Phillip Roth

The Jewish Hall of Fame

I once heard Sarah Silverman tell a joke about the pride Jews inevitably take in the accomplishments of other Jews. To paraphrase, ...

Obscene Recommendations

Some of the literary works I deal with in Unclean Lips are relatively well-known—Henry Roth’s Call It Sleep (1935) and Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint (1969), for ...

Sports Is Like Hollywood: They’re Both Jewish!

In  Operation Shylock , Philip Roth wrote a passage that, had he not written it, we would have needed to ...

Jews and Anxiety

This past May I published an essay in The New York Times titled “Do the Jews Own Anxiety?” Not long afterward, ...