‘Angry Jews since World War II: Reconstructing American Jewish

Identity during ‘‘Renaissance’’ of Jewish writing’

by

Michael Lydon

Norman Rockwell The Saturday Evening Post

Word Count: 5159

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‘My Union. My Union wasn’t the teacher’s union – it was the Union of Angry Jews. They

organized. Know their motto? Angrier Than Thou. That should be your next book. Angry

Jews since World War II’. Philip Roth, I Married a Communist

‘I’ll illustrate the Four Freedoms … I’ll express the ideas in simply everyday scenes.

Freedom of Speech – A New England town meeting. Freedom from Want – a Thanksgiving

dinner. Take them out of the noble language of the proclamation and put them in terms

everybody can understand’. Norman Rockwell

‘All the striving is for one end. I do not entirely understand this impulse. But it seems to me

that its final end is the desire for pure freedom’. Saul Bellow, Dangling Man

Thursday, May 8th

1945, the headline in the New York Times triumphantly proclaims, ‘The

War in Europe is Ended! Surrender is Unconditional; V-E will be Proclaimed Today’.

Amongst the jubilant scenes that would follow in Time Square, and all over America, a new

usable and triumphant past was being created, a past on which the myth of American

‘exceptionalism’, was being constructed upon. However, coupled with this air of triumphant

revelry and emerging societal confidence were issues relating to cultural alienation,

difficulties of self-identification, revealing a society also of directionless selves. It was in this

society of directionless selves seeking to construct themselves anew upon a triumphant past,

that the ‘renaissance’ of Jewish writing would take place. In a country with already long

established anti-Semitic elements, Jewish writers such as Saul Bellow, Arthur Miller and

Philip Roth, sought to reconstruct American Jewish identity. Using the American soldier, the

iconic figure of the new usable and triumphant past, these writers envisioned an American

Jewish identity far removed from the traditional identity constructed in relation to exile from

an ‘old country’. In Saul Bellow’s Dangling Man, Arthur Miller’s Focus and Philip Roth’s I

Married a Communist, The Plot Against America and ‘Defender of the Faith’, the ‘angry

Jew’, faced with an anti-Semitic society of directionless selves, emerged. As Roth’s character

Murray Rinn from I Married a Communist declares, a union of angry Jews was born in the

wake of World War II, whose motto proclaimed ‘Angrier than thou’ (164).

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In Saul Bellow’s Dangling Man1, the

protagonist Joseph’s entry into the ensuing war is

not so much by a heroic charge, but by a

bureaucratic summoning, ‘The postman was putting

a letter in the box next door and he pointed

vigorously at me and drew his finger across his

throat’ (186). As Bellow’s protagonist’s faith is

sealed by this modern grim-reaper, his directionless

alienation comes to an end, certainty is forthcoming:

‘Yes, I shall shoot, I shall take lives; I shall be shot

at, and my life may be taken. Certain blood will be

given for half-certain reasons, as in all wars’ (DM 84). In the era of ‘hardboiled-dom’

(Bellow, DM 9), Joseph’s response to this certainty is not one of heroic noble discourse,

which was indicative of the era, a sort of Hemingway ‘hardboiled-dom’. His response was an

angry acceptance, as he sarcastically proclaims, ‘I am in other hands, relieved of self-

determination, freedom cancelled. Hurray for regular hours! And for the supervision of the

spirit! Long live regimentation!’ (Bellow, DM 191). As noted by Frederick R. Karl, ‘Bellow

saw a postwar America not as a mosaic but as full of warring and divided elements,

nourished by directionless selves’ (33). In other words, Bellow’s American was not a

Rockwellian canvas with shades of heroism, nobility and societal unity, it was quite the

opposite. Bellow’s canvas was a more realistic one, coloured with the warring and divided

elements evident in American society. Bellow’s dangling man Joseph, responds to this

society by alienating himself from it, but, nonetheless, he accepted it. Given the ensuing war,

he allowed for the freedom of others, a freedom he expressed himself with his angry

1 From this point on, Bellow’s Dangling Man will be abbreviated as DM.

Fig. 1. Norman Rockwell’s ‘Freedom of

Speech’ (Mecklenburg 109).

4

acceptance of his forthcoming deployment: ‘whether I liked it or not, they were my

generation, my society, my world. We were figures in the same plot, eternally fixed together’

(Bellow, DM 25).

