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Commemorating Philip Roth means confronting his limitations head on
(JTA) — Next Sunday marks the 90th anniversary of Philip Roth’s birth. In celebration of the famed novelist’s work, a scholarly conference titled “Roth@90,” sponsored by the Philip Roth Society, will be held starting Wednesday at the Newark Public Library. That will be followed by a weekend of high-profile events — staged readings, panel discussions, a bus tour of Roth’s old Newark neighborhood — co-presented by the library and the New Jersey Performing Arts Center.
Exactly 10 years ago, we commemorated his 80th birthday in a similar fashion. Dozens of Roth scholars made learned presentations about his work, of which Roth attended exactly zero. Later that week, the author read aloud from his novel “Sabbath’s Theater” in front of hundreds of fans, friends and well wishers. The proceedings were televised on C-Span.
Roth was being acclaimed for having just wound down an exemplary career. With the exception of the Nobel Prize, what garland evaded him? Was there a high-culture literary platform where his name wasn’t a virtual watermark? Could he publish any novel without hundreds of reviews being written in newspapers across the world? Was there a serious fiction writer out there with greater renown?
So much has changed in the decade between the two conferences. To begin with, Roth died in 2018. In that same span, the country witnessed the election of Donald Trump and the fissure it exposed in society in general and the Jewish community in particular. America endured one convulsive racial reckoning after another. Finally, in October of 2017, the #MeToo movement gained massive public salience.
All of those events, along with digital media’s indomitable ascent, have combined to affect and reshape Roth’s literary legacy. That legacy is far less assured than all the (justified) praise and lionizing that will occur this week might suggest.
Let’s start with Jews. The Trump era yielded two seemingly irreconcilable data points. On the one hand, Jewish-Americans endured the Charlottesville riot, the Tree of Life synagogue attack and a stunning rise in antisemitic incidents. On the other, there was staunch support for Trump among Orthodox Jews and supporters of Israel’s right wing.
Leaving that conundrum for others to parse, I simply note that Orthodox Jews and right-wing Zionists are almost completely absent in Roth’s fiction. A young Roth wrote a sensitive portrait of Holocaust survivors who want to start a suburban yeshiva in “Eli the Fanatic.” He also sketched a militant religious-nationalist Zionist in “The Counterlife,” Mordecai Lippman, who, according to Roth biographer Blake Bailey (about whom more below), was based on Elyakim Haetzni, one of the so-called founding fathers of the settlement movement. In the same novel, a version of the narrator’s brother falls under the settlement leader’s sway.
And that’s it, across a half century of writing. For traditionalist Jewish readers, whose political and social influence in the United States and Israel is substantial and growing, Roth’s fiction is not a mirror, nor a signpost, nor a scroll upon which is inscribed some essential truth.
The Jews who populated his stories, the Jews he best understood, were of Ashkenazi descent, white, liberal, assimilated and secular. His courage was to valorize them over and against other Jews who viewed them as defective, lost or even as apostates. Thus Anne Frank in “The Ghost Writer” was portrayed as a patron saint of secular Judaism. Elsewhere, his stories abound in proud, professionally accomplished diaspora Jews. They rarely think about God. Synagogue attendance is reserved strictly for lifecycle events and High Holy Days, if that.
A novelist, of course, is not a political clairvoyant. However, the immediate future of Judaism is being greatly shaped by Jews whose population and influence are growing and whom Roth rarely portrayed. In this manner, another stellar writer like Cynthia Ozick — herself Orthodox and quite attuned to the mindset of her co-religionists — might fare better commercially and emerge as more relevant than her friend in the coming decades.
Roth didn’t just write about Jews. In my book “The Philip Roth We Don’t Know: Sex, Race and Autobiography,” I pointed out that depicting non-Jewish Black people was an unrecognized “obsessional theme” across his 28 novels and 25 short stories. Much to my dismay, I found Roth’s multi-decade treatment of his African and African-American characters often to be crude, thoughtless and sometimes racist.
Familiarize yourself with the degrading portraiture we receive of Black people in “The Great American Novel” (1973), or a short story like “On the Air” (1970), and you might reconsider what Roth was after in “The Human Stain,” in which an academic who is accused of racism turns out to be an African American who had been “passing” as white and Jewish. The book, the 2001 Pen/Faulkner Award winner, is often seen as a sensitive treatment of racial issues in America, and perhaps as the author’s attempt to extend the hand of friendship to another oppressed minority.
