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John Irving always felt like an outsider — is that all he thinks there is to Jewishness?
By John Irving
Simon & Schuster, 432 pages, $30
In The Cider House Rules, John Irving opens with a urological concern.
The nurses in the boys’ division of the St. Cloud Orphanage spend their new arrivals’ early days “checking that their little penises were healing from their obligatory circumcisions.”
Decades later, in Queen Esther, a muddled sequel of sorts, about a New England family and their ill-at-ease scion’s ambivalent Jewish identity, Irving considers the procedure as a sign of the covenant.
Esther Nacht, an orphan from that same institution — self-described as “a Viennese-born Jew who grew up in an orphanage in Maine, her mother murdered by anti-semites in Portland!” — becomes uniquely invested in what to do with the foreskin of her soon-to-be-born son.
It’s not her decision alone to make. Esther is only the surrogate mother, carrying the boy for Honor Winslow, the New Hampshire girl whose parents took Esther from the orphanage in the 1920s to be her au pair. Honor and Esther agree on one matter: The boy, Jimmy — who will be circumcised but will not have a bris — won’t be brought up Jewish, “for his own sake.”
Esther, for her part, has no choice. Her mother insisted she know about her Jewishness, and by dint of her murder at the hands of unclearly-motivated antisemites, unwittingly entrusted that education to the clueless Dr. Larch and his staff at St. Cloud. Irving, whose preoccupation with circumcision may betray him as a closet intactivist, seems to have a narrow and at times troubling idea of what it means to live Jewishly.
While Irving’s body of work is decidedly goyische, Jews have appeared sporadically. A mother in A Prayer for Owen Meany cries antisemitism over the title character’s rudeness (he didn’t know she was Jewish). Billy Abbott, in 2012’s In One Person, sides with Shylock while reading Merchant of Venice.
Irving makes no bones about being on the side of the oppressed — even vengeful — Jew. As he said in a 2024 interview with The Times of Israel, “I’m not Jewish, but I’ve always been pro-Israel, and I’ve always been pro-Jewish.” This novel, if coming from a left flank, with a stridently pro-choice and anti-religion cast of characters, may be his version of Project Esther.
The author’s identification is embodied here by Esther’s biological son Jimmy Winslow. Through his adoptive family he’s a faculty brat at Penacook Academy in New Hampshire, Irving’s latest stand-in for Phillips Exeter, where his stepfather was a teacher, and where he nursed a certain alienation.
“I always felt that I didn’t belong there; I always felt like a foreigner,” Irving told The Times, and so he connected with Jewish wrestling teammates. Throughout the book Jimmy is stuck with an unshakable “belief in his intrinsic foreignness.” (He later becomes an author who writes a novel called The Doctor’s Rules, about the orphanage at St. Cloud, which seems rather familiar.)
That Irving is not Jewish isn’t a problem, given Jimmy isn’t really either, beyond the fact of his biological parents, the tall, elusive Esther and a petite wrestler (always with the wrestling, and the nebulous paternity) named Moshe Kleinberg — aka “Moses Little Mountain.” Like Irving, he’s an “ally,” sticking up for a teammate named Jonah Feldstein (incidentally the given name of Superbad star Jonah Hill) roughed up by antisemitic toughs named Marcel and Marceau (ironically the stage name of a Jewish mime).
For the purposes of this plot, which mostly follows Jimmy, Jewishness is but a mark of difference, and a distinction without much of one. Except for fear.
“It’s too late for you to be Jewish — you didn’t grow up afraid,” Esther tells Jimmy, in one of her laconic letters.
Esther, with no real Jewish education, nonetheless had a Jewish calling, first going to Vienna in the lead-up to World War II, where she served as a courier to exiled Austrian Jews in Czechoslovakia. She later makes aliyah (Irving helpfully translates this and other Hebrew terms to English) and appears to work for the Haganah and later Mossad in some unknown capacity. Esther’s Jewish journey is one her adoptive family doesn’t feel comfortable tackling, and Irving doesn’t either, so we mostly hear the details in passing via the mailbox.