Critical reception to this work often argues that as ‘a war novel, it is decidedly non-

committal’ (Goldman 7), with Joseph’s response to the war under scrutiny, being that he is of

Jewish heritage, or a nominal Jew. As L.H. Goldman notes, ‘he seems unaware of what is

happening in Europe to the Jews, or if he is cognisant of events taking place, he is unaffected

by them’ (7). Much of this scrutiny is also related to an incident Joseph writes of in his youth

when a friend’s anti-Semitic mother refers to him as a Mephisto, or a devil. His response not

being to challenge this negative assertion but to accept it, even acknowledging it as truth,

‘She had seen through me … had discovered evil (Bellow, DM 77). Often critiqued as being

extremely naive (Goldman 7), and perhaps even alluding to a disparaging assertion on Jewish

bravery, Joseph’s response is, nonetheless, in keeping with his non-committal nature. His

‘Dostoyevskian alienation’ (Lyons 25), is a consequence of this reluctance to commit, be it

to ideological beliefs, such as communism, or even his marital commitments, as illustrated by

his affair with Kitty. Joseph’s relationship with his Jewish heritage, and his standing as a

nominal Jew, is of little importance to him. His reaction to anti-Semitic discourse is not met

with hardboiled action. Therefore, his deployment is not met with Rockwellian heroism,

fitting for the era of the hard-boiled, nor is it met with ideological commitment infused by his

heritage; it is met with angry acceptance. As revealed in his inner discourse with the The

Spirit of Alternatives, dying in the war was the vastest experience of his time, something that

Joseph feared, but, nonetheless, would not deny himself the opportunity of undergoing:

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I would be denying my inmost feelings if I said I wanted to be by-passed and spared

from knowing what the rest of my generation is undergoing. I don’t want to be

humped protectively over my life. I am neither so corrupt nor so hard-boiled that I can

savour my life only when it is in danger of extinction. (Bellow, DM 165-166)

If examined in retrospect, as done by L.H. Goldman, Joseph’s reaction to the war could be

seen as being naive, especially given the horrors inflicted on European Jews; however, it is an

authentic reaction to his situation by a non-committal character. Joseph was willing to fight in

the ensuing war, not for ideological reasons, but as it was his societal role.

DM, Bellow’s first novel, was written while he himself awaited notification of

whether or not he would be deployed to the war. In many ways, Joseph’s sentiments on

deployment echo that of Bellow, who wrote in a personal letter that, ‘I find the prospect of

enjoying the benefits of a peace without having contributed to the peace (of whatever sort; I

am hoping for the best) intensely disagreeable’ (Letters 26). He further suggests that as an

artist he has a right to be excluded, but maintains that he must go for artistic stakes:

‘remember the advice of the old German in Lord Jim “In the destructive element immerse”’

(Bellow, Letters 26). As with Joseph, Bellow’s reasons are not heroic or ideological. Writing

of an early draft of this ‘semi-autobiographical novel’ (Bellow, Letters 32), Bellow declares

that:

It is the complete wartime swansong of a ‘righteous man’ who strove with all his heart

not to be an undergroundling but who now sees himself forced to the pavement and

begins to realise that he may have to be a telluric creature after all because the age

requires it. (Letters 27-28)

Hence, Bellow, and his protagonist Joseph, are both required by their age to engage with the

war. Nevertheless, while they wait or dangle, perhaps soon to be ‘telluric creatures’, they

express themselves by engaging with literature, through writing a diary and prose. This

literary engagement owes much to influence from existentialist writings by Jean-Paul Sartre

and others: ‘The engaged writer knows that words are action’ (Sartre, Literature and

6

Existentialism2 23). For Bellow this literary engagement sees him write about a directionless

America, a country ‘newly exposed to history, affected by the depressions of existentialism

and absurdism, war painted, urban, materialist, angst-ridden, troubled with global

responsibility, struggling to distil meaning and morality from the chaos of utopian and

progressive thought’ (Bradbury, Saul Bellow 26). While for Joseph, his literary engagement

was in the form of an inner discourse with himself by way of a diary. Nevertheless, instead of

engaging with a heroic discourse, with this inner self about the war and anti-Semitism, Joseph

writes, so that he may have ‘a consciousness engagement with the varied craters of the spirit

… Joseph acts as his own therapist – as Dostoevsky’s underground man and Sartre’s

Roquentin (of Nausea) had done’ (Mellard 22). Joseph would soon be free to engage with the

great issues of his day, for a time being, however, he angrily engages with his spirit. Sartre:

since we think that the writer should engage himself completely in his works, and not

as an abject passivity by putting forward his vices, his misfortunes, and his

weaknesses, but as a resolute will and as a choice, as this total enterprise of living that

each one of us is, it is proper that we take up this problem at its beginning and that we,

in our turn, ask ourselves: ‘Why does one write?’. (LAE 35)

