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How Philip Roth invented a myth called ‘Philip Roth’
Steven J. Zipperstein set to work on his own biography of Philip Roth before anyone knew that Roth’s authorized biography would be pulled from shelves after accusations of sexual misconduct by its author, Blake Bailey. Zipperstein and I first spoke when he was wrapping up his draft. He was pondering Roth’s legacy. He wanted to discuss a Roth-like character I had put in my novel, How I Won a Nobel Prize, in part because he was surprised to discover a younger writer riffing on Roth so openly.
Zipperstein’s book, Philip Roth: Stung By Life, which is part of Yale’s Jewish Lives series, distinguishes itself with an approach that focuses more on Roth’s intellectual and artistic development than on a comprehensive reconstruction of his sexual history. Though Roth was devoutly anti-religious, Jewishness is a major theme that provides a surprisingly sturdy handle with which to grasp the family ties and cultural traditions that remained Roth’s persistent obsessions on the page, even as he resisted them in life.
Zipperstein, who is a professor of Jewish history and culture at Stanford, delivers an admiring, thorough, and swift account of an immensely single-minded writer’s unabating struggles with ambition, romance and the politics of his time. The book also has some fascinating scoops‚ major interviews and materials to which Zipperstein alone had access. We had a lot to talk about, and this interview has been compressed for length and clarity.
Julius Taranto: Start with the obvious: Why did you devote so much time and thought to a Philip Roth biography when there were rival biographical efforts that you could not have known would go up in flames?
Steven Zipperstein: Roth first reached out to me after I published my book, Rosenfeld’s Lives, and we were in touch intermittently for years. I was persuaded that there was really a book to be written, that I could actually do something new, when I discovered the Yeshiva University tape and came to realize the vast discrepancy between what Roth actually experienced and what he believed he experienced and then recorded on the page.
The Yeshiva University tape is one of one of several remarkable bits of journalism on your part, unraveling a remarkable bit of self-mythologizing on Roth’s part.
As part of its 75th anniversary celebration in 1962, Yeshiva University sponsored a panel about the ethnic responsibilities of a writer. Roth, who had at this point published only Goodbye, Columbus, was a featured speaker alongside Ralph Ellison. What Roth remembers — he devotes an entire chapter to this incident in his memoir — is that it was an inquisition, the audience hated him. As a result he decided he wasn’t going to write about Jews anymore and devoted three excruciating years to his next novel in which there are no Jews, and it’s a defining moment in his life.
I learned that the event was taped. Roth had threatened the university with a lawsuit if it was published or aired, but he agreed to give me access. By the time I acquired it, Roth was already dying in the hospital, so the last conversation I had with him was about this tape. It contradicts his memory in every conceivable way. The audience loved him and laughed at his jokes. Those who disliked him rushed to the stage once the program ended. And their criticism was all that he recalled.
I now see Roth’s purported rejection by the Jewish mainstream as a tale he invented (and earnestly believed) in order to justify his preexisting sense of rage and alienation.
Rage was a crucial factor in Roth’s fiction from the beginning. One of the people who contacted me, partly because of the implosion of Blake Bailey’s biography, and because of the apparent difference between my life and Blake’s, was Maxine Groffsky, who hadn’t spoken to anyone before about her relationship with Roth. They’d dated for years, and she was in many ways the model for Brenda Patimkin, the girlfriend in Goodbye, Columbus. But, at least as I was able to reconstruct it, Maxine was little like Brenda Patimkin.
She wasn’t rich or high status, and Roth was never especially subservient to her, the way Neil Klugman is to Brenda.
Still, in fiction Roth gives us Brenda Patimkin. That’s a projection of his rage and ambition.
Where do you think that came from?
I wrestled in the book not to be reductionist. I try to suggest that to understand Roth, you really need to understand the interplay between Roth and mother. Her fastidiousness was through the roof. Roth and his brother Sandy wouldn’t even use the bathrooms in friends’ houses because none were as clean as theirs. That’s a category of a very special kind. It’s a feature of Roth’s life from the outset to figure out what it means for him to really want to satisfy her and at the same time to be aware of what Benjamin Taylor calls his “inner anarchy.”
Mickey Sabbath – a rageful, overweight, unkempt, disgraced, perverted puppeteer – seems like the character through which Roth expressed his “inner anarchy” in its least-filtered form.
This man who engages in daily exercise, who’s trim, who’s incredibly disciplined in his work habits: Mickey Sabbath is what he imagines he is on the inside. In Sabbath’s Theater, he’s undressing himself. He’s allowing the reader to come closer to all that he fears he could be, the person who he knows exists and that he keeps hidden. It’s a book very much in conversation with Maletta Pfeiffer.
