{"title":"A Biography and Roth's Most Experimental Work to Date","authors":"Eric Vanderwall","doi":"10.1353/prs.2022.0009","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/prs.2022.0009","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":37093,"journal":{"name":"Philip Roth Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-04-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48835572","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract:In Portnoy's Complaint (1969), Philip Roth created a particularly vivid image of a Jewish mother. Now, more than fifty years after the novel was published, it is hard to define whether this novel produced the Jewish mother jokes or whether the jokes produced the novel. Sophie Portnoy is the embodiment of Jewishness as well as Judaism in the novel. "Hundreds of thousands of little rules" of the Portnoys' household go back to the laws of Judaism but are interpreted and presented by the mother in an odd and distorted way. Jewish philosophy is lowered to the everyday taboos that regulate Alex Portnoy's life even when he becomes an adult and lives separately from his parents. The belief in these taboos subsumes Judaism and its real laws, becoming the only Judaism Alex knows.
{"title":"\"Momma, Do We Believe in Winter?\": Yiddishe Mama and Judaism in Portnoy's Complaint","authors":"Olga B. Karasik-Updike","doi":"10.1353/prs.2022.0006","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/prs.2022.0006","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:In Portnoy's Complaint (1969), Philip Roth created a particularly vivid image of a Jewish mother. Now, more than fifty years after the novel was published, it is hard to define whether this novel produced the Jewish mother jokes or whether the jokes produced the novel. Sophie Portnoy is the embodiment of Jewishness as well as Judaism in the novel. \"Hundreds of thousands of little rules\" of the Portnoys' household go back to the laws of Judaism but are interpreted and presented by the mother in an odd and distorted way. Jewish philosophy is lowered to the everyday taboos that regulate Alex Portnoy's life even when he becomes an adult and lives separately from his parents. The belief in these taboos subsumes Judaism and its real laws, becoming the only Judaism Alex knows.","PeriodicalId":37093,"journal":{"name":"Philip Roth Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-04-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47202812","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract:This paper examines three stories in Philp Roth's Goodbye, Columbus. The stories are united in their concern for the challenges posed to Jewish identity in mid-twentieth century America, a generation of Jews separated from their immigrant parents and grandparents. Roth, a keen observer of American Jewish life, shines a perceptive, occasionally critical, often humorous light on his characters; he teaches the reader some hard truths about American Jews, truths that remain relevant more than half a century later.
{"title":"Philip Roth's View of Mid-Twentieth-Century American Jews as Seen in Three Stories from Goodbye, Columbus","authors":"Phil M. Cohen","doi":"10.1353/prs.2022.0003","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/prs.2022.0003","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This paper examines three stories in Philp Roth's Goodbye, Columbus. The stories are united in their concern for the challenges posed to Jewish identity in mid-twentieth century America, a generation of Jews separated from their immigrant parents and grandparents. Roth, a keen observer of American Jewish life, shines a perceptive, occasionally critical, often humorous light on his characters; he teaches the reader some hard truths about American Jews, truths that remain relevant more than half a century later.","PeriodicalId":37093,"journal":{"name":"Philip Roth Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-04-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46010668","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"\"Portnoy's Complaint at 50\": A Podcast About Roth's Most Infamous Book","authors":"B. Kaplan, Samuel Kessler","doi":"10.1353/prs.2022.0010","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/prs.2022.0010","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":37093,"journal":{"name":"Philip Roth Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-04-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47691402","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract:Philip Roth gets a lot of things right about Jewish Weequahic, at least for the time in which he lived there. Nevertheless, there are some aspects of the Jewish landscape of Weequahic and Newark that escaped him. Some of what he misses explains a development he was surely unaware of, the rejuvenation of traditional Jewish life in Weequahic after his departure from Newark, which takes place in the very period in which Roth has "the Swede," Seymour Levov, cast off any connection to his Jewish roots. It is argued here that Roth misreads some of what he witnessed and was ill-informed about developments in Weequahic beyond 1950. Had it been otherwise, his take on the local and national Jewish condition might have been very different. Much of the story of the Jewish community of Newark has yet to receive the full scholarly treatment it deserves. When it is written, it will shed new light not only on Roth's writings but also on the struggles, realities, and meaning of being Jewish in mid-twentieth-century America.