For Joseph, writing was an alienating discourse with himself; a discourse in which his

existentialist freedom allowed him to free himself from ‘hardboiled-dom’, ethnic heritage and

ideological commitments. Thus, Bellow’s DM, is expressing a freedom akin to that of a

Rockwellian work, but one that is influenced by European thinking. It is Joseph’s

existentialist freedom that allows him to authentically react to his situation. In Sartrean terms,

authenticity consists of having ‘a true and lucid consciousness of the situation, in assuming

the responsibilities and risks that it involves, in accepting it in pride or humiliation,

sometimes in horror and hate’ (Sartre, Anti-Semite and Jew 90). With this in mind, Joseph

reacts to his situation of deployment with true and lucid consciousness, reluctant and angry,

but, nonetheless, exceptive of his faith.

2 From this point on, Sartre’s Literature and Existentialism, will be abbreviated as LAE.

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Malcolm Bradbury writing on Arthur Miller

and his 1945 novel Focus, remarked that Miller,

like Joseph from Bellow’s work, was himself,

‘another Dangling Man’ (‘Arthur Miller’s Fiction3’

215). Moreover, as with Bellow’s protagonist, and

even Bellow himself, Miller chooses to engage

with literature, while awaiting deployment to the

world’s business. However, whereas DM, is a

‘Bellovian rendition of the post-depression blues’

(Lyons, ‘From Dangling Man’ 24), a work that

engaged with the spirit, or alternatively with ‘the beautiful word ‘‘soul’’ an interrogative

existence’ (Sartre, LAE 18); Focus engages with reality, being ‘a work of fictional realism,

with a liberal import; it is also concerned to express the surrealism – the rising unreality – of

contemporary American life’ (Bradbury, ‘AMF’ 220). Like DM, Focus owes much to

European existentialism. As Bradbury suggests:

It was not concerned with migrant experience, the hard endurance of the urban ghetto,

the loss of an ethnic past, or the transition to New World identity. Instead it was

devoted to the realm of introverted solitude, the waning of the world of realism,

politics, and significant forms of social action, and the problem, in such a vacant and

purposeless world, of constructing the self as a sufficient agent of moral identity and

action. Hence the book owes far more to works like Jean-Paul Sartre. (‘AMF’ 216)

In other words, there is no Steinbeckian collectiveness or Hemingway influenced hard-boiled

action. As with Bellow’s earlier work, Focus is concerned with Dostoyevskian solitude,

coupled with existentialist messaging; ‘contemporary writers should be advised to deliver

messages, that is, voluntarily to limit their writing to the involuntary expression of their

souls’ (Sartre, LAE 32). Interestingly, given his later success as a playwright, Miller adopted

the prose form in this early work. Although, this is perhaps unsurprising given the Sartrean

3 From this point on, Bradbury’s ‘Arthur Miller’s Fiction’, will be abbreviated as ‘AMF’.

Fig. 2. Norman Rockwell’s ‘Freedom from

Want’ (Mecklenburg 110).

8

influence on this work, and the existentialist faith in the prose form, Sartre writes that, ‘Prose

is in essence utilitarian. I would readily define the prose-writer as a man who makes use of

word’ (LAE 19).

Ladislaus Löb argues that, ‘Miller’s ideas on stereotyping in general and anti-

Semitism in particular are very similar to those of Jean-Paul Sartre’ (547). Further arguing

that whether or not ‘owing to Sartre’s direct influence or in response to the broader

intellectual climate, many of his works show clear analogies with existentialism’ (Löb 547).

In relation to Focus, it is apparent that this Sartrean influence is of a direct nature, given

Miller’s representation of anti-Semitism, which echoes closely Sartre’s views expressed in

his 1944 work Anti-Semite and Jew4. Focus begins by portraying a spiritual climate that was

reflexive of the ‘hyper-patriotism’ (Patterson 180), that was ever-present in the closing

months of the war. In this openly antagonistic climate, both Miller’s imagined environment

and his characters, in a Sartrean way, play with anti-Semitic discourse. As the narrator notes

of Newman’s subway trip to work, ‘Above his eyes was carefully printed, Kikes started War.

