Tagged “Portnoy’s Complaint”

Philip Roth, enfant terrible turned peerless chronicler of American Jewish life, is dead at 85

Philip Roth at the National Humanities Medal ceremony at the White House, March 2, 2011. (Jim Watson/AFP/Getty Images)

(JTA) — Philip Roth, whose notorious novels about the sex drives of American men gave way to some of the most probing examinations of the American Jewish condition in the 20th and 21st centuries, has died. He was 85. His death was confirmed to The New York Times by… Read more »

Sacred and profane: Philip Roth, onetime ‘enfant terrible,’ gets seminary honor

Philip Roth receives an honorary doctorate at the Jewish Theological Seminary's commencement in New York on May 22, 2014. (Ellen Dubin Photography)

(JTA) — “What is being done to silence this man?” an American rabbi asked in a 1963 letter to the Anti-Defamation League. He was talking about the novelist Philip Roth, whose early novels and short stories cast his fellow American Jews in what some considered a none-too-flattering light. Fast-forward… Read more »