They had an on-and-off affair for more than twenty years, and she’s the model for Drenka in Sabbath’s Theater.
I think Maletta more than anyone else becomes privy to Roth’s secrets because he’s convinced that he’s met someone who has an all but identical attitude toward life, towards sensuality and sexuality, and who for the longest time he greatly admires.
But he’s wrong, isn’t he? You spent time with Maletta, and she showed you her diaries and her unsent emails to Roth — documents she never showed to any other biographer or journalist. I’m going to quote from your book, because I think this has real importance for how we interpret the portrait of mutual sexual ecstasy in Sabbath’s Theater. In one of her draft emails in 1995, Maletta wrote: “All the things you did to me. You made me go and talk to whores. . . . That never excited me. I just did it to please you. . . . I never liked it. All the things I did with you. I cannot even write about them. What you put in the book.” It’s quite dark to reconsider Sabbath’s Theater with the understanding that the model for Drenka was often not as enthusiastic as Roth believed her to be.
In contrast to the accusations against Blake Bailey, there’s no evidence of any coercive behavior on Roth’s part in his sexual life – but it’s clear that his sense of Maletta was, I think, not altogether accurate.
She’s romanticized, both in fiction and in Roth’s mind. This relates to a theme that I picked up on in your description of the arc of his career. Alongside his ambivalent relationship to Jewishness and family life, there is a parallel ambivalence between sentimentality and irony. Early in his career, he is so critical of Jewish sentimentalists like Leon Uris and Herman Wouk. But he has his own version of sentimentality emerge later in his career, particularly in American Pastoral and The Plot Against America. He becomes nostalgic for his parents’ world, for FDR, for the sense of moral security that he imagines they had.
He wrestled with nostalgia. He hated nostalgia, and he hated the strengths of family life. He is seeking his whole life to be extraordinary. But he also fantasizes, overtly in Portnoy’s Complaint, about the joy of not needing to strive, the joy of being mediocre. Roth deeply admires his father and wishes on some level that he was like him but also knows in every orb of his body that he wouldn’t actually want to be like him, committed and monogamous and dutiful. He writes from that ambivalence time and time again. And I think, as I suggest in the book, that’s why Zuckerman is the stand-in that stays with Roth, in a contrast to Kepesh, who is more one-sided and selfish and disposable.
I sensed your special affection for The Ghost Writer. Its portrait of writing within domesticity is extraordinarily well-rounded. Perhaps in response to criticism from Irving Howe, Roth maintains a balance in The Ghost Writer that he wasn’t trying to maintain in other works. And you argue, persuasively, that Lonoff is not really a portrait of Bernard Malamud, as is commonly thought, but is much more profoundly Roth’s projection of his own future.
Roth worked assiduously against balance and proportion in many of his other books. Zuckerman inhabits Roth’s ambivalence, and Lonoff represents a future that Roth doesn’t want. Roth fears obscurity. He doesn’t want a body like Lonoff’s, but he fears down deep that this actually might end up being his body. That Hope might end up being his wife. He’s able to face his own terror, in this book and others, in ways that I find extraordinary, especially since beyond his writing desk he doesn’t manage that nearly as successfully.
You surface Roth’s notion that politics is the great generalizer, and literature the great particularizer, and that at a fundamental level, they really cannot abide one another. “How can you be an artist and renounce the nuance? But how can you be a politician and allow the nuance?” Did Roth have political commitments?
He’s a political liberal in the Clintonesque sense, without using it as a curse word. But as is true for many aspects of his life, he’s willing to challenge his presuppositions. That’s something he certainly does in American Pastoral, which probably satisfied readers like Norman Podhoretz rather too much. He does something not dissimilar in The Counterlife with regard to Israel. His own inclinations are dovish. That book was all the more powerful for me for its capacity to portray with a degree of sympathy extreme Israeli figures that Roth politically deplored. One of the characteristics of Roth that I ended up admiring the most was the way in which he so often excoriated his own commitments, challenged them, and exposed them for their own weaknesses.
He tells Benjamin Taylor that he cares intensely about his “moral reputation.” That not something that one expects from the author of Portnoy’s Complaint or Sabbath’s Theater. How would you describe the values that Roth wanted to be associated with? It can’t be mainstream civility.
What he values above all is freedom as he understands it. And what he’s hoping a biographer will do is to portray him as someone who spends his life exploring the wages of freedom and the underbelly of unfreedom – hence his political commitment to liberalism, and hence his deploring ideologues who disparage freedom. He’s immensely preoccupied with his reputation, but he also takes incredible risks with it. He is insistent that those risks are unavoidable for a writer and that to avoid them means inevitable mediocrity.
