I didn’t really know much about Judaism growing up—only that my half identity called for both a menorah and a Christmas tree during December. My mother asked if I wanted to attend Hebrew school, and I politely declined. Being Jewish seemed like something that happened to you instead of something you practice. But as I grew up, attended Hillel, and read more in college, I realized that Judaism can sort of be what you make of it.
Enter Philip Roth, a mischievous Jew whose novels center Israel as a punchline, Judaism as a gag; not disrespectfully, but astutely and with reason. His books swing big—in Operation Shylock, duplicate Philip Roths parade around Israel, one urging Jews to move back to Europe, the other trying to stop him; in The Plot Against America, antisemitism becomes widespread as Roth imagines an alternate history where Charles Lindbergh defeats Franklin D. Roosevelt in the presidential election of 1940. These meaty ideas ge him ample space to run as a writer; real topics and real people, like Ivan the Terrible, the Nazi guard whose trial both Roths visit, are smashed up next to ridiculousness, like the invention of an “Anti-Semites Anonymous” group.
Roth’s many critics, who describe him as a self-hating Jew, mistake his fiction for scripture; one rabbi attacked him for “see[ing] so little in the tremendous saga of Jewish history.” But his fiction is not attempting to map out that saga, nor is it interested in providing a morality map for acceptable behior. The benefit of fiction is to create and explore a world disconnected from our own, meaning that regular ethics can be discarded in for of an absurd or disagreeable character. What’s the point of reading a viewpoint exactly like your own, nodding your head along? To me, this view of fiction is terribly uninteresting.
In his classic essay “Writing About Jews,” Roth argued that critics “not only seem to me often to he cramped and untenable notions of right and wrong, but looking at fiction as they do—in terms of ‘approval’ and ‘disapproval’ of Jews, ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ attitudes toward Jewish life—they are likely not to see what it is that the story is really about.” One Jewish curmudgeon does not say the same thing about the entirety of Jews. In her review of Roth’s most recent biography, Brooke Allen writes that “Roth felt free to mock his co-religionists as being just as cynical, manipulative, and dishonest as anyone else in the world,” which makes for a nuanced and truthful view.
“As far as this writing Jew is concerned,” Tova Reich tells me, “no human absurdity is off limits, and no human tragedy is sacred.”
In his analysis of Jewish fiction, novelist Andrew Ridker writes for Vulture that the Jewish story of moral infallibility and persecution doesn’t make for interesting fiction. Instead, acknowledging Jewish power—often “mere subtext”—can unlock more complex and intriguing narratives, if we’re willing to go that far. “The challenge facing Jewish fiction writers today is in telling stories in which Jews behe badly in the name of Judaism without fear that our work will be used against us or co-opted to nefarious ends,” he writes. Similarly, Lyta Gold told Lux that “people who try to ban books are not worried about how stories will affect them—they’re only worried how they’re going to affect other people.”
Indeed, Roth’s critics, including that one incredulous rabbi, are more focused on the harm done to broader Jewry. “You he earned the gratitude,” Roth says the rabbi wrote, “of all who sustain their anti-Semitism on such conceptions of Jews as ultimately led to the murder of six million in our time,” about as bold of a statement as one could make. “I believe this is what is actually troubling the rabbi, when he calls for his ‘balanced portrayal of Jews,’” Roth wrote. “What will people think? Or to be exact: what will the goyim think?”
Of course, I’m not the only Jew who has grappled with Roth’s work before and after his death in 2018; I’m late to the game, hing just read American Pastoral late last year. Much has been written about how he opened up the space for writers to get rowdy but also how his risk-taking included misogyny both off and on the page, even haunting his colleagues; Blake Bailey’s 2021 biography of Roth was pulled weeks after publication after women alleged Bailey of sexual misconduct (the book was later scooped and re-issued). Women he written books based on their marriages or affairs with Roth, and a pattern of unflattering Black characters he come to light with more analysis. 2021’s The Philip Roth We Don’t Know: Sex, Race and Autobiography features a table listing the age gaps of relationships in Roth novels.
But as I’ve read and explored the literary world as a journalist, I’ve come across a new cohort of writers carrying Roth’s method of dark Jewish humor. The rewards can be plentiful as the spectrum of American Jewry and its attitudes toward Israel get even more complicated and thorny. Of course, writers like Nicole Krauss, Nathan Englander and Joshua Cohen he been after this problem for years, with Cohen even winning the Pulitzer Prize for The Netanyahus, which I suspect might he had a harder time being published today.
