It was a scandal right out of a Philip Roth novel: Days after the publication in 2021 of his long-awaited biography of Roth, author Blake Bailey was credibly accused of sexual misconduct. The publisher pulled the book, pulping all the copies. 

Even before the uproar, many younger readers lumped Roth among the “great white males” of mid-20th-century literature, and throughout his career Roth was dogged by accusations that he was a misogynist, both in his fiction and his private life. The scandal seemed to confirm these accusations by proxy, conflating the author and his biographer. 

Stanford historian Steven J. Zipperstein had already begun his own biography of Roth before the author died in 2018 and while Bailey’s book was under contract. “Philip Roth: Stung by Life,” part of Yale University Press’s “Jewish Lives” series, isn’t meant as a corrective to Bailey’s book or the fallout. But it does argue why Roth remains relevant and vital, especially to current Jewish discourse.

Writes Zipperstein: “He would probe nearly every aspect of contemporary Jewish life: the passions of Jewish childhood, the pleasures and anguish of postwar Jewish suburbia, Israel, diaspora, the Holocaust, circumcision, the interplay between the nice Jewish boy and the turbulent one deep inside.”

Zipperstein is the Daniel E. Koshland Professor in Jewish Culture and History at Stanford University, whose previous books include “Pogrom: Kishinev and the Tilt of History.” He first met Roth when he invited the author to speak to his colleagues and graduate students at Stanford. Roth showed up with a blonde woman in a silky blouse — not his wife at the time, actress Claire Bloom — and proceeded to spend the session flirting with her. His students were not amused.

They met again over the years under less antic circumstances and Roth gave his blessing to Zipperstein’s project. “We carried on a series of conversations, and he introduced me to his loyal entourage, and made it clear to them that they could share things with me that they otherwise might not have shared,” Zipperstein told me. 

In our conversation, held over Zoom this week, Zipperstein and I spoke about how Roth scandalized the Jewish world with early works like “Goodbye, Columbus” and “Portnoy’s Complaint,” how he both resented and cherished his Jewish readers, and why so much of his prodigious output still holds up. 

The interview was edited for length and clarity. 

How did you come to write a biography of Philip Roth? He already had an authorized biographer, so what did you hope to bring to your book?

I’d met Roth years ago at Stanford — there’s a brief mention of it in the book. After I finished “Pogrom” there was this long pause before it came out [in 2018], and I started wondering what I might do next. I’d helped found the “Jewish Lives” series, and Roth seemed a pretty good fit.

But honestly, he’d been in my head long before that. I first read him in Partisan Review — a chapter from “Portnoy’s Complaint” called “Whacking Off” — just before I went off to the Chicago yeshiva. I was raised in an Orthodox family, wrestling with whether I could stay in that world. And Roth’s voice — it stuck with me. Not because of the masturbation, but because Portnoy has all this freedom and he’s miserable. That hit home. It told me that leaving the world I was raised in wasn’t going to be simple, and that freedom wouldn’t necessarily make me happy. That realization — about freedom and its discontents — has stayed with me my whole life as a historian.

Then, years later, I came across the recording of the Yeshiva University event in 1962 — the one Roth described as a kind of Spinoza-like excommunication. The tape told a completely different story. That was the moment I thought: there’s a book here, about the distance between Roth’s memory and reality.

Let’s talk about that Yeshiva University event. Roth at the time was the young author of “Goodbye, Columbus,” which includes stories that some rabbis and others in the Jewish community said portrayed Jews in a negative light. Roth was invited to sit on a panel with Ralph Ellison and an Italian-American author to talk about “minority writers,” and Roth would later insist that the audience “hated” him. What did you find when you listened to the recording?

Well, Roth remembered it as this traumatic scene — the audience attacking him, shouting him down. But on the tape, the audience loves him! They’re laughing, applauding. The only confrontation comes from a few guys who come up to the stage afterward to argue.

What interested me wasn’t just that Roth misremembered it — it’s how he misremembered it. It tells you something about how he experienced the world. The people who criticize him are the ones who loom largest. That was revealing to me, both as a biographer and as someone who’s taught for decades. The people who dislike you — they’re the ones you remember.

But there is an almost literary bookend to that event: In 2014, the Jewish Theological Seminary awarded Roth an honorary doctorate. How did he react to that?

He was stunned! It was a casual decision by the institution, but a momentous decision as Philip saw it. He said in his speech, “This is the first time I’ve been applauded by Jews since my bar mitzvah.” He meant it sincerely.

Roth wasn’t a historian; he was a novelist. He remembered as he felt, not as it happened. My job was to separate those two things, not to punish him for it, but to understand the gap.

Roth once said, “The epithet ‘American Jewish writer’ has no meaning for me. If I’m not an American, I’m nothing.” As someone who insisted that he was first and foremost an American writer, as opposed to a Jewish writer, would he have liked being part of the *Jewish Lives” series?

Oh, I think so. He thought it was fair. We never talked about it directly, but I suspect he would’ve liked the company — King David, Solomon, Freud, Einstein.

There’s this anxiety about calling writers like Roth or [Saul] Bellow or [Bernard] Malamud “Jewish writers,” as though that makes them smaller. No one says Chekhov isn’t Russian enough. But say “Jewish writer” and people start to hedge.

I once said an American Jewish writer is someone who insists he’s not an American Jewish writer. Roth fit that perfectly.

There was a time when the Jewish experience was seen as a lens through which to understand modern life. Jews were central, not peripheral. Roth captured that paradox: Jews as both insiders and outsiders, too white and not white enough, privileged yet insecure. That ambivalence is his great theme.

“Portnoy’s Complaint” came out in 1969 and both delighted and scandalized readers with its descriptions of the narrator’s sexual adventures and fraught relationship with his Jewish parents. The reaction was extraordinary. I think it may be hard in our current era to imagine a literary novel selling so many copies and becoming such a part of the pop culture landscape.

