The Double’s Allegiance: Philip Roth and the Question of Zion

Midway through Philip Roth's brilliant and maddening 1993 novel Operation Shylock, Roth's alter ego — who this time around is simply named Philip Roth — takes a road trip from Jerusalem to Ramallah with a long-lost friend, a Palestinian intellectual named George Ziad. All the way there, past innumerable checkpoints, Ziad rants about the corrosive psychic effects of Israeli apartheid — on Jews. In Ziad's view, hegemonic support for the Zionist project has rendered the Jewish people tragically "goylike."1 He wonders whether they can snap out of it. "What happens," Ziad demands, "when American Jews discover that they have been duped, that they have constructed an allegiance to Israel on the basis of irrational guilt, of vengeful fantasies, above all, above all, based on the most naïve delusions about the moral identity of the state?"2 Philip doesn't answer. The friends arrive at their destination, the military tribunal of a Palestinian teenager accused of throwing Molotov cocktails at Israeli soldiers. Israeli army personnel have injected the boy with drugs to prevent him from speaking at his own trial.

A furor erupted last month when Ilhan Omar, a freshman congresswoman from Minnesota, described the obstacles she has faced as an outspoken Muslim supporter of Palestinian liberation. Omar observed that support for Israel — like loyalty to the gun or fossil fuel industries — remains entrenched in American political life thanks to the efforts of a powerful lobby. "I want to talk about the political influence in this country that says it is okay for people to push for allegiance to a foreign country," Omar said. Never mind that supporters of the Israeli government often speak of a "special relationship" between Israel and the United States. Omar's opponents seized on the word "allegiance," claiming that it could only signify one thing: anti-Semitism. Democratic lawmakers responded treacherously, proposing a resolution against anti-Semitism designed to censure their colleague.

But the smear campaign against Omar did not go as planned. Young Jewish leftists disagreed with its premise forcefully enough that their response, along with resistance from within the legislature led by the Congressional Black and Progressive Caucuses, forced party leaders to retreat. As though intent on playing out a twist from a Philip Roth novel in the writer's memory — Roth died last year at the age of 85 — Democrats amended their resolution at the last minute to condemn hate itself.

When the rising generation of unapologetically anti-Zionist Jews looks for its ancestors, will they remember Roth for asking the question: now what happens? Or will they remember his silence in the face of it?

---

I read Operation Shylock, an unhinged entry in the Roth canon poised at the juncture of his midcareer metafiction and his historically sweeping late work, several months after his death, and for an admittedly vulgar reason: I wanted to know if, with regard to the moral identity of the Jewish state, we were on the same furious team. I already knew that Roth was important to me. As a teenager, I first read Portnoy's Complaint (1969), a stand-up special in the shape of a novel in which, over the course of a single therapy session, a young man recounts a life so bloated with "shame and shame and shame and shame" that he suspects he's stuck "in the middle of a Jewish joke."3 I remember being glued to it in the car on the way to the religious school I attended for four hours after regular school every Tuesday and another four hours on Sunday mornings, which I hated but did not realize I could quit. Later, my favorite Roth novel was The Ghost Writer (1979), a work in which Anne Frank may or may not be alive, hot, and living in the Berkshires. In that book, a short story by Roth's alter ego Nathan Zuckerman skewering Jewish life in his hometown earns him a stern letter from Judge Leopold Wapter, one of the most prominent Jews in all Newark, complete with a numbered list of leading questions:

1. If you had been living in Nazi Germany in the thirties, would you have written such a story? . . .

6. What set of aesthetic values makes you think that the cheap is more valid than the noble and the slimy is more truthful than the sublime? . . .

8. Can you explain why in your story, in which a rabbi appears, there is nowhere the grandeur of oratory with which Stephen S. Wise and Abba Hillel Silver and Zvi Masliansky have stirred and touched their audiences?4

All these questions capture the easily wounded pride barely concealed behind discount mandarinism characteristic of postwar American Jewish respectability politics. But the one about Stephen S. Wise, an early-twentieth-century Reform rabbi who lent his name to a large synagogue in Los Angeles that we didn't go to, still makes me blush harder than any joke about jerking off into chopped liver. Respectability can be doubly shameful because its banality hardly seems worth the desecration. Roth showed me my life was worth profaning.

