Portnoy's Complaint
Why I’ll Be Teaching Both ‘Portnoy’s Complaint’ And This Harvey Weinstein Essay
“The imagined hypersexual Jewish male out to racially defile Gentile society (or white Christendom) has a long genealogy in anti-Semitic literature.”
Jonathan Franzen's Moral Hazard
Jonathan Franzen’s ‘Purity’ contains some of his most powerful writing — and some of his clunkiest. Joshua Furst takes the pulse of our nation’s foremost purveyor of ‘morally serious fiction.’
Philip Roth
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.
Sex, Angst, Jewish Novel
There was no Philip Roth book published this year. No Roth book was published last year. And unless something changes drastically, no Roth book will be published in 2014. Nathan Zuckerman — Roth’s author ego, who first appeared in the 1974 book “My Life as a Man” and presumably exited himself in “Exit Ghost” in 2007 — is gone. And yet, Roth himself, now 80, lives on.
The Humbling of Philip Roth
Author Neal Pollack’s encounter with his lifelong rival suggests there’s more to Philip Roth’s retirement than what the author has said in the press.
'Portnoy's Prescience
Themes of family ties, Zionism and just plain Jewishness, which come to full flower in Philip Roth’s later masterpieces, are prefigured in ‘Portnoy’s Complaint.’