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Welcome to a special edition of the commentary magazine podcast.

Today is Wednesday, May 23rd, 2018. I'm John Pouthor. It's the editor of

commentary magazine with me, a greenwald, our senior editor. Hi Abe. Hi John.

And Sora Bimari, our senior writer. Hi Sora. Hi John. No,

Rothman is not here today. We are convening to discuss the life and career and

writings of Philip Roth, dead yesterday at the age of 85. His death brings to a

close as Abe was saying earlier, the period of the first and fine, the great

flowering of American Jewish writing in the second half of the 20th century. He

was known to have loathed the joke that he saw, Bellow, and Bernard Malamad

comprise the heart, shaft, and marks of American Jewish writing. But his loathing

nonetheless was ill-taken and unexpectedly humorless since in fact that's

exactly who they were and their emergence, not that they all emerged at the same

time. Bellow began writing in the middle of the Second World War, Malamad at

the beginning of the 1950s and Roth at the tail end of the 1950s all

separated in age by about 20 years. But their concerns, which were the life and

times and existences of American Jews and the existential struggles thereof,

coincided with a period of great ferment in the American Jewish community, the

sense of acceptance and indeed of, I would say, cultural that they represented a

cultural vanguard in the United States after the Second World War that they

knew things and had things to say about America that were fresh and unexpected

and funny and perceptive and were embraced by the mainstream. Each one of

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