-Apatowian dialogue.
One could contend it is for young Jews with old souls or older people who are young at heart. I kinda consider myself both and rolled my eyes throughout.
That it belongs to a growing school of self-aware comedy writing wherein every character seems to have taken at least a level one improv class, is irksome, but its use of Judaism is perhaps most objectionable.
Nothing in the film is glaringly wrong — though how Leo could struggle with basic brachas after having spent many summers at a Jewish sleepaway camp raises eyebrows — but it resists its natural endpoint of finding the rite of passage meaningful for its own sake.
Leo learns a lesson on love, and offers it in the form of his drash on his Torah portion, Jacob and Rachel’s meet cute at the well, but he finds no deeper significance in his tradition, beyond a largely played-for-laughs visit to the Museum of Jewish Heritage: A Living Memorial to the Holocaust with his situationship.
A connection to peoplehood is not Leo’s consolation prize. The bar mitzvah process turns out to be a vehicle for his pathetic epiphany that she’s just not that into him. (The logic of 31 Candles calls to mind a better treatment of manhood and entitlement on an episode of Seinfeld where the bar mitzvah boy has eyes on Elaine.)
If there were now a dearth of Jewish content, Feingold’s film might be a refreshingly frothy entry to the American Jewish pantheon. As it stands, though, it feels like we’re being served Shiva Baby and Bad Shabbos’ reheated leftovers with more jokes about product placement and AI.
Like 31 candles glowing on a cake, the film is eye-catching and ultimately excessive. And, like the cake itself, it’s a confection that goes down easy enough — even if it may give you a stomachache.
The post In ‘31 Candles,’ a manchild becomes bar mitzvah to court his crush appeared first on The Forward.
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In Gaza, It’s Déjà vu All Over Again
A Red Cross vehicle, escorted by a van driven by a Hamas terrorist, moves in an area within the so-called “yellow line” to which Israeli troops withdrew under the ceasefire, as Hamas says it continues to search for the bodies of deceased hostages seized during the Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel, in Gaza City, Nov. 12, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Dawoud Abu Alk
Eleven years ago, the 2014 Hamas rocket war against Israel ended in a ceasefire.
In the ensuing years, Israel and the United States should have learned something about “ceasefires” as opposed to “peace.” President Donald Trump’s ceasefire plan, however, has the flaw that every single such plan has had (in the territories and in Lebanon): the failure of anti-terror forces to control territory and enforce the rules. In the absence of that, Hamas has reemerged and is rearming in Gaza.
As I wrote in 2014:
The Hamas rockets have, for the time being, stopped; the current cease-fire is holding. The tunnel threat, a strategic one most Israelis had not understood until several days into the war, has been alleviated; many Hamas rocket manufacturing facilities have been destroyed; a substantial percentage of the Hamas arsenal has been used up; and Hamas achieved none of its strategic goals — not large-scale Israeli casualties or physical destruction, an airport, a seaport, or the opening of border crossings. Israeli children have returned to school and, after a brief dip, the Israeli economy is expected to grow for the year.
Those were the days of “mowing the grass.” Eliminating the visible threats.
As I asked at the time:
To the extent that the Israeli public wanted the destruction or elimination of Hamas, or an end to the rocket threat, it was doomed by its unreasonable expectations. Americans suffer similarly. Having understood the Islamic State [IS] as a threat not only in Syria and Iraq, but also to our interests and potentially to our own country, they want it gone. The question for the American government, as it is for the Israeli government, is: “How do you defeat an armed ideological movement with a territorial base if you are unwilling to fight in that territorial base?”
President Barack Obama spoke of “degrading, dismantling, and destroying” ISIS. He never said how — and neither has President Trump.
Try this:
Control of territory and the ability to subject one’s enemies to enforceable rules is the only known mechanism for ending, rather than managing, a war. Despite the Western propensity for “peace processes” and negotiations, it is hard (impossible?) to find a historical example of one side simply agreeing to give up its mission, arms, ideology, or interests without a forcing mechanism — military defeat.
We don’t like to talk about “winners” and “losers,” preferring to “split the difference” or find a “win-win” formula. But “peace” itself was defined by Machiavelli as “the conditions imposed by the winners on the losers of the last war.” There are different iterations of “peace,” depending on whether the winners institute good or bad conditions. There can be a cold peace, a warm peace, or the peace of the dead. The peace that followed WWI contained the seeds of WWII; the peace after WWII produced the German economic miracle.
Even when wars aren’t “won,” control of territory and enforceable rules can make the difference between long-term success and failure – the US military has been in South Korea since the 1953 Armistice, allowing a democratic, technologically advanced society to emerge despite the continuing threat from the impoverished, heavily armed, and dangerous North. The withdrawal of American forces from South Vietnam within months of the armistice there allowed North Vietnam to capture territory and impose a communist government on a single Vietnamese entity. Although NATO faced Russia across the Fulda Gap, there is no denying that the Allied presence also enforced anti-Nazi rules in West Germany.
October 7, 2023, brought about a change in Israeli military thinking. A ceasefire is no longer enough. Hamas, in Israel’s view, has to be disarmed and ripped out of the territory in a verifiable and enforceable manner. The IDF is making plans to reassert itself across the yellow line. The US appears more interested in bringing Turkish troops into Gaza, a move rejected not only by Israel but, oddly, by Egypt. Qatari troops are no better. Both are Muslim Brotherhood partners of Hamas.