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A gunman attacked a Michigan synagogue. Here’s what happens to the community next
On Thursday, a driver rammed his pickup truck into Temple Israel in West Bloomfield Hills, Mich., a large Reform Temple about 25 miles from downtown Detroit. Blessedly, there were no casualties besides the shooter, whom security guards rapidly engaged. One guard was injured. Aside from that, everyone who was inside the synagogue, including 140 children attending school there, was unscathed.
“There’s hopeful news and there’s sad news about the aftermaths of these shootings,” said Mark Oppenheimer, author of Squirrel Hill: The Tree of Life Synagogue Shooting and the Soul of a Neighborhood, a methodical, lyrical look at what happened to the Pittsburgh neighborhood shattered by the Oct. 27, 2018 shooting that left 11 people dead.
The hopeful news is that older, established Jewish communities can rely on close, long-established bonds within and outside the community to get them through.
The sad news is that people unaffected by the shooting tend to move on and forget.
“So whereas this will haunt the Jewish community for years,” Oppenheimer told me in a phone interview, “most people outside the Jewish community will quickly move on to whatever the next horrible incident is.”
What happens next
Authorities have not confirmed the attacker’s motive, although he has been identified as a Michigan man who was born in Lebanon. But among all the unknowns, we do know a few things for certain.
We know that a great tragedy was averted due to the guards’ bravery and expertise, and due to the planning and preparation of synagogue leadership.
We know such attacks have gone from being extremely rare in the United States, to being more frequent.
And we know that what happens now, in the aftermath, matters a great deal.
That’s why, in writing about the worst mass shooting in American Jewish history, Oppenheimer spent most of his time researching what came after the atrocity.
“When the cameras and the police tape were gone, what stayed behind?”Oppenheimer, who teaches at Washington University’s John C. Danforth Center on Religion and Politics, wrote in the book’s introduction.
The power of connection
Both the Tree of Life synagogue and Temple Israel are older, deeply entrenched congregations with close ties to a number of local communities — Jewish and non-Jewish alike.
In one chapter of Squirrel Hill titled, simply, “Gentiles,” Oppenheimer chronicles how non-Jews came to the aid of the stricken congregation, including clergy, politicians and neighbors.
Emblematic of that was the capacity crowd of 2,500 people that came together at Soldiers and Sailors auditorium on the one-year anniversary of the shooting, where law enforcement, politicians and Christian, Muslim and Jewish clergy all spoke.
“There are usually people in government, in community organizations, in neighborhood organizations, who reach out, who want the Jews to know that they’re not alone,” said Oppenheimer.
Evidence of such connection was already on show in Michigan on Thursday. One reporter interviewed a woman praying outside the synagogue, who said, through tears, that the “Holy Spirit” had told her to turn her car around once she saw police cars racing past her to the scene, and go lend support.
In Pittsburgh, the 2018 shooting was also a time for the Jewish community itself to come together.
Squirrel Hill’s close-knit Jewish community crossed denominational divides to show support. An Orthodox rabbi organized a spreadsheet to manage the 24-hour vigils Jewish law prescribes over the bodies of the dead prior to burial.
“In Squirrel Hill, one of the nice things is there is a lot of community and solidarity across denominational lines and levels of observance,” said Oppenheimer, “and that’s pretty rare in American Judaism. It’ll be interesting to see how that plays out in Detroit.”
A new reality
Iin recent years, the need for solidarity and resilience in the face of such attacks has become, unfortunately, more apparent.
When Oppenheimer wrote his book, he was able to state the shooting was “a unique event” in American history. It’s true that until the Tree of Life massacre, antisemitic violence had claimed just 26 lives in U.S. history. The U.S., more than any Western country, and far more than Israel itself, had truly been a safe haven for Jews.
Since Squirrel Hill, six more people have died in four attacks. The previously well-earned sense of safety has been shattered.
“While the odds that any given Jew will be attacked remain quite low, it is obviously pretty terrifying,” said Oppenheimer.
Some critics of the national focus that fell on Squirrel Hill after the Tree of Life shooting argued that the tragedy got far more attention than similar mass shootings that had befallen non-Jewish communities.
But it’s the very rarity of these attacks that makes them so shocking and, at least for American Jews, so memorable.
In this new normal, it’s even more important for Jews to form strong, mutually supportive bonds among themselves, and with others.
And the world moves on
Those bonds are especially crucial because while the victims of violence don’t soon forget and move on, the world does.