The book is both wildly preoccupied by Jewishness and antisemitism and completely uncomfortable with illustrating how either functions beyond some rote, inelegantly conveyed history lessons on Mandatory Palestine. It even recuses itself by disappearing Esther as she pursues her goal to be the best Jew possible, which makes you wonder why any of the Jewish meshugas is even there in the first place.
When, in the final stretch, the plot places an adult Jimmy in Jerusalem amid the Lebanese Civil War two characters, who seem sympathetic at first, collapse his empathy toward Palestinians by affirming the ugliest slander imaginable: The Arab population wants to wipe out all Jews, and indoctrinate their children to think the same.
“This is what Esther was protecting him from,” Jimmy concludes, “the eternal conflict, the everlasting hatred.”
To Irving, the Jewish condition is being hated, and not much else. It’s a relief when he drops this theme, for about half the novel, to recount a zany sex plot in Vienna (it always waits for Irving’s characters) where Jimmy befriends a German Shepherd named “Hard Rain” (for the Dylan song), and plots to “knock up” the lesbian partner of his roommate to dodge the draft in Vietnam.
Somewhere inside here is a reflection of the predicament of the biblical Queen Esther, whose tale provides an epigraph (“For we are sold, I and my people, to be destroyed, to be slain, and to perish”).
Like Jimmy, Esther had a Jewishness she had to suppress in order to function as a secret advocate for her people. Only Jimmy is told to ignore his heritage — not just the Jewish parts, but the Mayflower pedigree of his adoptive family. That this may come as a loss is dutifully acknowledged, but a bit beside the point.
With regard to Esther herself, Irving’s read of the Megillah is misguided, opting to see her namesake as “wreaking vengeance on Haman.” The Winslows call her an “Old Testament girl,” and Irving seems to think most of that book boils down to “kill-or-be-killed” talion law.
Many critiques I can level at the novel are already voiced within it.
At various points the book points to Esther’s “vagueness” saying it’s as if she “lived in the background, like peripheral characters in a novel” Later Jimmy states there is “something more mythical than actual about Esther. Like a literary character,” with the mysterious loss of her arm seeming more “symbolic than real.” Pretty much. Pointing this out doesn’t make up for her deficiencies as a character. The fact that her name means “hidden” is hardly an excuse for obscuring nearly everything about her.
Where the Book of Esther is lean, cogent and contains nothing extraneous, Queen Esther is flabby and unfocused. Jimmy’s grandfather, Thomas, an English teacher with a love for Victorian fiction, insists “real life isn’t plotted like a novel.” This novel isn’t either.
But Thomas, a Boston Brahmin just out of place in smalltown New Hampshire, also offers some sage words when it comes to Esther. Whenever the family’s concerned for her undefined escapades in Europe or the new State of Israel, he reminds them “Jewish business is her business, not ours.”
If only Irving was canny enough to keep out of it too.
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This isn’t Mark Ruffalo’s first antisemitism controversy
Mark Ruffalo is in the spotlight after facing accusations of antisemitism for his criticism of the Ellison family — but this isn’t the first time the actor has been caught in controversy on this topic.
Last Friday, the actor connected the merger of David Ellison’s Paramount with Warner Bros. Discovery to Israel’s war with Hamas. He called Larry Ellison an “oligarch” due to his financial backing of his son David’s merger using wealth earned from his time at Oracle, which created technology used by the Israeli military. His statements immediately drew criticism, with Paramount leaders accusing Ruffalo of invoking antisemitic tropes.
Ruffalo, a four-time Academy Awards nominee best known for playing the Hulk in Marvel movies, has long been an outspoken advocate for progressive causes — including the Palestinian one.
In 2014, Ruffalo made his first public statements about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, posting criticisms of Israel’s Operation Protective Edge military operation against Hamas.
He criticized Israel for striking Gaza’s el-Wafa hospital, writing that, “Sorry, I thought blowing up Hospitals [sic] was something that all human beings could agree was off limits.”
Ruffalo also questioned the claim that Hamas used civilians as “human shields.”
“Do you honestly think these people, these fellow human beings, would use their own children as shields?” he wrote. “Use your heart.”
Around the same time, Ruffalo also disputed whether Hamas had actually kidnapped three Israeli teenagers, one of the incidents that sparked the 2014 hostilities — an incident that the terrorist group later admitted to.