Below it, Kill kikes kill ki. Apparently the author had been interrupted by the arrival of his

train’ (Miller 13). Miller further writes that for Newman this graffiti and others like it, ‘were

a kind of mute record that the city automatically inscribed in her sleep; a secret newsletter

publishing what the people really thought’ (Miller 13-14). This secret newsletter, or societal

discourse, is followed by Fred’s openly aggressive remarks to Newman on the train, in

relation to ‘niggers’, ‘spics’ and the Jewish ‘they’, or ‘Other’, who he felt were breathing

societal discord (Miler 17-18). These wild, even ridiculous remarks in relation to Jewish

conspiracies coincide with Sartre’s understanding of anti-Semites:

The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by

giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They

delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but

to intimidate at disconcert. (Sartre, ASAJ 20)

4 From this point on, Sartre’s Anti-Semite and Jew, will be abbreviated as ASAJ.

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The Sartrean comparison is also evident in Focus, in Newman’s first meeting with Gertrude,

who he takes as being a ‘Jewess’. Throughout their meeting, Newman’s sexual desire often

takes the form of indignation, assuming a sexual availability because of his misguided

understanding about her ethnicity (Miller 38-40). Sartre noting that one of the elements of

anti-Semitism ‘is a profound sexual attraction toward Jews’ (ASAJ 46). Moreover, throughout

Focus, the anti-Semitic discourse is constantly making reference to a forthcoming war, or

moment of crisis, when they will remove the Jewish ‘Other’ and take what is rightfully theirs.

As Fred proclaims, ‘We bust the Jews open and it’ll all come like a cracked slot machine’

(Miller 78). Sartre writes that, ‘Incapable of understanding modern social organisation, he

[the anti-Semite] has a nostalgia for periods of crisis in which the primitive community will

suddenly appear and attain its temperature of fusion’ (ASAJ 30). However, it is in Miller’s

main protagonist Newman that the Sartrean influence is at its most direct, as this returning

soldier, by finally reacting authentically to his situation, develops a freedom in becoming a

person.

Despite his aversion to Jews, for the most part, Newman is not an anti-Semite, as

made aware to the reader as Focus progresses. Newman begins the narrative as many others

in this era of directionless-selves, misguidedly partaking in anti-Semitic discourse as a way of

seeking definition. In Sartrean terms, Newman and those he represents:

They are not anti-Semites. They are not anything; they are not persons. Since it is

necessary to appear to be something, they make themselves into an echo, a murmur,

and without thinking of evil – without thinking of anything – they go about repeating

learned formulas which give them the right of entry to certain drawing rooms. (ASAJ

51)

This is certainly the image given of Newman as he gains access to Fred’s basement,

wordlessly welcome, so that he can finally tell Fred about those he killed during the war

(Miller 78); his ‘misguided search for security in the spurious comradeship of anti-Semites

reveals him as a pathetic fellow-traveller rather than a driving agent’ (Löb 548). However, as

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the narrative progresses, Newman’s relationship with ‘Jewishness’ changes; firstly, as a

consequence of his talks with Finkelstein, but more importantly, as a result of him being

taken for a Jew, because of his new glasses, ‘for it is the anti-Semite who makes a Jew’

(Sartre, ASAJ 69). Lawrence D. Lowenthal correctly asserts, that, ‘Both Miller and Sartre

agree that a Jew cannot be defined by religion, race, or national identity: one is a Jew if a

gentile says one is a Jew’ (180). In Newman’s case, it is only by becoming a Jew and

expressing his anger that he can remove himself from the role of pathetic fellow-traveller and

become the assertive driving agent. In existentialist terms, it is ‘by accepting a false identity

that he breaks through to what would be regarded as the authentic self’ (Löb 549). Before

going to the police station to report the attack on Finkelstein and himself by the group of anti-

Semites, Newman is blinded by a rage, to the extent that he does not know whether he struck

Fred, or even where or why he was walking. Remembering that at first he had tried to wave

the attackers toward Finkelstein and his store, Newman was ‘stiffened with disgust’ (Miller

232) for himself, the narrator highlighting his inner discourse, proclaiming, ‘Attack, it was

necessary to attack. Oh, God, if they would come at him now! If he could fight until his arms

fell off …!’ (Miller 232). It was only when Newman got to the police station and aligned

himself as akin to Finkelstein, therefore, making himself a Jew that his anger subsided. Miller

writes that, ‘Mr. Newman felt as though he were setting down a weight which for some

reason he had been carrying and carrying’ (235). Therefore, only in accepting his societal

given role as a Jew, Newman becomes a person, the weight of directionless removed, and no

longer a pathetic fellow-traveller, he enjoys a sort of Rockwellian freedom; the freedom of

the authentic self.