“It’s a short burst of solidarity, and then people leave. Understandably so,” Oppenheimer said.
I suspect that even though prayers of gratitude and deliverance will echo through the sanctuaries of Detroit — and in Jewish hearts everywhere — the attack will haunt its intended victims long after the police tape comes down.
What will make the difference in how the community faces those fears and moves forward is the amount of support it receives from those outside it. If the broader Bloomfield and Detroit community refuses to forget this awful incident, it will change the course of healing.
I asked Oppenheimer what lesson he learned from the Tree of Life aftermath could apply to Temple Israel.
“In Pittsburgh, there was a long history of people showing up for each other,” he said Oppenheimer. “The relationships, or lack of relationships, that exist become more noticeable when something goes wrong.”
“Where there are strong ties before a shooting, there are strong ties afterwards.”
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Political standoff causing DHS shutdown delays security grants for synagogues
(JTA) — A shutdown at the Department of Homeland Security since Feb. 14 is halting the review of millions of dollars in security funding for nonprofits, leaving Jewish institutions and other vulnerable groups in limbo at a moment of heightened concern about antisemitic threats.
The most recent threat came Thursday when an armed assailant rammed his vehicle into a large synagogue in suburban Detroit, where trained security forces shot at him and he was killed before he could injure anyone.
The closure stems from a political standoff over immigration enforcement: Senate Democrats are refusing to fund DHS unless the bill includes new oversight and limits on ICE operations, while Republicans and the Trump administration insist on passing funding without those changes. The dispute intensified after the killings of U.S. citizens during recent immigration operations.
Applications for the federal Nonprofit Security Grant Program, which helps synagogues, schools and community centers pay for security guards, cameras, reinforced doors and other protections were due Feb. 1 But because the program is administered through the Federal Emergency Management Agency, a component of DHS, the ongoing shutdown has frozen the process before applications could be reviewed. An effort to end the shutdown failed in the Senate on Thursday.
That means organizations that spent months preparing proposals are now waiting indefinitely to learn whether they will receive funding, at a time of rising anxiety and threats.
The grant program has become a cornerstone of security planning for Jewish institutions across the United States, especially in the wake of sometimes deadly attacks. Demand for the grants has surged in recent years as antisemitic incidents have climbed and security costs have soared.
According to data from the Anti-Defamation League, antisemitic incidents in the United States have reached historic highs in recent years, with Jewish institutions frequently targeted with threats, vandalism and harassment. Community leaders say the uncertainty surrounding the grants is arriving at precisely the wrong moment.
The NSGP is designed to distribute hundreds of millions of dollars annually to nonprofits considered at high risk of attack. Organizations submit detailed applications outlining their vulnerabilities and the security improvements they hope to fund, which FEMA then reviews and awards through state agencies.
But during a federal shutdown, most DHS personnel responsible for reviewing those applications are furloughed. As a result, the process has effectively stalled.
For many nonprofits, the delay creates practical and financial uncertainty. Security upgrades such as surveillance systems, bollards, access-control systems and trained guards often depend on the grants, and institutions typically plan their budgets around the expectation of federal support.
Jewish communal security groups say the program has been one of the most successful federal efforts to help protect religious institutions. Michael Masters, CEO of the Secure Community Network, a Jewish security nonprofit, said Jewish organizations rely on federal funding to cover essential security needs, saying that it was “a challenge” that DHS was currently not processing security grant applications.
“There’s no other faith-based community in the United States that needs to spend $760 million a year, at a minimum, on security that we do,” Masters said. “That’s a reality of the threat environment that we have to adapt to, that we have adapted to.”
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A gunman rammed a Michigan synagogue. Its security preparations may have saved lives.
(JTA) — The suspected assailant, armed with rifles and smoke bombs, who rammed into Temple Israel on Thursday encountered a synagogue that was well prepared for just such an attack.
He hit and injured the congregation’s security director with his car as he plowed through the synagogue’s doors and drove down a hallway. But he didn’t manage to harm anyone else as he was found dead after trained and armed security guards shot at him
And because the rest of the staff knew exactly how to respond to an active shooter threat.
“We always worry that you can plan and plan and plan and practice and practice, and it won’t matter, because it will be something else, but it feels like a miracle that everything worked the way it was supposed to, that our team was so incredibly brave, local law enforcement’s been amazing, and that everybody’s OK,” Rabbi Jen Lader of Temple Israel told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
Oakland County Sheriff Michael Bouchard and West Bloomfield County Police Chief Dale Young also immediately praised the security response in the wake of the attack.
