Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Life

Patricia Highsmith: Antisemitic Stranger on a Train

Texas-born Patricia Highsmith has long attracted readers with her cunning grasp of criminal psychology in such suspenseful novels as “Strangers on a Train” (1950) and a series starring the villainous Tom Ripley, now perhaps best known for the Anthony Minghella film “The Talented Mr Ripley” with Matt Damon as the title Tom. But the full extent of Highsmith’s own iniquity is now revealed in “The Talented Miss Highsmith: The Secret Life and Serious Art of Patricia Highsmith,” a new biography by Joan Schenkar out December 8 from St. Martin’s Press.

“The Talented Miss Highsmith” focuses on unpublished material which reveals the novelist in later years to have been a raving “Jew-hater,” as Schenkar puts it, who talked for years about leaving her considerable fortune to the Intifada and concocted a 1988 radio script for broadcast in Germany about Yitzhak Shamir that Schenkar describes as an:

irrational work, poisoned by ethnic prejudices. It reads like a lost chapter from that toxic anthology of antisemitic canards, ‘The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.’

Highsmith wildly claimed that the novelist Amos Oz would “soon be murdered by Shamir’s government.” German media personalities rejected her text as something “so ghastly that it could be a Nazi text.” Previous books on Highsmith, like the highly readable “Beautiful Shadow: A Life of Patricia Highsmith” by Andrew Wilson from Bloomsbury USA (2004) do not hide the writer’s eccentricity, including her habit of traveling around Europe by train while concealing a half-dozen pet snails in her bra to deceive customs inspectors. Only Schenkar though, fully delves into Highsmith’s mania on the subjects of Jews and Israel. When American publisher Otto Penzler printed her 1983 novel “People Who Knock on the Door” he deleted the book’s dedication “To the Intifada” with the permission of her main Swiss publisher, Diogenes, angering Highsmith, who accused him of being a Jew, despite his Protestant roots.

Schenkar’s well-researched work cites many such incidents, adding up to a devastating portrait of an ugly, twisted soul from which emerged all those fascinating, entertaining and thankfully fictional murders.

Watch a 1982 British TV interview with Melvyn Bragg of The South Bank Show, in which Patricia Highsmith dismisses any notion of the “sanctity of human life” as a mere “mental attitude.”

A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning, nonprofit journalism during this critical time.

We’ve set a goal to raise $260,000 by December 31. That’s an ambitious goal, but one that will give us the resources we need to invest in the high quality news, opinion, analysis and cultural coverage that isn’t available anywhere else.

If you feel inspired to make an impact, now is the time to give something back. Join us as a member at your most generous level.

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

With your support, we’ll be ready for whatever 2025 brings.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.