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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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A ‘deficit of courage’ killed the free press in Germany. Will American journalists find the courage to thwart Trump?
Paul Reusch was managing director of a major German industrial conglomerate known as GHH, whose holdings included Bavaria’s largest newspaper, the Münchner Neueste Nachrichten.
After two meetings with Adolf Hitler early in 1932, Reusch signed an agreement that the Munich broadsheet would refrain from “all unwarranted and personal attacks against Hitler and individual National Socialist leaders.”
One year later, Hitler lackeys were calling the shots in the newsroom, Jewish journalists had been forced out, and the newspaper was spewing hate propaganda.
The Third Reich brutally smashed free speech. Nearly a century later, it’s America’s Fourth Estate that is getting battered — by Donald Trump’s drive to muzzle his critics by exploiting the greed and hunger for power of corporate media executives.
Scott Pelley’s firing and the turmoil at CBS News are the freshest manifestations of this threat. But it’s been going on since the start of Trump’s second term — witness the craven settlements by ABC News and CBS News of frivolous lawsuits brought by Trump last year, his favored treatment of MAGA-aligned outlets, and his dehumanization of actual journalists.
“The news executives are acting as though, (if) we just placate Donald Trump we’ll get through this,” veteran TV journalist Jim Acosta said the other day in an interview on MS Now. “We have a deficit of courage and honor in this country right now and we need to get back to it.”
It was a deficit of courage that killed the free press in Weimar Germany. And like Paul Reusch, German media baron Alfred Hugenberg is a case study in corporate submission to authoritarianism.
Hugenberg was a steel executive, ultra-nationalist politician, and owner of some 50 provincial newspapers, of the Telegraph-Union wire service, as well as Ufa, the Third Reich’s largest producer of movies and newsreels. The Great Depression hollowed out Germany’s newspaper market, allowing Hugenberg to use his considerable capital to buy distressed papers and blanket the market with articles calling for an end to democracy.
Hitler’s Nazis and Hugenberg’s German National Peoples’ Party joined forces in 1931 in the Harzburg Front, an attempt to topple Chancellor Heinrich Brüning. Although the alliance ultimately unraveled, it brought huge financial contributions to the Nazis from German industrialists.
After Hitler came to power he struck rapidly to muzzle any dissent, either shutting down newspapers or taking them over to serve as cogs in the Nazis’ propaganda apparatus.
As America nears its 250th birthday, media turmoil is playing into the hands of Donald Trump’s authoritarian ambitions.
Trump’s obsession with silencing truth-writing journalists kicked into overdrive early in his second term, with his banning of The Associated Press, my former employer, from the Oval Office and from Air Force One, the Trump administration dictating who gets to be in the White House press pool, and giving preferential treatment to journalists who ask softball questions or can be relied on to make fawning statements about Trump’s grandiose ideas, as Trump’s personal insults toward journalists — mainly women — pile up in number and in viciousness.
What’s been happening at CBS News and Scott Pelley’s firing are warning signs of moves by Trump to take control of news media and suppress criticism of him. The drama started last summer with CBS’ parent company — Paramount — agreeing to pay Trump $16 million to settle a toothless lawsuit over the editing of a 60 Minutes interview with Kamala Harris. And then came approval by the FCC — led by Trump loyalist Brendan Carr — of Paramount’s merger with Skydance Media. No quid pro quo here!
David Ellison, the CEO of Paramount Skydance, hired Bari Weiss to lead CBS News. After firing a half-dozen top people at 60 Minutes, Weiss was accused by Pelley of “murdering” the vaunted TV news program and doing Trump’s bidding.
“My impression at the time was that she was putting a thumb on the scale on behalf of the administration. Constantly looking out for the views of the president,” Pelley said in an interview with The New York Times published this past Sunday.
Weiss and CBS News have denied Pelley’s allegations.
There’s more turmoil on the horizon — and more reason to fear the Trump administration will seek to deepen its influence on news operations.
This past February, Paramount Skydance and Warner Bros. Discovery signed an agreement for Paramount to acquire WBD for $110.9 billion, and WBD shareholders approved the merger. Whether the deal goes through is up to regulators. The Trump administration is eager to see Ellison, the son of Oracle CEO and Trump buddy Larry Ellison, calling the shots for CNN. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said a few months ago: “The sooner David Ellison takes over that network, the better.”
Ellison has said “editorial independence will absolutely be maintained” at CNN. But the purges at 60 Minutes are hardly reassuring. Jim Acosta maintains that the media conglomerate resulting from the merger of Paramount Skydance and Warner Bros. Discovery “will essentially act like a state media organization in support of Donald Trump.”
