JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Jewish humor, like all ethnic humor, is built upon stereotypes, and these stereotypes can often be found in anti-Semitic discourse. There is a fine line between ethnic comedy and outright bigotry, and its reception depends as much on context as on authorial intent. Ever since the early 1960s, when Lenny Bruce went public with his…
Purity By Jonathan Franzen Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 576 pages, $28 In 1969, after having written two earnestly serious novels that scrutinized the morality of his times in stately elegant prose, Philip Roth wrote “Portnoy’s Complaint.” A bawdy riff on sex and the impossibility of living up to the expectations of overbearing mothers, it reads…
The Forward 50 is our annual look at the American Jews who made a difference in the past year. Each day, we will spotlight one of our Top 5 picks, leading up to Sunday night when the entire package — along with some very special surprises — will go live. There was no Philip Roth…
As word came over the transom last week (an actual transom, since I don’t have a working computer) that Philip Roth was retiring, I dismissed it as old, dull news. I’d read the report in the original French, and translated it myself into Turkish and then into Swiss-German just for fun. Then, along with the…
Promiscuous: ‘Portnoy’s Complaint’ and Our Doomed Pursuit of Happiness By Bernard Avishai Yale University Press, 240 pages, $25 ‘Promiscuous: ‘Portnoy’s Complaint’ and Our Doomed Pursuit of Happiness” is a very serious and very funny book about a very serious and very funny book. Philip Roth’s “Portnoy’s Complaint,” published in 1969, was not only an instant…