Allegiance to Israel was an intrinsic element of a stretch of American Jewish life that encompassed both the aspirational midcentury milieu Roth frequently took on, and the comfortable suburbs I grew up in at the century's end. Ilhan Omar was talking about military aid, but I am talking about summer camp, where once, in a forced-choice game, we were asked, "If America and Israel went to war, whose side would you fight on?" (I assume we were meant to draw the conclusion that America and Israel must never go to war.) Many of us were brought up to believe that our real home lay in a country where only Jews belonged. But the increasingly confident anti-Zionist Jewish left in the United States has rejected the idea that our lives are given meaning by the bloody realities of Jewish settlement on the colonial frontier. We are diasporists: we believe we make our homes through solidarity with the stateless wherever we are.

I wondered if Roth might be one of us. The author mostly wrote about Jews in America, but Israel hovers around the edges of many of his novels. Portnoy's Complaint, for instance, ends with Alexander Portnoy visiting the holy land. He finds it difficult to take the place seriously. "In their short pants," Alex muses, "the men remind me of the head counselors at the Jewish summer camps I worked at during college vacations — only this isn't summer camp, either. It's home!" The sheer ubiquity of Jews in the country reminds him of a familiar racial hierarchy, too: "Hey, here we're the WASPs!"5 In the end, Alex finds that — in a punchline to the joke that is his life — he is unable to get an erection in the Jewish state. "Where other Jews flourish," he proclaims, "I now expire!"6 In Roth's 1989 novel The Counterlife, meanwhile, Nathan Zuckerman flies to Israel to confront his philandering brother, who has abandoned his family in Newark to become a West Bank settler.

Roth was typically more of an aesthetic than a political radical even in his youth, and the grand old manhood that graced his last decades marked a progression, not a break. But I suspected that, beyond the pleasures of endlessly refracted representation, he also offered a resource for Jewish anti-Zionism hidden in plain sight. And so Roth died and, bored of the lionizing obits about the prince of American Jewish letters, I decided to read Operation Shylock, which I knew concerned a Philip Roth impersonator peddling a political program called diasporism. As it turned out, Operation Shylock had seen me coming from a mile away.

---

Operation Shylock is about a writer, Philip Roth, who discovers that a huckster calling himself "Philip Roth" is on the loose in Israel, using the writer's brand to raise money for his own cause. Fake Roth, whose true origins are shrouded in mystery, has been traveling the world proclaiming Israel "the gravest threat to Jewish survival since the end of World War Two."7 Well, fair enough. But Fake Roth believes, further, that Jews should return en masse from Israel to eastern Europe, and has met with Lech Walesa, who led Poland's Solidarity movement, to discuss their repatriation — a dubious notion, not least because many Jews do not descend from eastern Europe to begin with. More dubious still is Fake Roth's reasoning: "horrendous as Hitler was," he argues, the Third Reich was only a flash in the pan — whereas the hatred of Arabs for Jews is intractable, cosmic, racial.8 The imposter's sought-after allies include Meir Kahane, real-life leader of the Jewish Defense League, a militant Jewish supremacist organization that birthed a far-right Israeli political party now caucusing with Benjamin Netanyahu's Likud party in the Knesset. Zionism's ultimate mistake, Fake Roth concludes, is that, by settling in the Middle East, Jews have reneged on fulfilling "the great Jewish European destiny."9 (Oh.) Upon learning all this, Real Roth flies to Jerusalem to confront his doppelgänger. Considerable hijinks ensue.

The trap was set and I fell in. I had wanted Roth — the real real Roth — to articulate a diasporist politics for me, and the very premise of Operation Shylock suggested that he felt this demand and scoffed at it. For the first few chapters of the book, I was impressed by his devilishness in forcing me into company with a character for whom "diasporism" is simply the name of a rebranded white supremacy. But I was also disappointed. Fake Roth is a stunted schmendrick; Real Roth — let's call him Philip from now on to keep ourselves sane — nicknames him "Moishe Pipik," Yiddish for "Moses Bellybutton." It seemed to me that there was something stunted, too, about Roth's take on diasporism, an epic troll standing in for real thought. But then George Ziad showed up — with his own never-mentioned double, Edward Said, hovering behind him.

