American Jews Face Israel in Philip Roth's Writing: Identity, Generation, Politics, and Language

Abstract

The relationship with Israel is an increasingly complicated issue for diaspora Jews. Philip Roth's texts show a complex and critical positioning of American Jews towards Israel from as early as the 1960s. Analyzing Portnoy's Complaint (1969), The Counterlife (1986), and Operation Shylock (1994), I argue that Roth portrays a complex, critical, and often uncomfortable Jewish-American relationship with Zionism and Israel. His ongoing engagement is as urgent, even if less prominent, as is the constant re-debating of Jewish-American identities throughout Roth's oeuvre. This suggests that Israel is a constituent, if problematic, part of his negotiations of contemporary Jewish identities. Roth explores the role of Israel in the Jewish-American identity politics by way of generational positioning, the question of politics, power, and violence, expectations of diaspora loyalty, and, most prominently, the meaning of language as an identity marker as American English and Hebrew are set against each other.