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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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The Jew who put Hitler on trial — and the play that stages his story
An oft-forgotten chapter in Hitler’s life was one the Führer clung to with a vengeance.
In May of 1931, a 27-year-old Jewish lawyer named Hans Litten called the Nazi leader to the stand to answer for the violence of his Brownshirts and the role his rhetoric played in inciting them. Hitler did not like being questioned, and, when he rose to dictator from the ashes of the Reichstag Fire, he wasted no time in retribution.
Litten has seen something of a revival in recent years, with a 2011 BBC TV film, The Man Who Crossed Hitler, and, in a more fanciful vein, as a character in the Weimar noir series Babylon Berlin. Douglas P. Lackey’s play, Hans Litten: The Jew Who Cross-Examined Hitler, now playing Off-Broadway at Theater Row, is both more holistic, and hollower, than previous efforts.
Despite the title, the play, directed by Alexander Harrington, is not a courtroom drama. It begins in 1924 in Königsberg, with Litten’s law professor father, Friedrich (Stan Buturla), discussing his son’s career prospects and handily alluding to the family’s Protestant conversion. Hans (Daniel Yaiullo) is convinced to pursue law, not as a calling, but as a kind of default — tempted, perhaps, by Friedrich’s sunny view of the profession.
“We can change the rules of law to make the law better,” Herr Litten says.
The action jumps forward in fits and starts, finding Litten in his new Berlin practice, where he defends Communists with his party member partner Ludwig Barbasch (Dave Stishan).
One day, Barbasch arrives with news, asking Litten if he’d heard about the case of the Eden Dance Palace, where members of the Nazi SA attacked Communists and claimed self-defense. (Because the play demands this event be explained, Litten, who it is established in the prior scene “reads everything,” hadn’t yet heard of the incident even though it occurred months earlier.)
Litten decides that he will subpoena Hitler, but not before checking out The Three Penny Opera and getting soused afterwards with Bertolt Brecht (Marco Torriani) and Kurt Weill (Whit K. Lee.)
Lackey, a philosophy professor at Baruch College who’s written plays about Wittgenstein, Arendt and Heidegger, is at his best when Hitler is in the dock, within the formal rhythms of a trial. His dialogue has a dialectic quality that lays out characters’ ideas, historical context and a fair amount of musings on Kant with no real room for subtext. Zack Calhoon as Hitler, pretending to disavow violence but barely concealing his rage, sidesteps caricature.
Yaiullo does dependable work as Litten. He plays him as a pedant but as events conspire to haul him off to a series of concentration camps, he develops the aura of a martyr.
“He was a saint,” Benjamin Carter Hett, a Litten biographer said in a 2011 interview with the BBC. “But I have a feeling that, if I sat down to have a beer with him, I wouldn’t like him.”
His prickliness with people, and a doctrinaire commitment to his own personal, unclassifiable politics are hinted at, but soon dissipate as he endures torture, first at Sonnenberg and finally at Dachau. His devoted mother, Irmgard (Barbara McCulloh) visits him in jail, remarking often how people back home regard him as already canonized.
It is documented that while interned Litten would give lectures to his fellow inmates and recite poetry from Rilke. He also, as is shown in the play, defiantly sang Die Gedanken sind frei (“Thoughts Are Free”) when asked to sing the Horst-Wessel-Lied for a Nazi occasion.
That Litten once spoke truth to a rising power, exposing Hitler’s supposed moderation as a farce, will always make him a compelling character. But his example is ultimately dispiriting, showing that changes of law — for the better, at least — are often fruitless against the headwinds of nationalism and cults of personality.
In 1938, Litten ended his life with a noose in a latrine at Dachau. That we now commemorate him in dramas speaks to a sort of victory. That war is what got us there — and judgment at Nuremberg followed — is regrettable evidence of the law’s delay.
Douglas P. Lackey’s play, Hans Litten: The Jew Who Cross-Examined Hitler is playing at Theatre Row until Feb. 22, 2026. Tickets and more information can be found here.
The post The Jew who put Hitler on trial — and the play that stages his story appeared first on The Forward.
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French Court Rejects Antisemitism Charge in Murder of 89-Year-Old Jewish Man
Tens of thousands of French people march in Paris to protest against antisemitism. Photo: Screenshot
A French court on Thursday tossed out antisemitic-motivated charges against a 55-year-old man convicted of murdering his 89-year-old Jewish neighbor in 2022, in what appears to be yet another instance of France’s legal system brushing aside antisemitism.