Ziad, a beloved graduate school classmate of Philip's who long ago gave up a professorship in the United States and moved home to Palestine, quickly comes to occupy the heart of the novel. Out of touch for decades, the men encounter each other by chance (or is it?) in the Jerusalem shuk and warmly reunite. Ziad is brilliant and inconsolable regarding the fate of his people under Israeli rule. And, even in the terms given to us by Operation Shylock, he is a diasporist.

In the remarkable scene in which Philip and Ziad drive to Ramallah, Ziad, who has confused Philip with his pretender, declares himself to his companion as a devoted follower. In one sense, Ziad's support for the odious Moishe Pipik is strategic, even diplomatic: he desires the end of Jewish sovereignty in his homeland, and Pipik's debased diasporism promises a path toward this end. Yet he also shares with Pipik — and, it seems, with Philip and with Roth — a conviction that for Jews, the creation of Israel has meant the tragic loss of diaspora itself. In Palestinian history, the year 1948 marks the nakba, or catastrophe, in which Zionist militants razed hundreds of villages, massacring their inhabitants and creating nearly a million refugees. In Israeli history, it marks the birth of an independent state. But Ziad claims to speak from the perspective of Jewish history; in his telling, 1948 becomes a kind of nakba of the Jewish soul, the outcome of an "unthinkable interrelationship, bordering on complicity" between Nazis and Zionists who shared the dream of wiping out the cultural, social, intellectual, and political life of diaspora Jewry and all it stood for: ambivalence, absurdism, emasculation.10

For Ziad, diasporic Jewishness survived the birth of Israel only as a phantom. American Jews, wracked with survivors' guilt in the wake of the Holocaust, pinned their sense of peoplehood to an identification with "a Jewish military state gloating and triumphant" and dedicated themselves to justifying the continued expansion of that state by consecrating a lost sense of victimhood. Other than that, they had pretty much assimilated. "Green lawns, white Jews — you wrote about it," Ziad tells Philip. "You crystallized it in your first book."11 Ziad's impassioned postcolonial reading of Philip's oeuvre — which is, of course, identical to Roth's — finally descends into fawning desperation. "Philip, you are a Jewish prophet and you always have been," he concludes. "How can I serve you?"12

At the end of Operation Shylock, Philip is abducted by the Mossad and asked to become a spy for the Jewish state. His handler takes a dark view of his own work. "I am a ruthless man working in a ruthless job for a ruthless country," Agent Smilesburger tells his captive.13 But at least, Smilesburger adds pointedly, he's not trying to wheedle out of the charge by performing political agonies. Philip takes the job, which leads to Ziad's death and ultimately to the bowdlerization of the very novel we are reading. At the request of his handler, Philip tells us, he has excised a chapter about his mission, the titular Operation Shylock. We know only that he has infiltrated a PLO meeting in Athens in order to obtain intelligence about "Jewish anti-Zionist elements threatening the security of Israel."14

I came to Operation Shylock hoping it would offer evidence toward an anti-Zionist interpretation of Roth's work; Roth laughed, wrote the exegesis himself, and fed it into the shredder. Within the world of the novel, Pipik's epic trolling and Ziad's strong reading are inextricable: the latter draws its strength from the slapstick and yet deeply serious misunderstanding enabled by the former. Ziad radicalizes Roth's own hysterical vision of postwar American Jewishness, drawing out of it a language with which to resist Israeli occupation. Pipik's diasporism is a doppelgänger of this critique — a straw man, a fetish, an idol for Roth to break. Pipik reveals that behind every refusal of ethnonationalism lies another ethnonationalism. This is, of course, a fascist lie. But by presenting diasporism as a seduction that Philip resists, Roth can reframe his alter ego's quietism as negation. For all its surreal trappings, the novel slides into what C. Wright Mills called "crackpot realism," an ideological mode in which complicity with power is recast as the refusal of illusion. As the critic Moustafa Bayoumi observes, this mode would become central to "the late aesthetics of the War on Terror" in thrillers like Homeland and Zero Dark Thirty, in which tough-minded American government agents discover that there is no alternative to the torture of Muslim enemies.15 We might recall here that Philip Roth is a favorite novelist of Barack Obama.