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In Philip Roth’s I Married a Communist5,

much of the narrative is concerned with the

idealistic Communist Iron Rinn, or Ira Ringold, a

returning Jewish soldier who is a casualty of

political persecution, the fifties ‘national obsession’

(Roth, IMAC 9). This obsession, which was at its

most vocal with McCarthyism and the House of

Un-American Activities Committees, was again a

product of ‘hyper patriotism’ but also ‘social

schizophrenia’ (Karl 35), resulting in the societal

directionless that is reflected in the work of Jewish ‘renaissance’ writers like Bellow, Miller

and Roth. As with Miller’s Newman, in terms of existentialism, Ira is made a Jew by anti-

Semites, only this time by his comrades during deployment to Iran. Also, as with Newman,

his reaction is one of anger, as upon being called, ‘a nigger-loving Jew bastard’, he nearly

drowns the ‘southern hillbilly’ who was responsible (Roth, IMAC 48-49). Furthermore, in

addition to this anger, during the war Ira developed misguided utopian dreams about

communism. As argued by Alan Wald, ‘the Communist movement preached a cultural

pluralist and internationalist universalism appealing to young men and women breaking free

of the shackles of shtetl and ghetto isolation’ (171). Thus, as with his friend and fellow

Communist party member, Arthur Sokolow, Ira was,

another of those assertive, self educated Jewish boys … recently back from a war in

which they’d discovered Europe and politics, in which they’d really discovered

America through the soldiers they had to live alongside, in which they’d begun,

without formal assistance but with a gigantic naive faith in the transforming powers of

art, to read the fifty or sixty opening pages of the novels of Dostoyevsky. (Roth,

IMAC 127)

5 From this point on, Roth’s I Married a Communist, will be abbreviated as IMAC.

Fig. 3. Norman Rockwell’s ‘Freedom to

Worship’ (Mecklenburg 111).

12

For Ira, this ‘naive faith’ in the transforming powers of art, resulted in him disrupting to all

those who would take them his favourite books, such as Miller’s Focus. A work he even gave

to his wife Eve, a self-hating Jew, of who Ira’s brother Murray remarked, ‘She like Arthur

Miller’s Mr. Newman, was not her face either’ (Roth, IMAC 160). Hence, Ira’s actions were

governed by his European education; in addition, these actions were carried out with angry

assertiveness. Upon being made a Jew, his response, or in Sartrean terms, his ‘avenue of

flight’ (Sartre, ASAJ 94), is American hard-boiled anger. As Murray reveals: ‘That’s one of

the biggest things that America gave to the Jews – gave them their anger. Especially our

generation, Ira’s and mine. Especially after the war’ (Roth, IMAC 163). Although in the case

of Ira, this anger materialised at its most manipulative, destructive, maniacal and in

existentialist terms, ‘inauthentic’.

In an argument with Ira, his former army compatriot, Goldstine declares, ‘The guys a

joke. He can’t think. Never could. The Communists get a dummy like Ira and they use him.

Mankind at its stupidest doesn’t come any stupider’ (Roth, IMAC 97). Throughout the

narrative, Ira is shown to have been used by Johnny O’Day and other Communists, a

manipulation that he then re-enacts on those around him, and in particular towards Nathan.

Later in the narrative, it is also revealed that he murdered as a young man as a consequence

of an anti-Semitic remark, something Murray challenges him on: ‘Because he said something

anti-Semitic? That’s necessitates killing him? The whole weight of Jewish history falls on Ira

Ringold’s shoulders? Bullshit! You just did something ineradicable, Ira – evil and maniacal

and forever rooted in your life’ (Roth, IMAC 300). Therefore, Ira’s anger is shown to

manifest in the worst possible ways, leaving many readers of IMAC, feeling his actions are

unbearable. One of these readers was Saul Bellow, who in a personal letter to Roth remarked

that IMAC was an ‘outstanding defect’ (Bellow, Letters 540). A reason was, Bellow wrote,

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Your reader, out of respect for your powers, is more than willing to go along with

you. He will not, as I was not, be able to go along with your Ira, probably the least

attractive of all your characters. I assume that you can no more bear Ira than the

reader can. But you stand loyally by this cast-iron klutz – a big strong stupid man who

attracts you for reasons invisible to me. (Bellow, Letters 540)

The reason Ira, the ‘cast-iron klutz’, so repulsed Bellow, was his actions, in opposition to