In fact, my best guess is that, as with many Jewish writers post-1967, Roth was shaken by the deterioration of the Black-Jewish alliance. His frustrations were reflected in prose that often referenced Black communities in his hometown of Newark but showed little curiosity about their lives or sympathy for their plight.
Obviously, this type of literary rendering of African Americans — or any minority group — is disturbing and dated. Insensitive racial representation inspires calls for publishers to drop authors. They disappear from high-school or college syllabi. This bodes ominously for the afterlives of the titans of post-World War II American fiction, including John Updike, Saul Bellow Bellow and Norman Mailer, all three of whom have been accused of being racially insensitive and worse.
Roth’s marketability also seems to be sailing into a squall regarding gender. As women began demanding an accounting of sexual abuse and misogyny within the media, entertainment and other industries, numerous think-pieces wondered how the author of “Portnoy’s Complaint” — whose libidinous narrator identifies most of the women in his life by debasing nicknames — would fare in such an environment. Would he — should he — be “canceled”?
The question is more complex than his admirers and detractors make it out to be. No doubt, many of Roth’s male characters mistreated women. Accusations of Roth himself doing the same exist, but they are fairly rare, unsubstantiated and contested. The dilemma for researchers is that Roth was a deeply auto-fictional writer. You sense his presence in his stories — especially when protagonists share much of his biography, including Nathan Zuckerman and Peter Tarnopol, and when characters are named “Philip Roth.”
It’s hard not to speculate about the relation between the author and the many misogynistic fellows who cut an erotic swath through his pages. There will, of course, be readers who give him the benefit of the doubt. They might observe that Roth’s toxic males provide evidence of women’s experiences that needs to be explored, not censored.
Not helping him cleanse his reputation were the numerous allegations of sexual misconduct leveled against his hand-picked biographer, Blake Bailey. The ructions engulfing Bailey came to dominate the discourse about Roth, leading to a peculiar cancellation by proxy.
The episode also revealed that Roth had instructed his estate to eventually destroy a massive trove of personal papers he entrusted to Bailey. This led Aimee Pozorski (co-editor of Philip Roth Studies), myself and 20 other Roth scholars to issue a statement reminding his executors that “scholarship can only be advanced when qualified researchers engage freely with essential sources.”
As if all these concerns weren’t enough, his grim prophecies about the demise of an audience for serious literature seem to be coming true. “The book,” Roth worried, “can’t compete with the screen.” Meanwhile, the English major is in a very bad way, and the institution of tenure is under siege. Professors (insufferable as we might be) teach the next generation who to read and how to read. Writers might not like them, but they need them.
Roth is also getting the scrutiny that he was at pains to avoid in his lifetime. His disregard for scholars who might be critical of him always struck me, one such scholar, as misguided. Instead, he surrounded himself with friends — friends who had preternatural access to major media platforms. These friends built upon his own interpretations of his own work. It doesn’t mean they lacked wisdom. It just means that when they talked about Roth, they talked about what Roth wanted them to talk about. To wit: Jewish Newark, his sundry interpretations of his life, his pesky ex-wives and lovers, the close-mindedness of his critics, and so forth.
I think, in this cultural moment, it’s prudent to confront Roth’s limitations head on and chart one’s own path through his fiction. I pitch him to my students as a writer with some racial, religious and sexual hang-ups — who among us is innocent of those charges? I also present him as a bearer of unique and meaningful insights. Let scholars (while they still exist) parade those insights into sunlight.
I’ve tried to illuminate that his fiction was preoccupied, for 50 years, by how individual and collective bodies (like the Jews) change. Transformation, metamorphosis, metempsychosis — his obsession with those themes, I’ve noticed in my classrooms, is shared by Gen Z. If the span between Roth@80 and Roth@90 has taught us anything, it is that Roth was right: Life is about radical, unpredictable flux. Now his own legacy is in flux. I wonder who will read Roth@100.
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Israel Announces Departure From Several UN Agencies It Accuses of Bias Against Jewish State
United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres speaks at the UN headquarters in New York City, US, before a meeting about the conflict in Gaza, Nov. 6, 2023. Photo: REUTERS/Caitlin Ochs
Israel will immediately sever ties with several United Nations agencies and international organizations, the Foreign Ministry announced on Tuesday, accusing the bodies of exhibiting systemic bias against the Jewish state within the UN system.
