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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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Iran Says Talks With US in Oman Were ‘Good Start,’ Will Continue
Iran’s Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi is welcomed by an Omani official upon his arrival in Muscat, Oman, in this handout image obtained on Feb. 6, 2026. Photo: Iranian Foreign Ministry/WANA (West Asia News Agency)/Handout via REUTERS
Iran’s top diplomat said on Friday that nuclear talks with the US mediated by Oman were off to a “good start” and set to continue, in remarks that could help allay concern that failure to reach a deal might nudge the Middle East closer to war.
But Foreign Minister Abbas Araqchi said after the talks in the Omani capital Muscat that “any dialogue requires refraining from threats and pressure. [Tehran] only discusses its nuclear issue … We do not discuss any other issue with the US.”
While both sides have indicated readiness to revive diplomacy over Tehran’s long-running nuclear dispute with the West, Washington wanted to expand the talks to cover Iran‘s ballistic missiles, support for armed terrorist groups around the region, and “treatment of their own people,” US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said on Wednesday.
Iranian officials have repeatedly ruled out putting Iran‘s missiles – one of the largest such arsenals in the Middle East – up for discussion, and have said Tehran wants recognition of its right to enrich uranium.
For Washington, carrying out enrichment – a possible pathway to nuclear bombs – inside Iran is a red line. Tehran has long denied any intent to weaponize nuclear fuel production.
“It was a good start to the negotiations. And there is an understanding on continuing the talks. Coordination on how to proceed will be decided in the capitals,” Araqchi told Iranian state TV. “If this process continues, I think we will reach a good framework for an understanding.”
TALKS WERE ‘VERY SERIOUS,’ SAYS OMAN
Mediator Badr al-Busaidi, Oman’s foreign minister, said the talks had been “very serious,” with results to be considered carefully in Tehran and Washington. The goal was to reconvene in due course.
The Islamic Republic’s clerical leadership remains deeply worried that Trump may still carry out his threats to strike Iran after a US naval buildup in seas in the region.
“The lack of trust is a huge challenge during the talks, and it should be overcome,” Araqchi said.
Last June the US struck Iranian nuclear targets, joining in the final stages of a 12-day Israeli bombing campaign. Tehran has since said it has halted uranium enrichment activity.
The naval buildup, which Trump has called a massive “armada,” has followed a bloody government crackdown on nationwide protests in Iran last month, heightening tensions between Washington and Tehran.
Trump warned the Iranian regime not to use violence to crush the nationwide anti-government protests. According to several reports, however, Iran’s security forces killed tens of thousands of demonstrators during what appears to be one of the bloodiest crackdowns in modern history.
Trump has warned that “bad things” will probably happen if a deal cannot be reached, ratcheting up pressure on the Islamic Republic in a standoff that has led to mutual threats of air strikes.
World powers and regional states fear a breakdown in the negotiations would ignite another conflict between the US and Iran that could spill over to the rest of the oil-rich region.
Iran has vowed a harsh response to any strike and has cautioned neighboring Gulf Arab countries that host US bases that they could be in the firing line if they were involved in an attack.
Negotiators in Oman will have to navigate Iran‘s red line on discussing its missile program to reach a deal and avert future military action. Tehran has flatly ruled out talks on its “defense capabilities, including missiles and their range.”
In a show of defiance, Iranian state TV said hours before the talks that “one of the country’s most advanced long-range ballistic missiles, the Khorramshahr-4,” had been deployed at one of the Revolutionary Guards’ vast underground “missile cities.”
However, Tehran is willing to show “flexibility” on uranium enrichment, including by handing over 400 kg of highly enriched uranium – refined closer to bomb-grade – and accepting zero enrichment under a consortium arrangement as a solution, Iranian officials told Reuters last week.
Iran also demands the lifting of US sanctions, reimposed since 2018 when Trump, during his first term in the White House, ditched Iran‘s 2015 nuclear deal with six world powers.
The United States, its European allies, and Israel accuse Tehran of using its nuclear energy program as a veil for efforts to develop the capability to produce atomic bombs. Iran says its nuclear program is for peaceful purposes only.