As I wrote:
The enemies of Israel and the West are similar. Ideological similarities aside, both are vicious and absolutist, and neither plays by Western rules regarding women, children, religious diversity or war crimes. Both rely on the relative gentility of their adversaries — Israel and the West — to protect them from ultimate defeat. Thus far, theirs is the correct bet.
Or at least it was.
The difficulty now will be bringing the US and Israel to the meeting point. President Trump was there. He called for ,“Hell to rain down on Hamas.” But now he appears to have changed his mind. Talk, negotiate, promise, offer, talk some more. This simply provides time for Hamas to rearm and reassert itself among the people of Gaza. And Hamas is using the time.
The US and its allies have to acknowledge the original flaw in the plan — both in 2014 and 2025. Without a military presence determined to uproot and destroy Hamas in whatever manner the military deems necessary, “peace plans” and “ceasefires” are simply wishes and, with due respect to Yogi Berra, “Déjà vu all over again.”
Shoshana Bryen is Senior Director of the Jewish Policy Center and Editor of inFOCUS Quarterly magazine.
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Bias and Distortion: When the BBC Becomes the Story
The BBC logo is displayed above the entrance to the BBC headquarters in London, Britain, July 10, 2023. Photo: REUTERS/Hollie Adams
“Nation Shall Speak Peace Unto Nation” (Micah 4:3).
That is unironically the official motto of the British Broadcasting Company, otherwise known as the BBC. And yet in recent weeks, the world has watched the opposite unfold: a state-funded broadcaster selectively edited footage to falsely imply that President Trump was actively inciting the January 6th Capitol riot. Presumably done because they believed the “truth” of their worldview mattered more than the truth of the footage.
This rightfully ignited an international scandal and a crisis of legitimacy. The BBC has offered a terse apology — but that apology rings hollow, given that the BBC has engaged in this behavior for decades — especially when it comes to covering the Jewish State.
The same editorial scalpel that carved Trump’s words, has for decades, performed cosmetic surgery on Middle Eastern reality. This stems from their belief that narrative truth supersedes factual truth — and that the BBC are the arbiters of all things truth.
The BBC represents the old-school institutional brand of nuanced antisemitism: never say explicitly what can be more effectively implied.
Israel is forever the aggressor and villain. Anything that contradicts that reality in any way whatsoever — from Palestinian terrorism, to Yasser Arafat and Mahmoud Abbas’ constant rejection of an Israeli state — is simply ignored.
Things simply happen, without agency, causality, or perpetrators — at least for one side of the conflict.
This is antisemitism through narrative staging. Israel is the intentional actor; its enemies are organisms responding to their environment. Israel’s choices are scrutinized; Hamas’ choices are naturalized.
To the BBC, Israel becomes a narrative accelerant while its enemies are granted the dignity of inevitability. The BBC does not invent the facts; it simply removes context. In the absence of evidence, it encourages audiences to “draw their own conclusions” — because, after all, the network is “just asking questions.” The result is reflexive antisemitism, an atmosphere rather than an argument.
According to a recent report in The Telegraph, the BBC has been forced to correct, on average, two anti-Israel Gaza stories a week since October 7th. This is not journalism; it is groupthink manipulation funded by the British public.
The ancient Greeks had a word for speech that abandons truth while avoiding outright lies: sophistry. Protagoras defined this worldview when he said, “Man is the measure of all things.” Truth becomes subjective, determined by what you want your audience to believe. Sophists mastered narrative manipulation and engineered entire populations with it.
Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle held a unanimous antipathy for all things sophistry. They believed the sophist class posed a greater threat to the republic than foreign invasion.
Plato warned that democracy becomes theatre when society loses the ability to distinguish between truth and plausibility. He could have been describing the 21st-century BBC.
The BBC has become the global engine for adjusting the Overton window — not just disparaging President Trump and American relations, but normalizing sympathy for terrorist groups, and delegitimizing Israel’s sovereignty. What are the effects of these manipulations on world events and British relations? The BBC is no longer a news organization; it is a mood architectural firm.
The Greeks understood the peril to democracy when sophistry overwhelmed truth. Throughout history this pattern has repeated itself for civilizations that ignored the early warning signs. Those signs are flashing again — and not merely at the fringes, but at the very apex of Britannia’s most trusted institution.
There is always a moment before the point of no return when better angels can still prevail. This is that moment. If “Nation Shall Speak Peace Unto Nation” is to retain any meaning, it must begin with truth. Peace built on sophistry is merely sophistry.
Britain’s closest ally is the United States, and its most besieged ally is Israel. The BBC chose to malign both, not accidentally, but institutionally.
You cannot claim moral authority while eroding the foundations of your own alliances. You cannot claim neutrality while waging narrative warfare. And just as the Greeks warned — so it begins.
Philip Gross is a London-based American businessman and writer whose work focuses on politics, culture, and Jewish history. Born in New York and living in Britain for three decades, he writes from a transatlantic perspective shaped by a career in global commodities and a lifelong engagement with Jewish thought and contemporary affairs.