In a statement posted on social media, the foreign ministry said that the decision was made following an internal examination after the United States last week withdrew from dozens of international bodies which, according to the White House, “no longer serve American interests.”
The move was approved by Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar, who instructed officials to conduct a broader review to determine whether Israel should continue cooperating with additional international organizations, potentially leading to further shakeups.
The seven organizations that Israel will remove itself from right away are: the Office of the Special Representative of the Secretary-General for Children in Armed Conflict, UN Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women (UNWOMEN), UN Conference for Trade and Development, (UNCTAD), UN Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia (ESCWA), UN Alliance of Civilizations, UN Energy, and Global Forum on Migration and Development.
The foreign ministry argued that each body targeted Israel unfairly.
After an examination and discussion conducted following the US withdrawal from dozens of international organizations, Israel’s Minister of Foreign Affairs @gidonsaar has decided that Israel will immediately sever all contact with the following UN agencies and international…
— Israel Foreign Ministry (@IsraelMFA) January 13, 2026
Israeli officials said the decision to sever ties with these specific organizations was the result of a broader conclusion that parts of the UN system have been politicized and openly hostile to Israel. According to the foreign ministry, several of the bodies either singled out Israel for disproportionate condemnation, ignored or minimized Israeli civilian suffering, produced one-sided and ideologically driven reports, or provided platforms for critics while excluding Israeli participation altogether.
Other organizations were accused of undermining core principles of state sovereignty or exemplifying an unaccountable and inefficient UN bureaucracy. Collectively, the ministry argued, this repeated behavior led Israel with little justification for continued engagement and necessitated a reassessment of participation in forums it believes no longer operate in good faith.
Israeli officials framed the move as both corrective and overdue, arguing that a number of UN-affiliated bodies have abandoned neutrality and instead become platforms for political attacks against the Jewish state.
Several of the organizations cited in the US withdrawal announcement had already been cut off by Israel in recent years.
Israel ended cooperation with UN Women in July 2024, after the agency declined to address or investigate sexual violence committed against Israeli women during Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, invasion of and massacre across southern Israel. The foreign ministry said the organization’s silence on the issue was unacceptable, adding that the former local head of UN Women concluded her tenure at Israel’s request.
Officials signaled that additional organizations could face similar decisions as Israel reevaluates the costs of participation in international forums it believes have become politicized.
The move comes on the heels of the US removing itself from 66 international organizations which, the Trump administration argued, behave “contrary to US national interests, security, economic prosperity, or sovereignty” and promote “ideological programs that conflict with US sovereignty and economic strength.”
“These withdrawals will end American taxpayer funding and involvement in entities that advance globalist agendas over US priorities, or that address important issues inefficiently or ineffectively such that US taxpayer dollars are best allocated in other ways to support the relevant missions,” the White House said in a Jan. 7 statement.
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Anti-Israel Activists Drop Lawsuit to Cancel Antisemitism Prevention Course at Northwestern University
People walk on the campus of Northwestern University, a day after a US official said $790 million in federal funding has been frozen for the university while it investigates the school over civil rights violations, in Evanston, Illinois, US, April 9, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Vincent Alban
A civil lawsuit which aimed to cancel Northwestern University’s antisemitism prevention course on the apparent grounds that conduct widely acknowledged as antisemitic is integral to Palestinian culture has been voluntarily withdrawn by both parties.
“The plaintiffs and defendants, by and through their respective undersigned counsel, hereby submit the following joint stipulation of voluntary dismissal purgation to federal rule of civil procedure … and hereby stipulate to the dismissal of this action in its entirety, without prejudice,” says a court document filed on Dec. 22. “Each party shall bear its own attorneys’ fees and costs.”
As previously reported by The Algemeiner, the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) — an organization that has been scrutinized by US authorities over alleged ties to the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas — demanded a temporary restraining order to halt the program, which the university mandated as a prerequisite for fall registration, and the rescission of disciplinary measures imposed on nine students who refused to complete it. Filing on behalf of the Northwestern Graduate Workers for Palestine (GW4P) group CAIR charged that the required training violates Title VI of the US Civil Rights Act of 1964 and serves as a “pretense” for censoring “expressions of Palestinian identity, culture, and advocacy for self-determination.”
CAIR particularly took issue with Northwestern’s adoption of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s (IHRA) definition of antisemitism and its application to the training course, which, at its conclusion, calls on students to pledge not to be antisemitic.
