Philip Roth: A Writer and His People
Over the course of his remarkable career, Philip Roth received nearly every literary award imaginable. One of these prizes was an honorary doctorate from the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York, which he received in May 2014. The JTS degree, though, was not merely one more feather that Roth added to his magnificent literary cap; it marked the beginning of a long overdue reconciliation between a writer and his people. Now that our inimitable literary lion—our contemporary Kafka—has passed, the time has come for the rest of the Jewish people to follow suit and atone for our modern-day original literary sin.
Like his novel The Ghost Writer, Roth’s autobiographical work of nonfiction The Facts recounts how a certain slice of the Jewish community repudiated Roth and indignantly accused him of “airing their dirty laundry.” In 1962,...