There are calls among journalists to show more support for each other, and to stand up to Trump when he personally attacks them. The optics at this year’s White House Correspondents Dinner weren’t great, with journalists giving a warm welcome to a man who regularly calls them “stupid,” “fake news,” “horrible,” “terrible,” among other insults. I wonder how they would have responded had a gunman not interrupted the proceedings and Trump gave a scathing speech about the assembled members of the Fourth Estate.
Acosta and other journalists are urging their colleagues — as well as news executives — to show more backbone.
“They (the Trump administration) are trying to put together a state-dominated media system in this country. And it has to be stopped,” Acosta said.
“There are a lot of journalists who can do something about it, and a lot of corporate executives who can do something about it. “
Acosta is not wrong.
Journalists working in the Third Reich were a mixed bag of Nazi fanatics, sycophants, opportunists, and career professionals who may have felt queasy about collaborating with the Nazis but kept quiet about it.
Resistance could have fatal consequences. Fritz Gerlich, editor of the Munich-based newspaper Der gerade Weg (The Straight Path), was murdered at Dachau. Erwein von Aretin, political editor at the Münchner Neueste Nachrichten, was also hauled off to Dachau, but survived. Editors and reporters at the Münchener Post, a pro-democracy newspaper owned by the Social Democrats, were rounded up, jailed, and after their release ostracized and forced to live in penury, a story I tell in my book Enemy of The People: The Munich Post and The Journalists Who Opposed Hitler.
German journalists never put up any serious resistance to Hitler’s suppression of the free press at least partly because most of the populace had turned against democracy.
American journalists are in a different situation, one far less perilous than that of their German colleagues. They might lose access to administration officials by standing up to Trump, perhaps forfeit their seat at press conferences to MAGA media, be banished from Air Force One, suffer juvenile insults from Trump, or anger their corporate bosses.
But today’s journalists need to ask themselves this: Isn’t standing up for democracy worth more than a seat in the briefing room?
While interviewing Trump on Meet The Press this past Sunday, Kristen Welker showed how it should be done, persisting in holding Trump to account. When Welker challenged Trump’s claims of election rigging by Democrats, he exploded.
“We’re like a Third World country,” he yelled at Welker. “Your elections are crooked. And you’re crooked, and Meet the Press is crooked, and so is ABC and CBS and CNN.” Red-faced, Trump stood up and stormed out
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YiddishPOP can bring more diversity to American Jewish education
Every Sunday morning, a group of families in Stockholm, Sweden, meets in a local school to create handicrafts, do gymnastics — and learn Yiddish.
Katka Mazurczak, the instructor of this grassroots group called The Yiddish Club, told me that the families seem to really enjoy the weekly Yiddish immersion. One of the resources she uses is YiddishPOP, a free online animated and game-based learning tool that features short episodes about a young teenager named Nomi, her robot sidekick Moby and her friends.
I’ve known about YiddishPOP for years and often share its videos with my grandchildren. The episodes cover topics that are familiar and easy for children to relate to. In one, a friend of Nomi’s finally scores a basket. In another, Nomi and Moby laugh as they look at their comical reflections in funhouse mirrors.
Each story is accompanied by a video clip presenting the new vocabulary and grammar, interactive games and a multiple choice quiz.
“Children love YiddishPOP,” said Mazurczak, who also uses the program when teaching kids in more formal school settings like the Stockholm Jewish Hillel School, known as Hillelskolan. “It has captivating graphics, clear speech and the movie goes at a good pace. Some episodes are really funny and kids laugh out loud.”
Part of the appeal of YiddishPOP, particularly for beginners, lies in Moby’s slapstick antics. I too find myself laughing during those scenes.
In a time when seeking diversity has become a main focus in schools across America, Jewish educators might want to consider introducing young students to the multi-faceted language and culture of Ashkenazic Jewry, using a contemporary language learning tool like YiddishPOP.
Teaching the Yiddish language through animation and interactive games helps it come alive for children, depicting it as a natural, even cool way to express Jewish identity, rather than stereotypically sending the language to the dustbin of history.
One school that has tried out YiddishPOP is the Krieger Schechter Day School in Baltimore, MD. When the school piloted the program with its third-grade class last year, the director of the lower school, Toby Kaplowitz, was impressed.
“Though students had just four sessions, they were truly engaged and walked away with both a sense of the language and an appreciation for its connection to their Jewish learning,” Kaplowitz wrote in an email. Krieger plans to continue using YiddishPOP with these same students, as they transition to fourth grade.