Ruffalo received criticism for his posts, but stood by his perspective. “Empathizing w/ Gaza does NOT make me anti-Semitic, nor pro-Hamas or anti-Israel,” he wrote in 2014. “It makes me human.”
As clashes between Israel and Hamas sprouted up again in 2021, Ruffalo once again took to Twitter to denounce Israel, likening the situation to South Africa and calling “for sanctions to free Palestinians.”
Soon after, Ruffalo wrote another tweet apologizing for his rhetoric.
“I have reflected & wanted to apologize for posts during the recent Israel/Hamas fighting that suggested Israel is committing ‘genocide,’” he wrote. “It’s not accurate, it’s inflammatory, disrespectful & is being used to justify antisemitism here & abroad. Now is the time to avoid hyperbole.”
Following the Hamas-led Oct. 7 attack in 2023 and Israel’s military response, Ruffalo returned to pro-Palestinian activism. Less than two weeks after the attack, on Oct. 20, Ruffalo — along with more than 50 others creatives through the organization Artists for Ceasefire — sent a letter to President Joe Biden demanding an immediate ceasefire in Gaza. At the following Academy awards, Ruffalo wore a pin from the organization.
In Sept. 2025, Ruffalo, and along with more than 5,500 others in the film industry, signed a letter pledging to boycott “Israeli film institutions” that they believed were “implicated in genocide and apartheid against the Palestinian people.”
Ruffalo has publicly aligned himself with the Boycott Divest Sanction (BDS) movement, calling to “boycott, divest, sanction and prosecute” Israel, on a podcast with Mehdi Hasan. During the same interview, he said that he has stopped talking to former friends who don’t agree with his perspective on the issue.
“I can’t talk to them anymore,” he said. “They’re either trying to convince me that the Palestinian people are all terrorists and they all deserve to die, or in the same breath will tell me that they’re actually human shields, and they deserve to die because they’re human shields.”
Now, after making statements connecting the Paramount-Discovery merger to Israeli military technology, Ruffalo has been accused of antisemitism by numerous Jewish organizations including the Anti-Defamation League and the Simon Weisenthal Center.
The actor has now taken to social media to denounce the accusations of antisemitism, calling the accusation “appalling and fundamentally dishonest,” and saying that criticizing “the actions of the Israeli prime minister, a military technology contract, or the executives who supply it is not the same as criticising Jewish people.”
He added, “Everything I know about acting, activism, and humanism has been profoundly shaped by the Jewish friends, colleagues, and loved ones who have been integral and family throughout every point of my life.”
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American synagogues are spending more than ever on security. How much is enough?
At Temple Israel in Bloomfield, Michigan, which was attacked in March by a gunman, getting ready for the High Holidays this year means more than preparing for crowds of worshippers.
The synagogue is spending millions of dollars on security upgrades, including a new gatehouse, artificial intelligence technology and physical and ballistic hardening of its building.
“There are major changes coming,” Rabbi Josh Bennett of Temple Israel said in an interview. “I think that extends then to many of the other places of worship in town, and then, by extension, the entire Jewish community around the country.”
But as congregations install barriers, hire guards and tighten access to their buildings, Jewish leaders are struggling to balance budgets and keep their synagogues welcoming.
Bennett fears fortressing the Jewish community through ever-expanding security upgrades is “unsustainable at all levels,” from the emotional to the financial.
The Secure Community Network, a Jewish security organization that provides threat intelligence and safety training to Jewish institutions across the country, told the Forward that the American Jewish community now spends between $765 million and $1 billion annually on security and safety.
CEO Michael G. Masters said that figure is dramatically higher than it was several years ago, when it was the exception, rather than the rule, for a Jewish institution to have a security plan, let alone layers of cameras, guards, and coordination with law enforcement.
The spending reflects what Mitchell Silber, CEO of the Community Security Initiative, a New York-focused Jewish counterterrorism and security organization, described as “the most complicated threat picture that the Jewish community in the United States has ever faced.”