{"title":"Roth's Jewish Weequahic: Perception or Reality and Why It Matters","authors":"Stuart S. Miller","doi":"10.1353/prs.2022.0007","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/prs.2022.0007","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Philip Roth gets a lot of things right about Jewish Weequahic, at least for the time in which he lived there. Nevertheless, there are some aspects of the Jewish landscape of Weequahic and Newark that escaped him. Some of what he misses explains a development he was surely unaware of, the rejuvenation of traditional Jewish life in Weequahic after his departure from Newark, which takes place in the very period in which Roth has \"the Swede,\" Seymour Levov, cast off any connection to his Jewish roots. It is argued here that Roth misreads some of what he witnessed and was ill-informed about developments in Weequahic beyond 1950. Had it been otherwise, his take on the local and national Jewish condition might have been very different. Much of the story of the Jewish community of Newark has yet to receive the full scholarly treatment it deserves. When it is written, it will shed new light not only on Roth's writings but also on the struggles, realities, and meaning of being Jewish in mid-twentieth-century America.","PeriodicalId":37093,"journal":{"name":"Philip Roth Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-04-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"66302636","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract:Philip Roth famously and frequently resisted being identified as a Jewish writer, although he never resisted being identified as a Jew and was a frequent critic of anti-Semitism. While Roth's work often depicts Jews arguing with each other, these conflicts have less to do with being Jewish, per se, than with how Judaism is conceived in the modern world. Criticized since his earliest stories for attacking Jews, Roth has rebelled against the practice of Judaism. This essay explores Roth's conflict with the existence of Judaism and the implicit communal demand that he abide by its historic practices.
{"title":"Philip Roth's Deathmatch with Judaism","authors":"Timothy L. Parrish","doi":"10.1353/prs.2022.0008","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/prs.2022.0008","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Philip Roth famously and frequently resisted being identified as a Jewish writer, although he never resisted being identified as a Jew and was a frequent critic of anti-Semitism. While Roth's work often depicts Jews arguing with each other, these conflicts have less to do with being Jewish, per se, than with how Judaism is conceived in the modern world. Criticized since his earliest stories for attacking Jews, Roth has rebelled against the practice of Judaism. This essay explores Roth's conflict with the existence of Judaism and the implicit communal demand that he abide by its historic practices.","PeriodicalId":37093,"journal":{"name":"Philip Roth Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-04-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44633045","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
ABSTRACT:The Anatomy Lesson (1983) features Philip Roth’s most extensive fictional treatment of Commentary, the magazine of Jewish affairs founded in 1945 and patronized by the American Jewish Committee. Before Roth’s apparent break with Commentary in the wake of Irving Howe’s and Norman Podhoretz’s one-two punch to his career in the December 1972 issue, the magazine was part of Roth’s emerging sense of a distinctly American Jewish intellectual identity while helping him separate from what he perceived to be his own limiting origins. A reconsideration of Roth’s dealings with the magazine complicates the sharp distinction often made between Commentary’s sometimes romanticized history as a bastion of postwar, left liberalism in the 1940s and 1950s, on the one hand, and its more familiar iteration as a flagship publication of neoconservatism in the 1970s and 1980s, on the other. Turning to Roth’s fiction as an additional source of insight yields an aesthetic theory of fiction as a space for an analytical encounter with ambivalence.
{"title":"An Ambivalent Nemesis: Philip Roth, Commentary, and the American Jewish Intellectual","authors":"I. L. Heister","doi":"10.1353/prs.2021.0015","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/prs.2021.0015","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT:The Anatomy Lesson (1983) features Philip Roth’s most extensive fictional treatment of Commentary, the magazine of Jewish affairs founded in 1945 and patronized by the American Jewish Committee. Before Roth’s apparent break with Commentary in the wake of Irving Howe’s and Norman Podhoretz’s one-two punch to his career in the December 1972 issue, the magazine was part of Roth’s emerging sense of a distinctly American Jewish intellectual identity while helping him separate from what he perceived to be his own limiting origins. A reconsideration of Roth’s dealings with the magazine complicates the sharp distinction often made between Commentary’s sometimes romanticized history as a bastion of postwar, left liberalism in the 1940s and 1950s, on the one hand, and its more familiar iteration as a flagship publication of neoconservatism in the 1970s and 1980s, on the other. Turning to Roth’s fiction as an additional source of insight yields an aesthetic theory of fiction as a space for an analytical encounter with ambivalence.","PeriodicalId":37093,"journal":{"name":"Philip Roth Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-09-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45336407","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Palgrave Handbook of Holocaust Literature and Culture ed. by Victoria Aarons and Phyllis Lassner (review)","authors":"Kate Ferry-Swainson","doi":"10.1353/prs.2021.0017","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/prs.2021.0017","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":37093,"journal":{"name":"Philip Roth Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-09-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44342838","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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