[Critic] Adam Kirsch said it best — it was one of the last times a novel could set off the kind of cultural frenzy that today only Taylor Swift can provoke. The timing was perfect: Censorship had loosened, the sexual revolution was on, and “Portnoy” hit a nerve.

Roth claimed afterward that he didn’t want that kind of fame again. But of course he missed it. He hoped “Sabbath’s Theater” [his 1995 novel] would do it again. He knew it wouldn’t. He was mourning the loss of a serious readership, even as he kept writing as if it still existed.

Roth’s reputation seems tied up in how he portrayed women in his fiction and how he treated women in his personal life. You describe his serial relationships with many, many women, which often ended as soon as the sexual excitement wore off. At the same time, many of these same women remained loyal, and many gathered at his bedside as he lay dying, and some have written admiring memoirs. How did you approach that paradox?

I tried to be honest without being prurient. Roth decided very early that he was going to be a great writer — perhaps as great as Herman Melville or Kafka — and he came to conclude that there’s not a whole lot of discretionary time for relationships. 

He’d fall in love hard, live with someone for two or three years, then move on. I didn’t moralize about it. Many of those women remained close to him. Others didn’t. He was loyal in his own way. 

And his relationships with men, except for one significant detail, are not vastly dissimilar from those that he has with women. They’re utilitarian. Incredibly loyal friends hang on, because they’re so enamored by Roth and they feel deeply protective of Roth.

He also listened more intently than anyone I’ve ever met — though you were never sure whether it was you he was listening to, or the story he was going to write next.

Tell me about your book’s subtitle, “Stung By Life.”

It’s a phrase I found in a eulogy Roth wrote for his friend Richard Stern. He said Stern was “stung by life,” and I thought, that’s Roth.

He was perpetually shocked by existence — by what people do, by what happens to them, by what happens to him. Zuckerman, his alter ego, is defined by ambivalence — about women, about Jewishness, about America. Roth described everything well, but ambivalence best of all.

You’ve written books of history, and biographies of other Jewish literary figures, including the Zionist thinker Ahad Ha’am and Isaac Rosenfield, the American-Jewish writer who died in 1956 when he was only 38. What challenges did you find writing about a figure like Roth, who was still alive when you began work on the book, and what do you think you brought to it that maybe others couldn’t?

I’ve written and taught biography for years. Roth spent his entire life writing about himself, but not telling the truth about himself. That puzzle fascinated me.

Some Jewish figures — Isaiah Berlin, for example — chose biographers who didn’t quite understand the Jewish stuff. I wanted to do the opposite. I wanted to understand him from the inside out.

I loved his work before I started. I love it even more now. Words were my way out of a world where answers were predetermined by Maimonides. Roth fought that battle too —against dogma, against certainty, through language.

Sometimes I think Roth’s gifts as a comedian have overshadowed other qualities of his work — for example, everyone who read “Portnoy” remembers the slapstick about masturbation, but I love his lyrical descriptions of his old Weequahic neighborhood in Newark and heading down to the park to watch “the men” play softball. Was he worried that he’d be shelved in the “humor” section of the bookstore?

He liked to say he was a comic writer in the tradition of Kafka and [Heinrich] Heine — not Shecky Greene, [the Catskills comedian].

But yes, he could be incredibly funny. In many ways, “The Ghost Writer” [1979], as beautiful and lyrical as it is, is all written in order for Philip to have that punchline about Anne Frank. 

The book’s narrator, Nathan Zuckerman, a writer like the young Roth, imagines that Anne has survived and that he can heal a rift with his family by bringing her home as his fianceé. 

“Nathan, is she Jewish?” “Yes, she is!” “But who is she?” “Anne Frank.” In many ways, those were the lines that begat that brilliant book.

I also feel people overlook how much he wrestles with the Jewish condition — and not just Jewish mother jokes or nostalgia for the old Weequahic neighborhood. In books like “The Counterlife” and “Operation Shylock” Roth was writing about Zionism, assimilation, extremism and the tension between Israel and the diaspora when few other serious novelists were. Does he deserve to be more widely read as part of the very current Jewish debate over these topics?

Yes. I think in sort of more conservative, traditional Jewish quarters, he ended up being seen as an enemy of the Jews. But thinking about your question, it’s hard to think of any piece of extraordinary fiction that’s really made its way into the Jewish communal debate. 

But Roth actually entered emphatically into the Jewish conversation. At one point in the late 1980s, Roth gives an interview to his friend Asher Milbauer. And he admits that the Jewish readership is his primary readership. He says writing as an American Jew is akin to writing for a small country where culture is paramount. As for other readers, he said, ”I have virtually no sense of my impact on the general audience.”

How would you describe that impact, and why should he still be read and admired?

Because he closes his eyes to nothing. He looks straight at the things we’d rather look away from — sex, aging, death, hypocrisy, joy. He writes about the child of good parents, the lover, the son, the dying man — all the selves we carry.

He shows how truth and illusion coexist, how clarity is always fragile. And he does it with language that’s alive. That’s what endures.

Does he still feel relevant to you?

Completely. Even among his contemporaries — [John] Updike, Bellow — Roth feels less dated. Maybe that’s because he was never comfortable. He kept interrogating everything, including himself.

That’s why he’s still with us. The rest of us are still trying to catch up.

Learn about Philip Roth’s “Portnoy’s Complaint” and other classics in a new course from My Jewish Learning: “Funny Story! The Best Jewish Humor Books of the Past 75 Years.” Taught by Andrew Silow-Carroll, the four-session course starts on Monday, Oct. 27 at 6 p.m. ET. Register here.  

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