Israel has likened the danger of Iran‘s missiles to its nuclear program. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in January that Iran‘s “attempt to build atomic weapons” and “20,000 ballistic missiles” were like “two lumps of cancer.”
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‘You Will All Burn!’ Haverford Bans Pro-Hamas Hecklers From Campus Over Event Disruption
Masked woman disrupting Middle East talk held at Haverford College on Feb. 1, 2026. Photo: Screenshot.
Haverford College in Pennsylvania has identified and banned from campus at least two members of a pro-Hamas group that disrupted an event featuring Middle East scholar Haviv Rettig Gur on Sunday.
As seen in footage shared on the X social media platform, one of the individuals, who concealed her face with a keffiyeh scarf in the style popularized by the Palestinian Liberation Organization terrorist leader Yasser Arafat, screamed “When Gaza has burned, you will all burn too.”
“Shame! Shame! Shame!” she continued while being escorted out. The individuals continued to scream unintelligible statements outside the lecture hall while banging on its door, prompting Rettig to comment on the incivility of political speech in contemporary higher education.
“It amazes me that this happens most intensely at institutions in America,” he said.
On Wednesday, a public relations official for Haverford College shared with The Algemeiner a statement the college issued to signal that it is not hesitating to respond to actions it described as “clear violations of Haverford’s Policy on Expressive Freedom and Responsibility.” The statement noted that there was also violence during the disruption, noting “at least one physical altercation between attendees.”
“We have gathered sufficient evidence to identify both the individual who used a bullhorn and the audience member who initiated physical contact with them,” the statement said. “We can confirm that neither of the parities is a student, nor are they members of the Haverford College community. As we conclude our investigation, the persons in question will be considered persona non grata, which bans them from our campus indefinitely. If they are found to be on Haverford’s campus, their presence will be considered trespassing, and the college will contact local police.”
On Monday, Haverford president Wendy Raymond condemned the group’s conduct, saying, “Shouting down a speaker whom one does not agree with is never acceptable and stands outside of our shared community values.”
Raymond added, “We strive to be a campus where all experiences and opinions matter … the fact that this event proceeded with nearly three hours of thoughtful and constructive discussion illustrates how valuable these types of learning opportunities are to our educational mission.”
The 2025-2026 academic year has seen a number of similar disturbances on colleges campuses, with anti-Zionist activists continuing to disrupt events and stage demonstrations even after Israel and Hamas agreed to a ceasefire in Gaza.
In October, masked pro-Hamas activists breached an event held at Pomona College in California to commemorate the victims of the Oct. 7, 2023, massacre in which Hamas-led Palestinian terrorists raped, murdered, and abducted women, children, and men during their rampage across southern Israel.
Footage of the act circulated on social media showed the group attempting to raid the room while screaming expletives and pro-Hamas dogma. They ultimately failed due to the prompt response of the Claremont Colleges Jewish chaplain and other attendees who formed a barrier in front of the door to repel them, a defense they mounted on their own as campus security personnel did nothing to stop the disturbance, according to video of the incident and witnesses who spoke to The Claremont Independent.
Following the incident, an anonymous group claimed credit for storming the event in a disturbing open letter.
“Satan dared not look us in the eyes,” the note said, which the group released on social media, while attacking event guests and Oct. 7 survivor Yoni Viloga. “Immediately, zionists [sic] swarmed us, put their hands on us, shoved us, while Viloga retreated like he did on October 7th, 2023.”
Appearing to threaten murder, the group added, “We let that coward know he and his fascists settler ideology are not welcome here nor anywhere. zionism is a death cult that must be dealt with accordingly [sic].”
In January, a sophomore and right-wing social media influencer at the University of Miami verbally attacked a Jewish student group, leading the school to defend free speech while saying that “lines can be crossed” in response.
“Christianity, which says love everyone, meanwhile your Bible says eating someone who is a non-Jew is like eating with an animal. That’s what the Talmud says,” Kaylee Mahony yelled at members of Students Supporting Israel (SSI) who had a table at a campus fair. “That’s what these people follow.”