French authorities in Lyon, in southeastern France, acquitted defendant Rachid Kheniche of aggravated murder charges on antisemitic grounds, rejecting the claim that the killing was committed on account of the victim’s religion.
According to French media, the magistrate of the public prosecutor’s office refused to consider the defendant’s prior antisemitic behavior, including online posts spreading hateful content and promoting conspiracy theories about Jews and Israelis, arguing that it was not directly related to the incident itself. The jurors ultimately agreed and dismissed the presence of an antisemitic motive.
In May 2022, Kheniche threw his neighbor, René Hadjadj, from the 17th floor of his building, an act to which he later admitted.
According to the police investigation, Kheniche and his neighbor were having a discussion when the conflict escalated.
At the time, he told investigators that he had tried to strangle Hadjadj but did not realize what he was doing, as he was experiencing a paranoid episode caused by prior drug use.
After several psychiatric evaluations, the court concluded that the defendant was mentally impaired at the time of the crime, reducing his criminal responsibility and lowering the maximum sentence for murder to 20 years.
Due to the defendant’s age and assessed risk, the magistrate also asked for 10 years of supervision after his release in addition to the maximum prison time.
Kheniche was ultimately sentenced on Thursday to 18 years in prison and six years of “socio-judicial monitoring.”
The three-day trail, which began on Monday, focused specifically on the alleged antisemitic motive being contested to determine the sentence, as Kheniche’s guilt for the murder was already determined. He has denied that antisemitism played any role in his actions.
However, Alain Jakubowicz, counsel for the League Against Racism and Antisemitism (Licra) and the Representative Council of Jewish Institutions of France (CRIF), both civil parties in the proceedings, argued that the defendant was “obsessed” with the Jewish religion.
Kheniche previously referred on social media to “sayanim,” a conspiracy term used to refer to a sleeper agent for Israel’s Mossad intelligence agency. He also reportedly took passport photos and a text in Hebrew found in his victim’s jacket and cut them out. But the magistrate argued that the law required the court only to consider the facts “at the same time as the crime committed,” thereby dismissing past antisemitic and conspiratorial comments.
The court’s decision “is a reflection of our society,” Muriel Ouaknine-Melki, counsel for members of the victim’s family, told AFP. “It is simply a reflection of the way France deals with the scourge of antisemitism.”
This is far from the first case in France to spark such alarm, as courts have repeatedly overturned or reduced sentences for individuals accused of antisemitic crimes, fueling public outrage over what many see as excessive leniency.
Last year, the public prosecutor’s office in Nanterre, just west of Paris, appealed a criminal court ruling that cleared a nanny of antisemitism-aggravated charges after she poisoned the food and drinks of the Jewish family she worked for.
Residing illegally in France, the nanny had worked as a live-in caregiver for the family and their three children — aged two, five, and seven — since November 2023.
The 42-year-old Algerian woman was sentenced to two and a half years in prison for “administering a harmful substance that caused incapacitation for more than eight days.”
First reported by Le Parisien, the shocking incident occurred in January 2024, just two months after the caregiver was hired, when the mother discovered cleaning products in the wine she drank and suffered severe eye pain from using makeup remover contaminated with a toxic substance, prompting her to call the police.
After a series of forensic tests, investigators detected polyethylene glycol — a chemical commonly used in industrial and pharmaceutical products — along with other toxic substances in the food consumed by the family and their three children.
Even though the nanny initially denied the charges against her, she later confessed to police that she had poured a soapy lotion into the family’s food as a warning because “they were disrespecting her.”
“They have money and power, so I should never have worked for a Jewish woman — it only brought me trouble,” the nanny told the police. “I knew I could hurt them, but not enough to kill them.”
The French court declined to uphold any antisemitism charges against the defendant, noting that her incriminating statements were made several weeks after the incident and recorded by a police officer without a lawyer present
The nanny, who has been living in France in violation of a deportation order issued in February 2024, was also convicted of using a forged document — a Belgian national identity card — and barred from entering France for five years.