Bellow’s Joseph and Miller’s Newman, were in an existentialist way ‘inauthentic’ to his

‘Jewishness’. Sartre argues that, ‘the authentic Jew is the one who asserts his claim in the

face of the disdain shown towards him’ (Sartre, ASAJ 91). As discussed, this ‘authenticity’ is

evident in Bellow’s Joseph, Miller’s Newman, and to a degree, also in Roth’s Ira, as his anger

is a genuine ‘authentic’ reaction, particularly faced with distain. However, it is how his anger

manifests that is disingenuous, his reaction to situations, or his ‘avenue of flight’, is

‘inauthentic’. Sartre argues that, an ‘inauthentic Jew’ is one who is poisoned by the

stereotype of being a Jew, ‘we may say that their conduct is perpetually over-determined

from the inside’ (Sartre, ASAJ 95). An ‘avenue of flight’ from this situation for the

‘inauthentic Jew’ is masochism, which Sartre regards ‘is the desire to have oneself treated as

an object. Humiliated, despised, or simply neglected, the masochist has the joy of seeing

himself moved, handled, utilized like a thing’ (ASAJ 107). Throughout IMAC, Ira is

continually placing himself within situations in which he seeks to defend not only his

political ideals, but also his standing as a Jew. By marrying Eve, ‘a pathologically

embarrassed Jew’ (Roth, IMAC 152), and living with her anti-Semitic daughter Sylphid, a

woman who regards her own mother Eve as a ‘Kite Bitch’ (Roth, IMAC 11), Ira is

surrounding himself by those who despise him. In addition, by allowing himself to be

handled by O’Day and the Communist party, a party which at that stage was inclusive of

Stalinist anti-Semitic elements, Ira was again illustrating characteristics of a masochist

‘inauthentic Jew’. Throughout the narrative, Ira’s masochistic self-stationing, is met by his

14

angry and manipulative reactions, a cycle of behaviour he was unable to change, as Murray

proclaims, ‘Un-Iraning Ira was impossible’ (Roth, IMAC 304).

Gillian Steinberg correctly notes that, ‘Mention Philip Roth and Judaism to most

average readers, and you will hear much criticism of Roth’s negative, defeatist attitude

toward his own religion— the phrase “self-hating” will probably come up more than once’

(7). Much of this reader, and critical reception, can be seen as a consequence of his

representation of the ‘inauthentic Jew’, such as Ira. Another ‘avenue of flight’ for this

‘inauthentic Jew’, Sartre writes, is self-hate anti-Semitism, ‘in anti-Semitism he denies his

race in order to be more than a pure individual, a man without blemish in the midst of other

men’ (ASAJ 109). This character summary can certainly be seen as a reflection of Eve from

IMAC, and even to a lesser degree with Nathan, who proclaims that he ‘didn’t care to partake

of the Jewish character’ (Roth, IMAC 39). Nevertheless, it is in his work The Plot Against

America6, that again Roth portrays the American soldier with this other characteristic of a

Sartrean ‘inauthentic Jew’. In Roth’s fictional Lindbergh’s America, Jews, in existentialist

language, are again made Jews by the openly anti-Semitic society and governmental policy.

However, they are also, for the most part, proud of their American citizenship, as the narrator

Philip notes,

What they were was they couldn’t get rid off – what they couldn’t even begin to

want to rid of. Their being Jews issued from their being themselves, as did their

being American. It was as it was, in the nature of things. (Roth, TPAA 220)

Throughout the narrative, Roth presents to the reader differing variants of the self-hating Jew,

from Sandy and Aunt Evelyn’s contempt for, ‘frightened, paranoid ghetto Jews’ (Roth, TPAA

227), to Philip’s failed attempt at running away to the Catholic orphanage. However, it is

with the returning soldier Alvin that this self-hate is at its most extreme. Upon returning from

the war, which he fought in as a result of joining the Canadian army, Alvin is mutilated both

6 From this point on, Roth’s The Plot Against America, will be abbreviated as TPAA.

15

physically and mentally. His physical impairment taking the form of an amputated leg, while

his mental mutilation, takes the form of hatred manifesting for the Jewish race. This self-hate

is evident when he confronts his uncle, ‘The Jews? I wrecked my life for the Jews! I lost my

fuckin’ leg for the Jews! I lost my leg for you’ (Roth, TPAA 297). As further insult to his

uncle, and to the Jewish people, he spits in his uncle’s face. Spitting in the face of his race,

his new found enemy, just as he previously spat in the face of the dead German soldier. For

