Back in 1963, the late Philip Roth wrote an essay for Commentary entitled “Writing About Jews.” It’s a powerful manifesto about the purpose of fiction—one incidentally about postwar Jewish America—but with broader relevance. Is the point of an individual novel or short story to portray all of humanity, or something specific about human nature via a handful of characters or even one protagonist? Is it the responsibility of artists from minority communities to depict their fellow group members in a flattering light, or even to attempt to achieve an accurate sweeping overview of the group in question?

Roth did not hand-wring about any of this: “Fiction is not written to affirm the principles and beliefs that everybody seems to hold, nor does it seek to guarantee us of the appropriateness of our feelings.”

Moreover, he wrote, it is not a novel or story’s responsibility to replicate sociology, but rather to showcase aspects of human nature eluded by other avenues:

“The test of any literary work is not how broad is its range of representation—for all that breadth may be characteristic of a kind of narrative—but the depth with which the writer reveals whatever it may be that he has chosen to represent.”

Roth specifically took issue with Jewish communal leaders and members of the Jewish community press, who saw his depictions of Jewish adulterers and the like as unseemly, especially so soon after the Holocaust. They were, per Roth, missing the point:

“[L]ooking at fiction as they do—in terms of ‘approval’ and ‘disapproval’ of Jews, ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ attitudes toward Jewish life—they are likely not to see what it is that the story is really about.”

Roth wrote for general readerships, but also understood himself as in a competition of sorts with Jewish leaders over Jewish audiences:

“If there are Jews who have begun to find the stories the novelists tell more provocative and pertinent than the sermons of some of the rabbis, perhaps it is because there are regions of feeling and consciousness in them which cannot be reached by the oratory of self-congratulation and self-pity.”

At first, when reading Roth here, I thought, they’re mad about Portnoy’s Complaint, but then I remembered the year: 1963. Portnoy was only published in 1969. Look how furious people were at him in the early 1960s! Little did they know.

The fault line, for ’60s Philip Roth, had been art versus parochialism. Universalism and individualistic greatness—and freedom—versus being a timid little mouse worried what non-Jews would think, worried about propriety and respectability. And the question at hand was about the works themselves—how were Jews depicted within stories written by Jewish authors, authors informed by their own experience.

Today, the fault line is something else........

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