Title: Philip Roth and the Jews
First published: 1996
Description: In a style richly accessible to the general reader, this book presents Roth's secular Jewishness, with its own mysteries and humor, as most representative of the American Jewish experience. Thirty years into his career as a writer, Philip Roth remains known to most readers as a self-hating Jew or a flawed would be comic.

Philip Roth and the Jews shows Roth the ironist, the master of absurdity, for whom twentieth-century America and modern Jewish history resonate with each other's signal accomplishments and anxieties. Roth's "egoism" is a persona, an abashed moralist discomfited by the world. Cooper shows that in the "Jewish" works Roth has taken the pulse of America and read the pressures of the world. Modernism, the universal tug for individual sovereignty and against tribal definition, is an issue everywhere.

Roth's own odyssey of betrayal, loss, and return - the pattern of the Jewish writer in the last 200 years - is so shaped by his origins that Roth has carried his home and neighborhood into the corners of the earth and thus never left them.
Subjects: Judaism in literature, Jews, Jews in literature, History and criticism, Criticism and interpretation, Jewish fiction, Religion, Characters, Roth, philip, 1933-2018, Jewish literature, history and criticism
People: Philip Roth
LC classification: PS3568.O855 Z62 1996