Posted on November 28, 2023
Desperate times call for degenerate measures. For American Jews, this would be a good time to call upon Philip Roth.
Thane Rosenbaum
Desperate times call for degenerate measures. For American Jews, this would be a good time to call upon Philip Roth.
It just so happens that Roth, in the personage of one of his best known but least likeable characters, the puppeteer Mickey Sabbath, is answering the call, appearing Off-Broadway in a stellar adaptation of his novel “Sabbath’s Theater.” The play preserves Roth’s distinctive dialogue, inner voice, and, yes, even masturbatory talents (stay tuned). Produced by the New Group at the Pershing Square Signature Center, it stars John Turturro (also its co-adaptor), as Sabbath, and Elizabeth Marvel, as the various accented women and sexual co-conspirators in his life.
Both actors are among the finest of their generation, and their considerable talents are on evident display in a cleverly spare production that relies on the kinds of whimsical shadows, physical contortions, and damaged psyches that an indecent puppeteer like Sabbath, retired and writhing from arthritis, would appreciate.
Beginning with his debut novella and stories, “Goodbye, Columbus,” which received the National Book Award in 1960, Roth published 29 more books over a career that spanned nearly 60 years and brought him great acclaim (“Sabbath’s Theater” received the National Book Award, too, in 1995). For many Jews, however, Roth’s prodigious output, and literary notoriety, were sources of shame.
After all, he was arguably America’s least inhibited writer. His novels exhilarated in a joy ride of taboo subjects, his protagonists placed in immodest situations, mostly involving sex and largely without moral regret. Perhaps no serious writer in any language was less shy about masturbation. Let’s put it this way: Those who read “Portnoy’s Complaint” have never looked at a piece of liver the same way again.
Roth came of writerly age at a time when Jews were just getting comfortable in America. The postwar boom years welcomed Jews as full participants. Finally, they were accepted as part of the American mainstream. Children were admitted to Ivy League universities. Once-restricted clubs were reserving spots for Jews who comported themselves as Mayflower descendants. There were doctors and lawyers galore. Jewish accents started to fade. And Jews themselves were less of a novelty. Many Americans knew the menu at Jewish delis and learned that twisting grapevine dance known as the hora.
The Holocaust was still not a subject fit for polite conversation, and American Jews were eager not to be regarded as history’s perpetual victims. If anything, Jews were taking the lead among white Americans in the Civil Rights Movement — without any special pleading for themselves.
Right in the middle of all that forward motion was Philip Roth, with his plotlines that celebrated sexual liberation and teased Jewish paranoia, conspicuous consumption, and defilements of its traditions. (“Fiddler on the Roof” debuted on Broadway in 1964. The irreverent and often arrested Jewish stand-up comedian, Lenny Bruce, played Carnegie Hall in 1961.)
The cultural message was clear: Jews could take a joke and assimilate with the best of them, and would receive wide acceptance so long as they were willing to dial down the Chosenness, Americanize their names, and lop off parts of their noses. Those very Jews, in particular, who Roth mocked for their fear of giving non-Jews reasons to be antisemitic excoriated him. Rabbis across America pounded on pulpits: “This guy is making us look bad in front of the Gentiles. He is a one-man band of extreme shanda.”
For Roth, Jews were made of sturdier stock, and if they weren’t, so be it — they would remain stock characters in his art, their hypocrisy and anxieties exposed for all to see. He presupposed Jews as being more comfortable in their skin, and having more foreskin in the game of this America. They were Americans, after all, and while murderous antisemitism might exist elsewhere, here it was largely under wraps.
Watching Turturro and Marvel deliver Roth’s pitch-perfect banter (this is Turturro’s second Roth performance, having starred in HBO’s “The Plot Against America”), moving about the stage like two familiar animals in heat — with all that air-grinding sex and existential angst — suggests there was little use for props. But one does appear toward the play’s end — an American flag.
The Stars and Stripes has more than just a locational purpose. It conveys a hint of patriotism, cloaking Sabbath, as if in spite of his bitter disappointments and feelings of loss, at least America has given Jews nothing further to worry about. It is, and has become, a home.
These days, however, what’s happening on city streets suggests that Roth’s confidence in America, if that’s what it was, may have been misplaced. The skittish Jews he so mercilessly mocked may have been right all along. America is showing the wear and tear of a temporary home. Throughout history, Jews eventually wore out their welcome. America seemed to be the exception to the rule.
But look what’s being staged outside the theater. From Times Square to Grand Central Station to Bryant Park — and on many American college campuses — roving bands of pro-Palestinian agitators are ostensibly protesting Israel’s military campaign in Gaza. But the shouted slogans behind those keffiyeh masks fail to mask the unmistakable sight of enraged mobs looking to harm Jews — any Jews at all.
Ironically, the flag draped around Turturro is being defiled by presidents from a number of American universities who appallingly believe that pogromist behavior is protected under the First Amendment.
Photo by Monique Carboni
All that venomous rhetoric, wild belligerency, and aggressive actions — not to mention the malicious tearing down of flyers representing the children that Hamas is still holding hostage. The bloodcurdling events of October 7 unleashed a torrent of ancillary Jew-hatred that may have been dormant, but now is most definitely out in the open.
Perhaps those paragliders didn’t just invade the sovereignty of Israel; they also gave license to deranged Jew-hating jihadists.
Broadway has been doing its bit, as of late, to remind Jews not to get too cozy. Tom Stoppard’s “Leopoldstadt,” and the musical “Parade,” exposed the folly of believing that antisemitism has no place in such cultivated strongholds as Vienna and Atlanta. Jewish history is replete with such misguided thinking and heartbreaking gullibility.
Sabbath is the day of rest. The prescient timing of “Sabbath’s Theater,” and the mayhem taking place beyond its balcony, might cause American Jews not to be so casual in their rest. Roth’s depiction of brashly unapologetic Jews, once secure of their place in America, may now belong to a different era, entirely.
Thane Rosenbaum is a novelist, essayist, law professor and Distinguished University Professor at Touro University, where he directs the Forum on Life, Culture & Society. He is the legal analyst for CBS News Radio. His most recent book is titled “Saving Free Speech … From Itself.”