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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Two years after the Oct. 7 massacre, the Middle East is at an absurd pivot point. If Hamas, badly beaten but unbowed, accepts the disarmament element in President Donald Trump’s new peace plan, the region will move toward reconstruction, Gulf-financed normalization, and peace. If it refuses, Israel will likely re-occupy Gaza, miring the region in a ruinous quagmire.

That so much now depends on the whim of a terrorist group is a scandal — the product not only of Hamas’s diabolical strategy and indifference to loss of life, but of American weakness and, crucially, a chain of catastrophically bad choices by Israelis. It did not have to be this way.

The choice between abyss and opportunity is simple in outline and brutal in consequence. One future is endless counterinsurgency in Gaza: Soldiers patrolling hostile alleys and encountering roadside bombs, with Palestinian families under curfew, while Israel’s economy bleeds, its society seethes and its global standing plummets. The other is the disarmament and removal of Hamas, with the hostages returned, Gulf money flowing into reconstruction, and quite possibly dramatic moves toward normalization between Israel and Saudi Arabia, and maybe others.

That binary was manufactured, step by avoidable step, by foolishness, arrogance, and weakness from key players:

• • The political opening: Netanyahu’s return. The rightward re-alignment of Israeli politics after repeated elections was caused by splits in the center-left, and an utter lack of focus from Israel’s moderate parties that made Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s comeback possible. The coalition he assembled after the November 2022 election, dependent on fanatics and brimming with ex-cons and incompetents, was a disaster waiting to happen. The wait wasn’t long.

• • Judicial overhaul and societal schism. Netanyahu’s drive to neuter the judiciary and establish an illiberal majoritarian semi-democracy, similar to that of nearby Turkey, began within days of his resuming power. It tore Israeli society apart in 2023, provoking mass protests and deepening social polarization — a rupture that the security establishment warned would project weakness and invite attack.

• • Ignoring security warnings and intelligence. Knowing this was their position, Netanyahu refused to meet with the heads of the military, Shin Bet and Mossad in the weeks and months before Oct. 7. For their part, the security chiefs also ignored multiple intelligence indicators of Hamas’ intent for a major attack. The signals were minimized or misread — a classic bureaucratic pattern of cognitive failure. As for Netanyahu, his fabulously misguided position, for many years, was that Hamas ruling Gaza was useful because it weakened the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank — which is threatening to him precisely because it is moderate.

• • Troop diversion to the West Bank. In the run-up to Oct. 7, forces and attention were redirected to the West Bank to manage flashpoints — a political decision tied to coalition pressures to accommodate radical settlers determined to provoke the Palestinians, which left the Gaza boundary defense much thinner than it should have been.

• • Tactical failures on Oct. 7. When the assault began, early military warnings were not acted on, local commanders were confused, communications broke down, and reinforcements arrived too late, often not unless 10 hours later, in a small country.

• • Blundering into war. Israel briefly held the moral high ground as the world recognized Hamas’ act of barbarism. Arab capitals were unusually receptive, and the diplomatic leverage was enormous. That was the moment to demand the release of hostages, insist on Hamas surrendering Gaza’s administration to the Palestinian Authority, and make disarmament a multilateral demand enforced by a regional-Western coalition. If Hamas had refused, the world would have been forced into an explicit test — and come to understand, once and for all, that war was the option Hamas wanted.

• • Ignoring the hostage problem. It was obvious from the start that Israel could not destroy Hamas while the group held hostages in Gaza. The captives were a human shield, ensuring that any attempt at “total victory” would be self-defeating. Netanyahu denied this, promising that annihilation was possible while sending the army in and out of the same ruins two years of an endless cat-and-mouse.

These step-by-step misfires, together, make it clear that at every subsequent juncture, Netanyahu chose to prolong kinetic action. A permanent state of emergency enabled him to argue for deferring accountability and shifting the discussion away from the unwinnable one about his role in Oct. 7.

And the United States showed weakness and complicity with nonsense at key moments. 

• • A missed opportunity. In late 2023 and early 2024, then-Secretary of State Antony Blinken was crisscrossing the region to put together a comprehensive plan: return of all hostages, the Palestinian Authority restored to Gaza, normalization with Saudi Arabia. Officials in President Joe Biden’s administration believed it was achievable. Netanyahu refused, knowing his coalition would collapse. Biden, astonishingly, effectively accepted the rebuff — a display of weakness that allowed the war to grind on, and, of course, hurt the Democrats’ chances to retain the American presidency.

• • Biden’s big error. Biden went further, publicly endorsing Netanyahu’s own outline for ending the war in exchange for hostages. Within weeks, Netanyahu reneged, and Biden again let it pass. The cost was counted not only in the lives of Palestinian civilians, but also in those of Israeli soldiers and hostages who might have been saved.