Alvin, his response, his ‘avenue of flight’ from being ‘over-determined from the inside’, is to

deny and even hate his race, so that he can again be pure, ‘a man without blemish in the midst

of other men’. Final examples of Roth’s ‘inauthentic’ Jewish American soldiers can be seen

in one of his most controversial works, the short prose, ‘Defender of the Faith’7, taken from

the collection, Goodbye, Columbus and Five Short Stories; a work ‘almost always read as a

commentary on the religious identity of post-World War II American Jews’ (Steinberg 8). In

this work, both Private Sheldon Grossbart and Sergeant Nathan Max can be seen as

‘inauthentic Jews’, with Grossbart being regarded as masochist, ‘someone had taught

Grossbart the sad rule that only lies can tell the truth’ (Roth, ‘DOTF’ 178); while Max’s

actions could be construed as anti-Semitic or self-hating, as seen with Grossbart’s challenge

to him, ‘There’s no limits to your anti-Semitism is there?’ (Roth, ‘DOTF’ 183).

With these examples of ‘inauthentic Jews’, it is understandable that many readers and

critics regard Roth as himself a self-hating Jew. This noted, the anger, masochism, and self-

hate, evident in Roth’s fictional Jewish American soldiers may warrant their characterisation

in existentialist terms as ‘inauthentic’, nevertheless, it is important to note that this does not

mean that they are not realistic. As Bonnie Lyons notes of Roth:

Early in his career the issue and goal seemed to be to tell the truth about Jews, not to

repudiate or belittle, but for that traditional reason: to teach . . . In the more recent

work, he has added to the idea of telling the truth about Jews’ more philosophical

questions, including ‘What is the truth?’ and ‘What is a Jew?’. (‘Jew on’ 194)

7 From this point on, Roth’s ‘Defender of the Faith’, will be abbreviated as ‘DOTF’.

16

In essence, Roth’s representation of the ‘inauthentic Jew’ was a realistic one. Highlighting,

whether or not these characters are likeable, they are, nonetheless, believable. Steinberg

argues that Roth’s ‘DOTF’, can be read as a akin to tales from the, ‘The Haggadah, the text

read at the Passover seder and most often associated with Passover, [which] contains various

stories from the midrash—a collection of rabbinic explanations for and expansions on

biblical stories’ (9). She further argues, that a comparison can be drawn between Grossbart

and Marx, and four brothers from a Passover midrash, concluding that like these four

brothers, who each share a distinct character trait, Grossbart and Max, ‘acts in ways that are

wicked, wise, simple, and unquestioning at different times and in different situations’

(Steinberg 17). As Sartre argues, ‘we must grasp the idea that it is the situation of the Jew

which must under all circumstances serve us as a guiding thread’ (ASAJ 93). What ‘avenue of

flight’ taken to their situation will determine their

‘authenticity’. In Roth’s noted works, his Jewish

American soldiers Ira, Alvin, Grossbart and Marx,

react to their situations with anger, masochism, and

self-hate, expressing a character and societal

freedom in doing so. As Roth himself argues, ‘what

Jewish history comes down to is that at long last

we have in our ranks one of everything’ (Reading

Myself and Others8 199). Hence, in a similar way

to Rockwell’s idealised America, Roth’s characters

are illustrations of societal freedom.

8 From this point on, Roth’s Reading Myself and Others, will be abbreviated as RMAO.

Fig. 4. Norman Rockwell’s ‘Freedom from

Fear’ (Mecklenburg).

17

Susannah Heschel in her seminal essay, ‘Imagining Judaism in America’, argues that

post-World War II, ‘In a reversal of the earlier American Jewish attitude, Europe was no

longer viewed as a place of confinement, but as a source of inspiration that would rescue

American Judaism from what was felt to be its moribund state’ (33). She further writes that in

the wake of the Holocaust and influenced by new theological ideals, such as theopaschism, a

theory by Abraham Joshua Heschel relating to the suffering of God alongside man (Heschel

41), many American Jews sought to ‘restore the authenticity of Jewish identity’ (Heschel 41).