According to the FBI, Jews were the victims of nearly two-thirds of religion-based hate crimes in the United States in 2025. And these days, Silber’s analysts are tracking threats from white supremacists and neo-Nazis, Islamist extremists and actors inspired by or connected to Iran and Hezbollah, and left-wing violence connected to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
“That’s taking a tremendous toll just financially on our Jewish institutions,” Silber said.
The growing costs have pushed Temple Israel to lobby Congress in support of the bipartisan Jewish American Security Act, which would increase federal funding available to protect Jewish institutions. Last week, members of Congress, including the bill’s co-sponsor, Rep. John James of Michigan, visited the Temple to see the security updates.
When congregants help screen for danger
But as congregations pour money into keeping potential attackers out, another question looms: At what point does protecting a synagogue begin to change the experience for those coming in?
“The more you build, there’s, I think, an inverse proportion to how safe people will actually feel when they’re coming in,” said Bennett, whose congregants have been emotionally rattled since the March attack, during which a gunman rammed a truck loaded with gasoline and fireworks into the synagogue. “Nobody wants to walk into a building where you walk by loaded semi-automatic machine guns.”
A person arriving at a synagogue for the first time could have harmful intentions. They could also be new to town, exploring Judaism, or simply looking for a place to spend Shabbat. Distinguishing between those is an important challenge.
Unlike an outside guard, a longtime congregant may know who normally attends services, which unfamiliar face is expected for a wedding or bar mitzvah, and when someone’s behavior genuinely seems out of place. That’s why organizations like SCN and the Community Security Service train community members to serve as additional protection at their own institutions.
In 2026 alone, SCN has conducted close to 1,000 in-person safety trainings, reaching roughly 25,000 people. For the High Holidays, they are offering Zoom Webinars for Jewish institutions across the country, as synagogue-goers who ordinarily recognize most people walking through their doors may suddenly welcome hundreds of unfamiliar worshippers.
Preparation was put to the test at Central Synagogue in Manhattan last Friday, when a man stormed the temple, punched a congregant, and headbutted and spat on a security guard while directing a racial slur at him.
Silber described the response as a “tactical success.”
“Their security team had drilled. Their clergy and staff had drilled. And when the moment came, within less than 60 seconds, they had this individual moved outside of the sanctuary.”
At Temple Israel, the congregation has been fundraising specifically for security. After the March attack, Bennett said, some congregants would like to see “a moat and a full army around our buildings.”
He understands the impulse. But he worries there may be no end to what a synagogue can spend in pursuit of safety.
“How do you do this with the knowledge that it’s financially unsustainable?” Bennett said. “This is not the way we should be spending dollars.”
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The far right is more dangerous to Jews than the far left. A historian explains why.
When Jewish leaders speak out these days, it’s often to blast the anti-Israel actions of one Democratic Socialists of America politician or another. Given all the attention — and the millions of dollars raised within the Jewish community to help defeat these candidates — you’d think the greatest existential threat to American Jews was coming from the left.
But a new book by historian Steven Ross is here to tell you: You’d be mistaken.
“What you’ve seen seeping in on the far left is more anti-Israel and some antisemitism,” Ross told me in a phone interview. “But here’s the thing: the left has never called for death to people, the right has.”
Right-wing extremist groups have spent 80 years calling for the death and deportation of Jews and minorities — and sometimes acting upon those calls. The far left, whatever its failures on antisemitism, has not. And unlike in previous years, the far right today has found the two things it lacked: a single leader to unite behind, and a technology to reach millions.
In The Secret War Against Hate: American Resistance to Antisemitism and White Supremacy, Ross, a professor of history at University of Southern California, tracks the continuous, noxious activity of hate groups in the United States from the end of World War II to the present day — and the brave and secretive men and women who sought to thwart them.
The book reads like a great suspense novel, except, unfortunately, it’s nonfiction. And its conclusion — spoiler alert — is that the threat is only growing more dangerous.
Uncannily, in his research, Ross found that Jewish leaders predicted as much — in 1945.
Even before the Allies declared victory in Europe, leaders of the Anti-Defamation League, American Jewish Committee and the Anti-Nazi League, who had launched undercover operations to infiltrate and disrupt hate groups, had come to a disturbing conclusion. They could defeat any hate group, even the Ku Klux Klan, unless the disparate groups could one day “communicate on an instantaneous basis,” and unless the far right figured out a way to make it into one of the two mainstream political parties.
