Philip Roth and the Jews

By Alan Cooper and Alan Cooper

Book Overview

Examines Philip Roth's use of Jewish ideas and materials in his novels, considering also the responses to Roth's work and his relations with the Jewish community and contemporary Jewish writers.

In a style richly accessible to the general reader, this book presents Roth's secular Jewishness, with its own mysteries and humor, as most representative of the American Jewish experience. Thirty years into his career as a writer, Philip Roth remains known to most readers as a self-hating Jew or a flawed would-be comic. Philip Roth and the Jews shows Roth the ironist, the master of absurdity, for whom twentieth-century America and modern Jewish history resonate with each other's signal accomplishments and anxieties. Roth's "egoism" is a persona, an abashed moralist discomfited by the world. Cooper shows that in the "Jewish" works Roth has taken the pulse of America and read the pressures of the world. Modernism, the universal tug for individual sovereignty and against tribal definition, is an issue everywhere. Roth's own odyssey of betrayal, loss, and return-the pattern of the Jewish writer in the last 200 years-is so shaped by his origins that Roth has carried his home and neighborhood into the corners of the earth and thus never left them.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0791429105
• ISBN13: 9780791429105
• Release Date: April 1996
• Publisher: State University of New York Press
• Length: 319 Pages
• Weight: 1.23 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 5.9" x 8.9"
• Grade Range: Postsecondary and higher

Customer Reviews

Phil Roth and his relationship with the Jews

I have to say that I was skeptical of this book. I was doing research on Phil Roth for my students. I found the book to be an interesting tool in understanding and clarifying Roth as an author. He was born at Newark's Beth Israel Medical Center and raised in the Jewish enclave of Newark also known as Weequahic section. Every culture or ethnic group had their sections in Newark just like they did in New York City. His relationship with Judaism is not an easy one. He is not a religious Jew nor a practicing one. I don't know if he believes in God at all and I don't expect them too. We, writers and authors are quite a strange bunch. Anyway, Roth's Jewishness is examined but it's not quite clear to the reader. I believe that Roth like others thought that his neighborhood would have stayed the same since he left but it didn't. The Jewish community has become quite assimilated into American culture. Driving past the Weequahic section last week on a snowy day only by accident, I saw his Newark as once a section where it was a community. That's the problem, we have all lost our sense of community by moving away for a little more property and nicer homes and better schools. We now have longer commutes and expenses but we miss our families and friend and the familiarity of our neighborhoods. Maybe that's why some towns have generations of families like mine in the same community, at least, we know of each other. Anyway, Roth's relationship with his religion, culture, and ethnicity is often the subject of his many novels especially about the conflict regarding assimilating or becoming mainstream once they were seen as outsiders before. Remember in their time, it seemed that there were only two religious groups, Christians and Jews. Now you have Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, Atheists, etc. among our mix. Life certainly has changed for the Jews who were once seen as unwelcome outsiders but tolerable. Now they are a part of American culture, they are no longer outsiders and are welcome into our families, communities, and society.