The Black-Jewish Matrix

Crucially, moreover, Roth wrote across a remarkable and volatile period in Jewish American history throughout which race was explicitly foregrounded as an issue. These are events from which his fiction –despite its markedly unstable rapport with reality – should not be abstracted. Yet a curiously inverted relationship reigns between the titanic number of Roth’s black characters, and the critical Roth scholarship on race. Articles and chapters on race represent the barest handful of what is otherwise a prodigious body of criticism. Recently, Philip Roth Studies devoted a special issue to “Roth and Race,” but no one has yet published an entire book that systematically treats and charts the appearance of characters of color or the numerous meanings of race in Roth. In this essay we hope to tease out some productive avenues toward such a text.