“Here we are,” Ross said. “Everything has come true.” Social media has enabled hate groups to communicate and organize at scale, and President Donald Trump’s pardon of the Jan. 6 rioters — direct ideological descendants of the postwar far right, Ross says — was but one example of the Republican flirtation with extremist and violent groups.
Descendants of the ‘Betrayed Generation’
In the early 1940s, Jewish leaders also predicted that when the war ended, antisemitism and racism would increase — despite Americans having just fought a savage battle against prejudice and fascism.
The Greatest Generation also birthed what Ross calls “the Betrayed Generation,” men and women who returned to a changed America in which liberals, Blacks and Jews were mobilizing and upwardly mobile.
“The Founding Fathers, they insisted, had created a nation based on white Christian rule and they would not allow traitors or people of color to change that,” Ross writes.
Groups like the American Nazi Party, the Columbians and the National States Rights Party warned that Jews were behind “race suicide,” plotting to replace white people with non-white immigrants. They accused Jews of being secret Communists and undermining the cause of “America First.”
“I will solve the Jewish problem once and for all,” James Madole, founder of the fascist National Renaissance Party, told a boisterous rally in Manhattan’s Yorkville neighborhood in February 1953. “I will finish the job that Hitler started.”
During this period, there were an estimated 3,114 right-wing organizations and periodicals that reached a combined membership of over 10 million Americans, says Ross.
The groups carried out a series of bombings against synagogues and Black churches that were, Ross writes, “unrelenting, unpredictable, and unnerving.”
How to fight back
J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI, which should have been tracking these groups, was far more concerned with persecuting potential communists. So the ADL, AJC and the ANL fielded undercover agents to infiltrate and disrupt these groups, often at the risk of their lives.
One of them, a 19-year-old Columbia University student named William Goring, rose to the head of the National Renaissance Party’s leadership. In a memo to his handlers, Goring described the far-right members he encountered as “the failures, the lonely,” who feel “abandoned by their government and gain a strong internal feeling of camaraderie” from the far-right parties.
“To ease their lack of self-respect they make up excuses and find scapegoats. Some fix upon the Jews, others on the Blacks,” Goring wrote.
By the 1970s, this spy network as well as internal strife had weakened these hate groups, their memberships dwindling to hundreds.
Jewish groups “thought they had won the battle against hate,” wrote Ross, and turned their attention to the causes of civil rights and Israel.
But the ideology and organizations festered and regrouped, manifesting in the anti-government militia movement, the white supremacist march in Charlottesville and the Jan. 6 riots. Between 2008 and 2016, the number of militia and anti-government groups rose to 1,400.
Media personalities with millions of followers, like Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens, push warnings against shadowy Jewish influence and the “great replacement theory,” the new term for “race suicide.”
The bombings that wracked Jewish communities in the postwar period have declined, Ross acknowledged. What’s replaced them is a constant stream of hate pushed into people’s social media feeds. Social media has made it harder to infiltrate and disrupt hate networks, while making it easier to constantly find new recruits.
“You don’t have to bodily harm someone,” he said. “Creating a life where they’re afraid, whether it’s Muslim, Jew, immigrant — that’s terrorism, that’s domestic terrorism.”
Meanwhile, Trump and others in his administration openly engage with Holocaust deniers and antisemites. In Florida’s Republican primary races earlier this month, two candidates, Dan Bilzerian and Jake Lang, spouted raw antisemitism. Bilzerian, who lost to a Jewish congressman, had asked his 30 million online followers if Hitler “was a good person.”
Ross, whose father survived the Warsaw Ghetto and Dachau and whose mother survived Auschwitz, said he believes the answer is better education, but that’s “long term.”
I asked him what the short-term solution is.
“Take two people to the polls,” he said. “Get two people in their young 20s who aren’t used to voting, and get them out to the polls. That will change things right now.”
Bilzerian lost badly, but he’s not going away, and neither is the ability to infect minds and harvest hate. The question isn’t whether the far right is more dangerous — Ross has answered that. It’s whether we’re paying attention.
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