---

For much of his career, Roth's muse was his own status as a pariah in the American Jewish community. Roth's detractors, especially after Portnoy's Complaint, ran the gamut from local rabbis to intellectual leaders like Irving Howe and Gershom Scholem. In many of his novels, these critics were repurposed as interlocutors. "If you had been living in Nazi Germany in the thirties," they ask him, "would you have written such a story?" This maneuver puts the meta in Roth's metafiction. It compels us to understand literary self-consciousness not as a trick but as a record, one side of a writer's long-running spat with the world.

This approach to gathering literary material also required Roth to exaggerate the terms of his excommunication. The scandalized reviews and pulpit denunciations he received were real — but so were the Jewish book prizes he began winning in 1959 with Goodbye, Columbus, and wrote about much less often.16 In Operation Shylock, he calls his own bluff: at one point, Pipik smirks that Philip is "coming back into the Jewish fold again because he wants a Nobel Prize."17 Roth's stature, even or especially in the establishment precincts of American Jewish life, only increased in the decades that followed Operation Shylock, as the writer turned his hand to national epics like American Pastoral (1997) and The Plot Against America (2004).

But even Roth's most outré work has been kosher ever since the old politics of respectability gave way, in the Jewish world as elsewhere in American life, to the cynical co-option of dissent. This reclamation has occasionally bordered on the grotesque. Shortly after the arrest of Harvey Weinstein on sexual assault charges, a hot take in the Jewish web magazine Tablet used Portnoy's Complaint to justify describing Weinstein, almost fondly, as "a deeply Jewish kind of pervert." The article's author, the religion journalist Mark Oppenheimer, noted that Portnoy lusted after all-American white girls; Weinstein, likewise, assaulted many non-Jewish women. Oppenheimer argued that Weinstein's sexual pursuits, like Portnoy's, signified an anxious celebration of Jewish entry into the promised land of whiteness — although Oppenheimer used the deracinated term "power," the better to continue the celebration. It was a reading worthy of Moishe Pipik, and the magazine was forced to apologize.

Green lawns, white Jews. A triumphant march toward empire, with some hang-ups mixed in. It would be a great loss if Roth were remembered as an exponent of this vision for American Jewry rather than its sharpest satirist — if he were buried, essentially, in one of his own traps. At the same time, I don't think we can look to him as a diasporist forebear. This is not, in the end, because I suspect Roth of more than a grudging allegiance to Israel. It is, rather, because his allegiance to America ran so deep. Throughout Roth's work, not Israel but the United States is a Jewish haven that must be safeguarded. In Operation Shylock, Philip sacrifices Ziad not because he hates Palestinians but because, when his adventure is over, he can go home. We might look instead to the real Edward Said, who could not. For good reason, Said sometimes described himself as "the last Jew."18

Late last month, Israel began bombing Gaza again. Donald Trump recognized Israel's illegal occupation of the Golan Heights, while at the AIPAC conference in Washington, D.C., Netanyahu lashed out at Ilhan Omar as Democrats stood by. We are allowed to speak about this now — some of us, sometimes. I remember when the silence was louder, when bombs fell on Gaza in 2008, and the rambunctious newsroom at the Jewish Daily Forward, the newspaper where I worked as a reporter, grew quiet and withdrawn. I remember accompanying a Birthright Israel trip sponsored by Tablet, where I worked a little later, laughingly assured by my editor that I could staff the trip and write the exposé. I remember how much time I spent imagining I was a spy, then discovering I was just a patsy.

It is a relief to have blown our cover. But we should be wary of the special dispensation to speak, as the lost children of Zionists, as others continue to be silenced. I am looking forward to the return of the Jews, and watchful already for false prophets of diasporism.

---

Ari M. Brostoff is a writer and graduate student in New York. She edited the Sex and the City edition of Post45's experimental criticism series "The Slow Burn."

---

References