Used by governments and other entities across the world, the IHRA definition describes antisemitism as a “certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews. Rhetorical and physical manifestations of antisemitism are directed toward Jewish or non-Jewish individuals and/or their property, toward Jewish community institutions and religious facilities.” It provides 11 specific, contemporary examples of antisemitism in public life, the media, schools, the workplace, and in the religious sphere.
Beyond classic antisemitic behavior associated with the likes of the medieval period and Nazi Germany, the examples include denial of the Holocaust and newer forms of antisemitism targeting Israel such as demonizing the Jewish state, denying its right to exist, and holding it to standards not expected of any other democratic state.
The mutual dismissal did not cite a reason for the claim’s withdrawal, but it was Northwestern’s robust policy agenda for combating antisemitism which precipitated CAIR’s scrutiny.
The university adopted the IHRA definition of antisemitism in 2025 and began holding the “mandatory antisemitism training” sessions CAIR challenged in its lawsuit.
“This included a live training for all new students in September and a 17-minute training module for all enrolled students, produced in collaboration with the Jewish United Fund,” Northwestern said in a report which updated the public on its antisemitism prevention efforts. “Antisemitism trainings will continue as a permanent part of our broader training in civil rights and Title IX.”
Other initiatives rolled out by the university include an Advisory Council to the President on Jewish Life, dinners for Jewish students hosted by administrative officials, and educational events which raise awareness of rising antisemitism in the US and around the world.
On Tuesday, the Coalition Against Antisemitism at Northwestern (CAAN) told The Algemeiner that the lawsuit lacked a “strong legal foundation” and was “an inefficient use of judicial resources.”
It added, “Universities have broad discretion to require training programs designed to address antisemitism and other issues central to campus safety and wellbeing. While the case was withdrawn prior to a ruling on the merits, we believe the university’s authority in this area is well-established.”
In late November, Northwestern University agreed to pay $75 million and abolish a controversial compact, known as the “Deering Meadow Agreement,” it reached with a pro-Hamas student group in exchange for the US federal government’s releasing $790 million in grants it impounded in April over accusations that it was slow to address antisemitism and other policies which allowed reverse discrimination.
Part of the “Deering Meadow Agreement” which ended an anti-Israel encampment, called for establishing a scholarship for Palestinian undergraduates, contacting potential employers of students who caused recent campus disruptions to insist on their being hired, creating a segregated dormitory hall to be occupied exclusively by students of Middle Eastern and North African (MENA) and Muslim descent, and forming a new advisory committee in which anti-Zionists students and faculty may wield an outsized voice.
The agreement outraged Jewish civil rights groups and lawmakers and ultimately led to the resignation of former Northwestern University president Michael Schill, who authorized the concessions.
“As part of this agreement with the federal government, the university has terminated the Deering Meadow Agreement and will reverse all policies that have been implemented or are being implemented in adherence to it,” the university said in a statement, noting that it also halted plans for the segregated dormitory. “The university remains committed to fostering inclusive spaces and will continue to support student belonging and engagement through existing campus facilities and organizations, while partnering with alumni to explore off-campus, privately owned locations that could further support community connection and programming.”
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
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For 250 years, American Jews have answered prejudice with defiance
(JTA) — In December 1778, as the American Revolution still raged, a Jewish writer in Charlestown opened a newspaper and saw Jews made into wartime scapegoats. An article in the local press claimed that Jews in Georgia had taken “every advantage in trade,” then fled with “ill-got wealth” as soon as the state was “attacked by an enemy,” “turning their backs upon the country when in danger.”
The writer did not let this accusation go unanswered. He responded in print. And he signed his reply with a line that declared both his patriotism and his devotion to Judaism: “A real AMERICAN, and True hearted ISRAELITE.”
That combination — civic belonging and Jewish identity claimed in the same breath — feels newly resonant as the United States enters its 250th anniversary year. The American story has never been free of antisemitism. But this early source reveals something else that is often overlooked: From the country’s earliest years, Jews in the United States could answer public insinuations in newspapers, using the civic vocabulary of their time, as participants in the public square.
The 1778 letter is striking not only for its tone but for its immediacy. The author refutes the rumor with a blunt factual claim: “there is not, at this present hour, a single Georgia Israelite in Charlestown.” The people the earlier writer thought he had identified “upon inspection of their faces,” he suggests, were women “with their dear babes,” fleeing danger as countless families did in wartime.