She continued, “They think that if you are not a Jew you are an animal. That’s the Talmud. That’s the Talmud.”
Mahony could also be heard in video of the incident responding to one of the SSI members, saying, “Because you’re disgusting. It’s disgusting.”
Later, Mahony, whose statements were first reported by The Miami Hurricane student newspaper, took to social media, where she has more than 125,000 followers on TikTok, and posted, “Of course the most evil (((country))) in the world is filled with (((people))) who hate Jesus [sic].”
The “((()))” is used by neo-Nazis as a substitute for calling out Jews by name, which, given the context in which they discuss the Jewish people, could draw the intervention of a content moderator.
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
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Free Speech Advocacy Group Walks Back Condemnation of Israeli Comedian’s Shows Being Abruptly Canceled
The Israeli national flag flutters as apartments are seen in the background in the Israeli settlement of Maale Adumim in the West Bank, Aug. 16, 2020. Photo: REUTERS/Ronen Zvulun
An organization dedicated to protecting free speech has withdrawn a statement in which it condemned the last-minute cancellations of two performances by Israeli comedian Guy Hochman, after he faced backlash over his support for Israel.
Two venues, in New York and California, canceled Hochman’s scheduled performances last month.
Hochman’s show in New York City was canceled by its venue due to safety concerns after anti-Israel protesters picketed outside of the establishment.
The Fine Arts Theater in Beverly Hills, California, then called off Hochman’s gig after receiving pressure from anti-Israel activists, including threats of violence. The theater said it made the decision also after Hochman declined the venue’s demands to publicly condemn his home country of Israel for the alleged “genocide, rape, starvation, and torture of Palestinian civilians.”
PEN America initially condemned the cancellations of Hochman’s shows in a statement shared on its website on Jan. 29. At the time, Jonathan Friedman, the managing director of US free expression programs at PEN America, said, “It is a profound violation of free expression to demand artists, writers, or comedians agree to ideological litmus tests as a condition to appear on a stage.”
“People have every right to protest his events, but those who wish to hear from Hochman also have a right to do so,” Friedman added. The statement accused Hochman of “dehumanizing social media posts about Palestinians” but also noted that “shutting down cultural events is not the solution.”
On Tuesday, however, PEN America removed the message from its website and replaced it with another statement explaining the move: “On further consideration, PEN America has decided to withdraw this statement. We remain committed to open and respectful dialogue about the divisions that arise in the course of defending free expression.” A spokesperson for PEN America did not immediately respond to The Algemeiner‘s request for comment to further explain the organization’s change of heart.
In 2024, a campaign was launched to boycott PEN America after the group was accused of being apologetic to the alleged “genocide” of Palestinians and “apartheid” in Israel, as well as of “normalizing Zionism.”
Members of PEN America include novelists, journalists, nonfiction writers, editors, poets, essayists, playwrights, publishers, translators, agents, and other writing professionals, according to its website. The organization has a page on its website dedicated to information about “Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territory,” which begins by claiming that the “Israeli government has cracked down on free expression of writers and public intellectuals in the wake of the Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel by Hamas.” The webpage is highly critical of the Jewish state and its military actions in the Gaza Strip during the Israel-Hamas war, which started in response to the deadly rampage orchestrated by the US-designated terror organization across southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.
The same webpage highlights a list of “individual cases” of Palestinian activists and writers that Israel has allegedly detained, arrested, or convicted, but there are no specific details shared about their offenses. The list includes Palestinian poet Dareen Tatour, who was convicted of incitement to terrorism for a poem she wrote and comments she made on social media during a wave of Palestinian attacks against Jews.
The list also includes Palestinian activist Ahed Tamimi, but the provided description about Tamimi does not mention that she was convicted on four counts of assaulting an IDF officer and soldier, incitement, and interference with IDF forces in March 2018.
A third writer on the list is Mosab Abu Toha, a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet and essayist who tried to justify Hamas’s abduction of Israelis on Oct. 7, 2023.