Last year, YiddishPOP began distributing $500 microgrants to help teachers and parents bring the Yiddish program to schools. Dana Yudovich Katz, a teacher at Kehillah High — a supplemental program for students in grades 8–12, run by the Jewish Federation of Greater Houston — was the first recipient. She added YiddishPOP to a course she had initiated with the teens called TAM: A Taste of Yiddish Language and Culture. Tam is Yiddish for “flavor.”
Most of the students came away from using YiddishPOP with a positive feeling towards the language. As one student in Yudovich Katz’s class told her: “The film was good at using the words in a way I could understand because it was just slow enough.”
The YiddishPOP team is now working on teacher materials that will make it easier for people without a background in Yiddish or language teaching to use YiddishPOP. Teachers and school administrators who’d like to apply for a YiddishPOP microgrant can do so here until July 31.
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UK Jewish leaders demand answers after Muslim police group paper calls Zionism a form of hatred
(JTA) — British Jewish groups say they are alarmed about revelations that a fraternal society for Muslim police officers published a policy paper that described Zionism as a form of anti-Muslim hatred and called the Israeli army a “Zionist terrorist group.”
The Board of Deputies of British Jews called the paper posted by the National Association of Muslim Police “disturbing” in its presentation of Jewish identity, history and the nature of antisemitism.
“If this is being circulated among officers, it poses a direct challenge to the integrity of policing and it should be withdrawn immediately,” the group said.
NAMP has distanced itself from the report and, in a statement, rejected any allegation that the group “supports Hamas.”
The 39-page paper titled “From Past Prejudices to Present Policies: Confronting anti-Muslim hatred and Promoting Human Rights,” was written by NAMP’s then-vice president, Khaldoun Kabbani, and published in July 2025. It says “Zionism represents one of the manifestations of anti-Muslim hatred”; likens the war in Gaza to the Holocaust; and disputes facts about Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel, including that Israeli children were killed.
The Spectator, a right-wing British newspaper, drew attention to the report in a piece published on Friday that said the report illuminated “the disturbing truth about the National Association of Muslim Police.” The group has a formal affiliation with 16 of 43 police departments in the U.K. and says it represents more than 20,000 officers.
Kabbani, a forensics officer, was briefly the chair of the Scottish Muslim Police Association but planned to move abroad after retiring earlier this year, according to a post by the group on LinkedIn.
The revelation of the NAMP report comes at a time of heightened tension over policing in the U.K., amid both a surge in anti-Jewish crimes and a renewed uproar over a December murder that has fueled allegations of “two-tier policing” that treats some victims differently from others. The Spectator referenced the victim, Henry Nowak, in the column about NAMP.
The NAMP report has spurred distress for many British Jews who are on edge amid a string of violent incidents targeting Jewish communities. The Campaign Against Antisemitism, a watchdog group, said its polling shows that 83% of British Jews do not think the police are doing enough to protect them — and that the report suggested their concerns were well founded.
“The people responsible for publishing this extremist screed on the official police.uk web domain are unfit to be police officers and must be immediately investigated by their respective forces’ professional standards departments and dismissed,” Steven Silverman, CAM’s director of investigations and enforcement, said in a statement.
“British Jews have long suffered two-tier policing that sees antisemitic crime go unpunished,” he said, adding that CAM would press the British government “ensure a clear message is being sent. This cannot pass with the document being quietly deleted.”
The report was removed from NAMP’s website over the weekend. The group distanced itself from the report in a statement published on Tuesday, saying that it had removed the report “immediately” after learning about its existence and emphasizing that the author was “no longer associated” with NAMP.
“We understand that the publication of this document has affected several communities, and we regret any concern, discomfort, or misunderstanding it may have caused,” the group said.
It added, “NAMP categorically does not ‘defend’ Hamas or any other proscribed organisation. We condemn all forms of terrorism and extremism.”
The document is “deeply troubling,” a spokesperson for the Jewish Leadership Council, which coordinates British Jewish groups, said in a statement.
“This document appears to falsely associate an ideology held by the majority of Jewish people as a threat to Muslims. It also engages in deeply troubling Holocaust inversion and denial of some of the worst atrocities carried out by Hamas on October 7th,” the spokesperson said. “At a time of rising antisemitism including violent attacks on British Jews, this document further threatens community cohesion and police forces should be clear in distancing themselves from it.”
The Board of Deputies of British Jews said it plans to speak with the “relevant” government and police departments to discover the paper’s provenance, how it’s being used and “how to ensure that the valued relationships of trust between British Jews and the police are not being undermined.”
The Metropolitan Police of London, the largest police department in the U.K. and a formal NAMP affiliate, declined to comment on the report. The department has recently stepped up policing in Jewish communities in an effort to stem antisemitic violence.
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