“I am deeply proud of the response, not only from the security that was on site, but also of all the police officers and the firefighters that are here right now, we train on active shooter events a lot,” Young said during a press conference outside the synagogue on Thursday. “I think that training certainly helped to mitigate what happened here today.”
Indeed, it was a situation that Jewish institutions across the United States have trained for, as antisemitism and threats of violence have ticked up in recent years, especially following the 2018 synagogue shooting in Pittsburgh that killed 11 Jews during Shabbat services. The rabbi of a synagogue in Colleyville, Texas, credited a security training with enabling him to respond when a man took him and three congregations hostage in 2022.
“Everybody flees danger, and our team went straight toward it, and they were the ones who neutralized the terrorist and saved everybody,” said Lader. “And our teachers followed, you know, to the absolute letter, our active shooter training and lockdown procedures, and saved every kid.”
Beyond the synagogue’s full-time director of security, Lader said Temple Israel also has a full team of armed security guards on the premises at all times as well as a remote security system that is able to secure different areas of the building during threats.
In late January, FBI agents also visited Temple Israel to train clergy and staff about how to respond to an active shooter.
According to a social media post from FBI Detroit, the Active Shooter Attack Prevention and Preparedness course “combines lessons learned from years of research and employs scenario-based exercises to help participants practice the decision-making process of the Run, Hide, Fight principles and take necessary actions for survival.”
Michael Masters, the national director and CEO of the Secure Community Network, an organization that coordinates security for Jewish institutions nationwide, said that the outcomes of the attack Thursday reflected the preparedness of Temple Israel.
“Investing in security is an investment, it’s a down payment on the Jewish future,” said Masters. “The community that made up the synagogue, the larger Detroit Jewish community, has been making that investment for years and years, and today, that investment paid off and lives [were] saved.”
Among the security measures that Masters said his organization recommended were “bollards or fences or natural obstructions” to the building, controlling access to the facility through reinforced doors or windows and having a security presence.
“What we hope this reaffirms is that security needs to be an ongoing investment in order to allow Jewish life, faith based life, to thrive,” said Masters. “And very much that investment can result, and did result, in Jewish lives being saved, and so we all need to recognize that and commit ourselves as members of the community at every level to be a part of making that investment at whatever level we can.”
In the wake of the fatal shooting of two Israeli embassy staffers in Washington D.C. in June, the synagogue hosted a town hall on hate crimes and extremism.
Among the speakers at the town hall was Noah Arbit, a lifelong congregant of Temple Israel who represents West Bloomfield in the Michigan House of Representatives. Arbit said in an interview on Thursday that after he first learned of the attack while working on the state house floor, he immediately began to cry and raced down to his home synagogue.
“I campaigned on taking on hate crimes,” said Arbit. “To be working on these issues, and then to see it come home to roost in my own community, in my own synagogue, in my hometown that I represent is, frankly, just like my worst nightmare.”
While Arbit praised the response by security and law enforcement as the attack unfolded, he said he was “outraged and enraged and deeply pained that it was necessary in the first place.”
“Jewish communities across the country and world have watched, you know, for the past decade, as our institutions have congealed into fortresses,” he said. “We are now forced to live behind, basically, you know, militarized, institutionally securitized institutions, and what a shame that is. It’s not just a shame, It’s unfathomable, it’s unforgivable.”
For Rabbi Mark Miller of Temple Beth El, another Reform synagogue a 20-minute drive away in Bloomfield Hills, the attack on Temple Israel served as a stark reminder of why security infrastructure was essential for Jewish institutions.
“This is one of those moments when, for years and years, we have bemoaned that we have to put so much time and energy into security for our institutions,” said Miller. “And this is one of those days that reminds us that we don’t have a choice.”
Miller’s synagogue had a recent security crisis of its own, when a man drove through its parking lot in December 2022 and shouted antisemitic threats as parents walked their preschoolers into the building. The assailant, Hassan Chokr, was sentenced to 34 months in prison in September for illegally possessing multiple firearms inside a gun store after leaving the synagogue.
“It’s a terrifying day, obviously for a lot of people, especially for parents with their kids at not only Temple Israel but at ours and other temples and Jewish institutions,” Miller said.
Lader said that among her congregants, two competing sentiments had jumped out: Those who “never, in a million years, in our heart of hearts, thought it was ever going to happen to us” and others who “knew it was only a matter of time before it knocked on our door.”
But another feeling was even stronger, she said.
“I think the overarching sentiment, and the one that I want to make sure gets out there, is our absolute gratitude to our internal teams, our amazing staff, local law enforcement and our teachers for really, like, a building full of absolute heroes, who were able to keep us safe,” Lader said.
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