• • And Trump’s. By January, 2025, after 15 months of devastation, a reelected Trump forced Netanyahu to accept what was essentially the same plan as Biden had put forward. But Netanyahu walked away halfway through implementation, without even denying that doing so was a violation of the deal — because Trump allowed him to (and indeed was then advocating for the expulsion of all Gazans in favor of a U.S.-built “riviera”).

Each of these errors compounded the others and cost many lives.

On the Palestinian side, it is widely believed that some 65,000 people are dead, over half of them civilians — although all numbers from Gaza are suspect, as they come from authorities linked to Hamas. According to Israel’s Defense Ministry, 1,152 Israeli soldiers and security personnel have been killed in the course of the war, including several hundred in the Oct. 7 attack itself. Of the 251 people abducted on Oct. 7, the vast majority of them civilians, at least 83 are believed to have been killed — the cost of these decisions to not prioritize their release.

At every pause when Netanyahu prolonged the war he could say “Hamas is not yet destroyed.” People who both wanted Hamas gone and the hostages freed could be manipulated into tolerating continuation of fighting. That line sustained support from about a third of the public.

What are the lessons of this litany of error — other than the obvious one, that Netanyahu must be removed from power at almost any cost?

The big one is that Israel, even if Hamas says no to Trump’s deal, must resist the impulse to push forward militarily. Two years of devastation have made it plain: The war cannot be “won” so long as hostages remain in Hamas’s grip, and every repetition of the cat-and-mouse in Gaza only weakens Israel’s legitimacy and social cohesion, while strengthening Hamas’s narrative.

If Hamas refuses to disarm, the wiser course is to flip the script, and increase pressure on them without further military action.

The priority must be the hostages: Every diplomatic channel and instrument of international pressure should be deployed to secure their release. Humanitarian suffering must be addressed by offering civilians temporary refuge — in Egypt, in the West Bank, or elsewhere — guaranteed by international commitments of return once Hamas is gone.

This is not ethnic cleansing; it is protection, analogous to Ukrainians sheltering in Poland during the Russian assault. Properly framed, it exposes Hamas as the jailer of Gaza’s people.

If Hamas breaks, then excellent: the Trump plan can proceed with a technocratic Palestinian government in Gaza, reforms in the Palestinian Authority, Gulf-financed reconstruction, and normalization with Saudi Arabia and beyond. If Hamas refuses, the world must be made to see that Palestinian misery is not the people’s inevitable fate, but the direct consequence of Hamas’s obstinacy.

The fact that the Middle East’s future now waits on Hamas is not some cosmic inevitability: it is the fruit of a sequence of political, tactical and strategic mistakes. Israel must learn from this disaster, and take steps never to be so exposed in the future.

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Let’s not sugarcoat it: American support for Israel has taken a nosedive since Oct. 7, 2023.

The question two years later is: How can Israel avoid a complete crash?

Recent polls show the most dire numbers. Americans’ sympathy for Israelis dropped to 46% by February 2025 — the lowest in 25 years of Gallup tracking. Israel received its lowest rating ever in Chicago Council of Global Affairs polling, which dates back to 1978: 61% of Americans said Israel is playing a negative role in resolving Middle East challenges.

The numbers are worst where it matters most — among the younger generations, who will lead the United States and set policy in the future. Only 9% of those aged 18 to 34 approve of Israel’s military actions in Gaza, according to a Brookings Institution poll. That’s compared to 49% in the 55 and older age group.

What I think: The tremendous outpouring of support American Jews received after Oct. 7 hasn’t disappeared. Instead, it’s been obscured by deep misgivings about the way Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government has conducted the war in Gaza. And after two years of conflict, there’s finally a real opportunity to remake the region — and enable that support to flourish once again.

The most dramatic shift occurred among Democrats, who now sympathize with Palestinians over Israelis by nearly a 3-to-1 ratio. Just 33% of Democrats view Israel favorably — a 30-point plummet over a span of three years. While party leaders still express strong support for Israel, if not for its current government, negative sentiment is surging among younger Democrats. At the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia last year, the party’s youth wing passed a resolution calling Israel’s military campaign in Gaza a genocide.

But even more strikingly, the generational gap among Republicans is dramatic and widening.

For years, Republicans have tried to peel off Jewish voters by claiming theirs is the true pro-Israel party. Over the last two years, that claim collapsed in their young wing. Since 2022, young Republicans aged 18 to 49 went from 35% having an unfavorable view of Israel to, today, 50% having one, according to an August survey, while such views among Republicans older than 50 went up only marginally, from 19% to 23%.