Then he turns the accusation on its head. Far from abandoning Georgia, he writes, Jewish merchants from the state had been in Charlestown on “Sunday the 22d” [sic] of the previous month and when they learned of an enemy landing, “they instantly left this… and proceeded post haste to Georgia, leaving all their concerns unsettled.” They are now, he insists, “with their brother citizens in the field, doing that which every honest American should do.”
The accusation did not end with the Revolution. In the next century, amid another national crisis, it returned in a different form — and again drew a public reply.
A second text, published 85 years later during the Civil War, records antisemitism appearing again. On May 22, 1863, the Natchez Daily Courier published an extract from a sermon preached at the German Hebrew Synagogue in Richmond on a fast day “recommended by the President.” The rabbi, M. J. Michelbacher, addressed what he called the “cry” heard in public life: “that the Israelite does not fight in the battles of his country.”
The sermon does what the Charlestown letter did. It names the accusation plainly, then insists that it is false. “All history attests the untruthfulness of this ungracious charge,” the rabbi declares. He speaks of Jewish soldiers who have been “crippled for life, or slain upon the field of battle,” and of “several thousand” still in the war’s campaigns.
Then he turns to another longstanding claim — one that recalled the 1778 rumor about “ill-got wealth.” “There is another cry heard,” he says, “and it was even repeated in the Hall of Congress, that the Israelite is oppressing the people — that he is engaged in the great sin of speculating and extorting in the bread and meat of the land.”
The rabbi reports having made “due inquiry” from the Potomac to the Rio Grande and concludes: “the Israelites are not speculators nor extortioners.” He argues that Jewish merchants do not hoard a staple “to enhance its value,” and he appeals to the plain logic of commerce: “It is obvious to the most obtuse mind that the high prices of the Israelite would drive all his customers into the stores of his Christian neighbors.”
Taken together, the 1778 letter and the 1863 sermon extract show two strands present early in the American record: antisemitism, and the ability to answer it in print. That right did not erase prejudice or guarantee safety. But it did give American Jews an early civic tool of belonging —something many European Jews could not take for granted.
The same paper record that preserves these rebuttals also holds another inheritance: early scenes of Jewish belonging, especially at synagogue dedications and cornerstone layings, when non-Jewish neighbors and civic leaders chose to show up.
In Charleston, one of the nation’s earliest centers of Jewish life, Temple Beth Elohim rebuilt after a devastating fire in 1838. When the new synagogue was dedicated in March 1841, notices extended an invitation beyond the Jewish community. “Clergy of all denominations,” “His Excellency the Governor,” judges, other elected officials, the Mayor and Aldermen of Charleston, and “the public generally” were all “respectfully invited to attend.”
The notice shows the dedication as a civic occasion, not a private rite.
A similar pattern appears in Mobile. In 1858, after a fire left the Jewish community without its synagogue, a report in The Israelite spoke with gratitude of “Christian brethren” who “had generously and liberally contributed towards erecting a most beautiful and substantial edifice.” The same theme surfaces again and again in early reports of synagogue building across the United States.
That is why these sources matter in a 250th anniversary year: The paper record preserves both early prejudice and early practices of public belonging, and provides a template for what Jews can anticipate in the face of attacks, like last week’s arson at a synagogue in Jackson, Mississippi.
That double inheritance still shapes American Jewish life: welcome and violence, belonging and suspicion. The balance is never guaranteed. Pluralism has to be chosen again and again.
In the 1778 letter, the writer does not ask for pity. He asks for fair judgment. “Let judgment take place,” the earlier author had written, after describing Jews fleeing Georgia. The rebuttal responds with evidence and with a claim about the obligations of citizenship: Georgia’s Jewish merchants, he insists, are “with their brother citizens in the field.”
In 1863, M.J. Michelbacher did not pretend that the accusations were harmless. He calls them “ungracious” and rooted in prejudice.
As the United States marks 250 years, there will be no shortage of speeches about what it means to be an American. Newspaper archives offer one reminder: pluralism has always depended on choices made in public life — by editors who amplify slander or correct it, by neighbors who show up to moments of celebration across lines of faith, and by those who helped build places of worship not their own.
Belonging has never been guaranteed; it has been defended. The Charlestown “true hearted Israelite” offers an enduring lesson for the 250th: when prejudice is spoken, and you have the power to answer, you answer
The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of JTA or its parent company, 70 Faces Media.
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