Philip Roth's Nostalgia for the Yiddishkayt and the New Deal Idealisms in The Plot Against America
This essay reads Philip Roth's The Plot Against America as testifying to the novelist's reengagement with and recovery of his essential Jewish racial identity as well as his re-vision of America as the promised land for its Jews. Situating the complex cultural politics of yiddishkayt in the matrix of the New Deal idealism of the Rooseveltian era, it addresses the novelist's engagement with American democracy that has safeguarded the Jews and other immigrants from being persecuted.
What Is Secular Literature? Philip Roth as Case Study
ABSTRACT:Countless scholars who study the fiction of Philip Roth describe him as a “secular Jewish American,” who writes about “secular Jewish Americans,” and who produces “secular Jewish American fiction.” These claims are ubiquitous though they are rarely explicated in any systematic manner. The study of secularism is burgeoning in non-literary fields, though in recent years, literary theorists have begun to address the issue themselves. Tremendous and fascinating divergences exist among scholars as to what “secular fiction” entails, and Roth’s prodigious oeuvre permits us to explore some of the possibilities. As we shall see, scholars incline to correlate secular fiction with, variously, atheism, realism, postmodernism, and what Edward Said referred to as “secular criticism.” The congeniality or fit of Roth’s work to each of these categories will be explored as we try to understand what secular fiction might be and whether Philip Roth is as unambiguously a practitioner of it as is often alleged.
The Tsadik and His Soul’s Sparks: From Kabbalah to Hasidism
The present study shows the continuity between the Safedian Kabbalistic view of the relations between the sparks of a certain soul, and the Hasidic theory, that was conceived of as innovated by and characteristic of 18th century Hasidism, as to the responsibility of the Tsadik for the sparks that belongs to his soul. In the two literatures, the rescue of a spark of one's soul is related to the beautiful captive woman that is conceived of as an externalization of an inner dimension of the righteous person, immersed in a shell.