Numbers like these, or the sentiments behind them, were behind a now-famous memo that the late Charlie Kirk wrote to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, warning that Israel faced a “5-alarm fire” over conservative support.

Or, as a recent headline in Politico summed it up:“An entire generation of Americans is turning on Israel.”

At first, sympathy

That trend began long before the Oct. 7 attack. Decades of Israel’s occupation of the West Bank, repeated Israeli incursions into Gaza that resulted in high numbers of civilian casualties, university curriculums that framed Israel as a colonizer, and Israel’s demographic and political move to the right have all played a part.

But still, the post-Oct. 7 numbers represent a tremendous reversal.

In the immediate aftermath of the Hamas-led attacks, 71% of Americans said they felt a lot of sympathy for Israelis, and 96% expressed at least some. In a country as divided as the U.S., those are extraordinary numbers.

Israel’s long military campaign changed that. As it dragged on, claiming more than 64,000 Palestinian lives — about 20,000 of whom Israel claims are Hamas fighters — leveling more than 75% of Gaza’s buildings, and causing widespread hunger, support began to evaporate.

The fall-off was accelerated by online media campaigns, some of which, according to the American government and Israeli intelligence sources, were funded and operated by Iran and Qatar. (Israel has also funded online social media influencer campaigns, to try to improve its global image.) Social media, where young people get their news and form their opinions, became another battlefield in the war — and one Israel has been losing.

American Jews mirror their neighbors

As is so often the case, American Jews reflect the sentiments of the society around them.

A just-released Washington Post poll found that 61% of American Jews say Israel has committed war crimes in Gaza.  Almost 4 in 10 say Israel is guilty of genocide against Palestinians.

Only 36% of Jews aged 18 to 34 say they feel emotionally attached to Israel, compared to 68% of those over 65. Among younger Jews, half said Israel is committing genocide, compared with about a third of older respondents.

The numbers have been reflected by sometimes surprising public statements. Last month, Rabbi Ismar Schorch, former chancellor of the Conservative Jewish Theological Seminary, called Israel’s Gaza War “a moral stain” on Judaism itself.

In August, 80 Modern Orthodox rabbis wrote an open letter demanding moral clarity on the humanitarian disaster of food scarcity in Gaza.

“Hamas’s sins and crimes do not relieve the government of Israel of its obligations to make whatever efforts are necessary to prevent mass starvation,” they wrote. “Orthodox Jewry, as some of Israel’s most devoted supporters, bears a unique moral responsibility. We must affirm that Judaism’s vision of justice and compassion extends to all human beings.”

Some of Israel’s supporters have argued that these numbers prove Americans only like Israel until it starts defending itself. Spend a few minutes on Jewish online forums and inevitably up pops the Golda Meir quote, “If we have to have a choice between being dead and pitied, and being alive with a bad image, we’d rather be alive and have the bad image.”

But that sentiment is harder to justify when scores of Israel’s former officials, two of its former prime ministers, and hundreds of thousands of Israelis who have taken to the streets themselves are saying the war has gone on too long, and been too cruel.

Has Israel lost the U.S.?

Dire as those statements and numbers might seem, buried within the statistics are some reasons for hope.

Polls show that what Americans really take issue with is Israel’s military campaign. Overall approval of Israel’s military action in Gaza fell to 32% by July 2025, down from initial support of 50% in November 2023 — including that near rock-bottom 9% support for Israel’s military action among young people.

In other words, the Israel that Americans are rejecting in those polls is the Israel executing a military and political project that, until recently, seemed bent on obliterating Gaza. But there’s a whole other Israel out there, and it’s a powerful one.

It’s the Israel of protest marches, which have seen tens of thousands of Israelis rally, week after week, against a government that does not reflect their values. It’s the Israel of the dozens of Arab and Jewish NGOs fighting for coexistence.

President Donald Trump’s new peace plan, which will put an end to the war, offers the beginning of a way back to that better Israel. Netanyahu has accepted the plan, which not only calls for an end to the war and for the hostages to be freed, but for a longer diplomatic horizon that calls for “reconciliation and coexistence” between Israelis and Palestinians. Hamas has taken the first steps toward signing onto it, as well, by for the first time agreeing to release all the remaining hostages.

If Trump and his successors can hold the Israelis and Palestinians to their word, the possibilities open to an Israel-Saudi Arabia peace and the integration of Israel into the Middle East. When the Arabs accept Israel, it will be that much harder for a Barnard sophomore to reject it.

Israel can retain the U.S. as its greatest ally, and the American public as its greatest friend, if it marginalizes its own hardliners and takes the opening Trump has offered. These are big ifs, pipe dreams perhaps. But two years after Oct. 7, we are closer now than ever to seeing them come true.

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