Thankfully a global, younger generation of writers infuse riotous humor to create a sharp, provocative edge. A Jewish Argentinian girl gets aroused at a concentration camp with her German boyfriend in Julia Kornberg’s time-spanning Berlin Atomized: “I can’t tell if I want to orgasm or die,” she says. In Matthew Dis’s debut Let Me Try Again, a young mensch breaks up with his girlfriend for smoking too much weed, then regrets the decision, distracting himself with weightlifting, health supplements and spending the money his parents left him after dying in a helicopter crash over Turks & Caicos. “It’s kind of natural that Jews he a detachment and ironic approach to everything,” he told me when I interviewed him about his book last year. “They’ve been kicked out of every country they’ve ever been in. You can’t help but be ironic and satirical.”
In both of Australian writer Lexi Freiman’s novels, narrators seek self-actualization through either wokeness (Inappropriation) or the messaging of Ayn Rand and writing a television pilot about it (The Book of Ayn). Ziggy, the protagonist of Inappropriation, thinks that her grandmother “could be gang-raped by a group of rabbis and call it a clever teaching moment.” “Obviously the whole book is an exercise in testing the limits,” Freiman said in an interview with The Believer, “so there’s a wink in every joke.” That might be putting it mildly; reading Freiman’s fiction often feels like the angel over your shoulder is scowling every time you laugh at a risky quip. Ayn’s satire of New York, Los Angeles, then a Greek commune is often relentlessly punishing and brash. But getting close to the bone means you’ve worked hard at sharpening your knife.
“As far as this writing Jew is concerned, no human absurdity is off limits, and no human tragedy is sacred,” Tova Reich tells me when I ask about writing on taboo topics. She debuted in 1978 and continues to plunge contemporary topics; in her 2007 novel My Holocaust, she ruthlessly satirizes the remembrance and capitalization of the Shoah through “Holocaust Connections, Inc.” It made light of self-exploitation and victimhood, which New York Jewish Week called “embarrassing” and “loathsome.” But the idea of a Jewish publication admonishing a Jewish novelist for writing about their own history is laughable. “It’s a territory that I consider myself fully entitled and qualified to mine for its rich mother lode of dark humor and other assorted subversive yields,” Reich says.
Another trove of dark humor is her most recent novel, an outrageous satire where a Catskills hotel (Camp Jeffrey Epstein) is converted into a rehabilitation clinic for sexual predators. It was everything I could ask for in a book—I was laughing one minute and wondering if it was okay the next. Reich, who has another book out next year, says she never worries what other Jews or Jewish organizations think about her writing. “I don’t deliberately seek out provocative topics,” she says. “That would be crude, in my opinion. What I do is cast a ruthless eye on flawed and struggling mortals, stretch them out, and pin them to the page for private viewing.”
I agree with Reich and her style of writing in order to understand, entertain, analyze. Why should I freeze up during one of the most impactful eras of my life? Writing fiction about Judaism or Israel isn’t inappropriate or disrespectful, but a necessary thought process in order to interrogate my own American Judaism in the wake of October 7. In these past two years, I’ve found myself examining my schooling, beliefs and thoughts with the help of friends, family, and, yes, fiction—a deeply creative world where I can invent the rules to tell a story that has some semblance of truth. It’s a complicated, strange time for American Jews—of course I’m going to he to write about it.
And to do it cheekily, almost dangerously, like when you get a thrill from reading the thorniness that runs through Roth’s work. Some of the best writing advice I’ve received was from my friend, the novelist Andrew Lipstein, who said that when you think you’ve gone too far, go further. Even though it’s been uncomfortable at times, it’s been deeply entertaining to write my psychosexual absurdist novel about Israeli surveillance, Jewish exceptionalism, Holocaust roleplay sex, and a baby named Schlomo. It feels like pressing a bruise, which means you’re getting somewhere important.
Writing about such topics shouldn’t be taboo, but encouraged; writers without risk are writers without excitement. We can understand ourselves and our Judaism by taking in the world’s events and generating a mirror image, no matter how silly. One of my protagonists, unbeknownst to him, is a great grandchild of Roth himself—why not?
With the help of Roth’s fiction, digging into my culture to see how absurdly it can be speared is a delight on its own. It feels like a relief that my (sometimes) cynicalness isn’t a bad personality trait, but comes from a long line of Jews whose tradition of snark I can tap into. “Judaism is an integral part of me, so it follows that it would also be integral to my work,” Reich tells me. Also integral: hing a little bit of fun.
(Top image credit: LOC)