For many, this restoration of Judaism, took the form of romanticising the shtetl, or the small

Jewish villages of pre-World War II Eastern Europe, while for others it took the form of

hoping to partake in aliyah, a Zionist idea of emigrating to Israel (Heschel 43-44). However,

for others, they sought to define anew American Jewish identity, by finding direction in

America’s directionless society. Ruth R. Wisse writes that, ‘American Jews were not only

spared the Holocaust, they unwittingly drew from the moral credit that accrued to its victims’

(192). She further argues that as a consequence of this ‘sparing’,

during the same remarkable decade when the Jews lost one third of their numbers and

reclaimed their land after two millennia of foreign occupation (and while everywhere

else in the Jewish world writers were caught up by the exigency of survival and

rescue), American Jews made a dramatic entry into American letters. (Wisse 192)

These American Jews, such as Bellow, Miller and Roth, also looked to Europe as way of

defining anew American Jews, only their works looked at existential uncertainty, as

influenced by writers such as Sartre. Nevertheless, as argued by Karl, if the existentialist or

‘Sartrean emphasis on the individual reinventing himself or herself’ (49), was to work in a

society that was spared the horrors of the war, there was needed an ‘American sense of

existentialism’ (Karl 49). To achieve this, Bellow, Miller and Roth, took the American

soldier, a man who in Bellovian terms could soon be a ‘telluric creature’, to reconstruct

Jewish American identity. In their literary constructs, Joseph, Newman, Ira, Alvin, Grossbart

and Marx, they revealed what Sartre would regard as ‘authentic’ or ‘inauthentic’ Jews. These

18

characters reacted to their situations choosing either to be ‘authentic’ to their ‘Jewishness’, or

to seek an ‘avenue of flight’, such as masochism or self-hate anti-Semitism, which would see

them ‘inauthentic’ to their race. Although, for most readers and critics of these works, the

reaction of the characters to their situations, may reveal them as non-committal, pathetic-

followers, ‘cast-iron klutzs’, masochists, or even self-haters, they are characters that,

nonetheless, are realistic in their reactions to their situations. Roth has argued that, ‘Instead of

being taken seriously as a treat, man is effectively silenced by being made popular’ (RMAO

190). In the case of the angry Jewish characters represented in the works of these Jewish

‘renaissance’ writers, the important point was making them visible. Sartre writes that

language, ‘is a prolongation of our senses, a third eye which is going to look into our

neighbour’s heart’ (LAE 20). Accordingly, writing is a means of conquering (Sartre, LAE 38);

it is a discourse between writer and reader, in which ‘the writer appeals to the reader’s

freedom to collaborate in the production of his work’ (Sartre, LAE 46). Thus, Bellow, Miller

and Roth, seek to appeal to a reader’s freedom, to engage with their ‘authentic’ and

‘inauthentic’ angry Jews, to engage, so that as a reader they might accept, therefore,

conquering anti-Semitic persecution, while reinventing Jewish Americans anew.

To conclude, the idealised image of American society in the final years of World War

II, and beyond into the fifties, is perhaps best seen in the work of Norman Rockwell. In this

Rockwellian America, as illustrated by his ‘Four Freedoms’, a series of paintings of ‘simply

everyday scenes’ (Mecklenburg 106), heroism, nobility, abundance, tolerance, and safety,

make up the backbone of this idealised society. Rockwell constructs a societal image of

‘exceptionalism’, of clear societal and individual direction, and, most importantly, a land of

freedom, that is given to the universal viewer; a man or woman who thinks of nothing but

universal values, ‘He [or she] is a pure and abstract affirmation of the inalienable right of

man’ (Sartre, LAE 78). In contrast to this image of American society, Jewish ‘renaissance’

19

writers, Saul Bellow, Arthur Miller, and Philip Roth, presented to the reader an image of a

directionless society, fraught with conflict, anti-Semitism, and poisoned by ‘hyper patriotism’

and ‘social schizophrenia’. It was in this society, that they sought to re-invent Jewish

American identity, by presenting to the universal man and woman the angry Jewish

American soldier. In presenting these characters as flawed and even unlikeable constructs,

these writers are seeking to appeal to a reader’s freedom, so that literary engagement, may act

as a way of conquering prejudice. Thus, these American soldiers, Bellow’s Joseph, Miller’s

Newman, and Roth’s Ira, Alvin, Grossbart and Marx, are illustrations of freedom, worthy of a

Rockwell painting. In portraying their ‘authentic’ and ‘inauthentic’ angry reactions to their

situations, these Jewish ‘renaissance’ writers are appealing to the freedom of the universal

man or woman to accept. They are Jewish writers who strive for their angry Jews to be made

visible, to be accepted, to be free. As Bellow’s Joseph writes, ‘All the striving is for one end.

I do not entirely understand this impulse. But it seems to me that its final end is the desire for

pure freedom’ (DM 154). For pure freedom.

20

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