More in ‘Philip Roth’

Today in Tablet Magazine, Adam Kirsch considers a new book’s innovative argument: that the rise of secular political philosophy with Locke, Hobbes, and the rest was helped by Protestantism’s interest in Jewish law and government. Mideast columnist Lee Smith weighs the complex question of how Jews should feel about evangelical Christian support for Israel. Following ...

As she made clear in this week’s Vox Tablet podcast, Judith Shulevitz has, with her new book The Sabbath World, offered us nothing less than a kaleidoscopic picture of the day of rest. Below, with excerpts from eight of today’s leading Jewish fiction writers (and a posthumous entry from I.B. Singer), we offer a ...

Today in Tablet Magazine, Staff Writer Marissa Brostoff arguesthat J.D. Salinger’s Glass family stories are indelibly Jewish in a way that is nonetheless quite different from those by contemporaries Bellow, Mailer, and Roth: “Zooey has plenty of complaints, but Portnoy’s is not one of them.” As pork has become increasingly trendy in the foodie world, ...

A young man taking a long, languorous bath is paid a visit by his mother, who sits down (presumably on the toilet seat) to chat, and, despite her son’s half-hearted attempts to get rid of her, remains there for most of the next 48 pages. She’s come to talk about the young man’s college-aged sister, ...

“The two holidays that celebrate the divinity of Christ—the divinity that’s the very heart of the Jewish rejection of Christianity—and what does Irving Berlin do? He de-Christs them both! Easter he turns into a fashion show and Christmas into a holiday about snow.” Philip Roth, in Operation Shylock, was referring to Berlin’s “Easter Parade” and, ...

If Philip Roth’s The Humbling fails to earn him a National Book Award nomination next year, he can at least console himself with the news that he’s made the shortlist of contenders for a British award honoring bad sex in fiction. Bestowed by the London magazine Literary Review, the awards “draw attention to the crude, ...

In the mid-1990s, Philip Roth entered the triumphant late phase of his long career, producing a series of big historical novels—American Pastoral, I Married a Communist, The Human Stain. These books, with their detailed recreation of the American past and their blend of social observation with Rothian obsession—about sex, death, and the Jews—showed that he ...

Philip Roth’s 30th novel, The Humbling, was published this week, and it has prompted the author to sit for a rare interview. Tina Brown does the gushing video interrogation for the Daily Beast, asking Roth for his views on the future of the novel (what with Kindle and television, he gives the printed book no ...

During Jewish Body Week, no one should forget that one of the things Jews have persistently done with their bodies, much to their loving mothers’ dismay, is to hunch over texts, wearing out their eyes while squinting to make out tiny typefaces. In other words, Jews read with their bodies, too. In Maggid: Jewish Bodies: ...

So it turns out the Nobel Prize for Literature has gone not to the Israeli novelist Amos Oz, as some people were predicting, or to Philip Roth, who others (though fewer others, it seemed) thought was a leading contender. Instead, the winner of this year’s Nobel Prize for Literature is Herta Mueller, a Romanian-born German ...