In another shocking case last year, a local court in France dramatically reduced the sentence of one of the two teenagers convicted of the brutal gang rape of a 12-year-old Jewish girl, citing his “need to prepare for future reintegration.”
More than a year after the attack, the Versailles Court of Appeal retried one of the convicted boys — the only one to challenge his sentence — behind closed doors, ultimately reducing his term from nine to seven years and imposing an educational measure.
The original sentences, handed down in June, gave the two boys — who were 13 years old at the time of the incident — seven and nine years in prison, respectively, after they were convicted on charges of group rape, physical violence, and death threats aggravated by antisemitic hatred.
The third boy involved in the attack, the girl’s ex-boyfriend, was accused of threatening her and orchestrating the attack, also motivated by racist prejudice. Because he was under 13 at the time of the attack, he did not face prison and was instead sentenced to five years in an educational facility.
Just this week, a court in Paris denied a Jewish family from Baghdad compensation for their former home, which was seized from them and now serves as the French embassy in Iraq.
The plaintiffs, descendants of two Jewish Iraqi brothers, filed a lawsuit last year seeking $22 million in back rent and an additional $11 million in damages from the French government.
According to their account, the French government leased the house as its embassy starting in 1964 and paid their family through 1974, but has made no payments for more than 50 years.
In the 1950s, the Iraqi government seized Jewish property and stripped Jews of their citizenship, yet the family retained legal ownership of their Baghdad home even after being forced to leave in 1951.
Last year, Philip Khazzam, grandson of Ezra Lawee, told The Globe and Mail that, under pressure from Saddam Hussein’s government, the French government stopped paying rent to the Lawee family and appears to have diverted the funds to the Iraqi treasury.
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Vance Defends Trump’s Iran Approach, Says Tehran ‘Can’t Have a Nuclear Weapon’
US Vice President JD Vance delivers remarks at the Wilshire Federal Building in Los Angeles, California, US, June 20, 2025. Phone: REUTERS/Daniel Cole
US Vice President JD Vance defended President Donald Trump’s approach to reining in Iranian aggression during an interview with podcaster Megyn Kelly, arguing that Tehran’s acquiring a nuclear weapon would prove disastrous for American interests.
“Iran can’t have a nuclear weapon. That is the stated policy goal of the president of the United States,” Vance said.
Vance pushed back against critics who have suggested that the president shouldn’t engage in “diplomacy” or “negotiate” with Iran, explaining that Trump will “keep his options open” while trying to advance American security interests “through non-military means.” However, Vance stressed that the president would be willing to engage militarily if left with no other options to dismantle Iran’s nuclear capabilities.
“I am very cognizant that the Middle East leads to quagmires,” he said. “Trust me, so does the president of the United States.”
Trump has discussed targeted strikes on Iranian security forces and leadership, partly as a way to pressure the regime over its violent suppression of demonstrators while also seeking to expand talks to address nuclear and missile issues. The protests, which began on Dec. 28 amid deep economic distress and mounting public frustration with Tehran’s theocratic leadership, quickly spread across the country. Security forces have met demonstrators with lethal force, mass arrests, and a near-total internet blackout that has hampered independent reporting and documentation of abuses. Some reports indicate that up to 30,000 protesters may have been killed by Iranian forces in just two days. Regime officials put the death toll at 2,000-3,000.
Vance also highlighted the importance of preventing Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon, explaining that Tehran is the “world’s largest state sponsor of terrorism.”
“What happens when the same people who are shooting up a mall or driving airplanes into buildings have a nuclear weapon? That is unacceptable,” Vance said.
The vice president added that in the event that Iran obtains nuclear arms, other states such as Saudi Arabia will rapidly seek to secure their regimes though acquiring nuclear weapons themselves, triggering a new era of “nuclear proliferation on a global scale.”
“The biggest threat to security in the world is a lot of people having nuclear weapons,” he said.
Vance suggested that decreasing the overall number of nuclear arms in the world would help secure long-term peace for the global community.
Vance also pushed back on the chorus of critics within the Republican Party who claim the president has expended too much energy and time on foreign affairs, arguing Trump has “gotten a lot done” for the American people and most of his accomplishments are within the realm of domestic policy.
The vice president has come under scrutiny in recent months over his chummy relationship with controversial podcaster Tucker Carlson, a pundit who has repeatedly argued that the US should not attempt to dismantle Iran’s nuclear program.