From the ARCHIVE: May Charles Lindbergh and Rabbi Bengelsdorf Rot in Hell! Philip Roth's The Plot Against America in Tikvahworld
David Shasha
Book Review: The Proust of Weequahic: Philip Roth in Search of Lost Newark
Philip Roth, The Plot Against America, Houghton Mifflin, 2004
Turned wrong way round, the relentless unforeseen was what we children studied as “History,” harmless history, where everything unexpected in its own time is chronicled on the page as inevitable. The terror of the unforeseen is what the science of history hides, turning disaster into an epic.
Philip Roth, The Plot Against America
The soothsayers who found out from time what it had in store certainly did not experience time as either homogeneous or empty. Anyone who keeps this in mind will perhaps get an idea of how past times were experienced in remembrance – namely, in just the same way. We know that the Jews were prohibited from investigating the future. The Torah and the prayers instruct them in remembrance, however. This stripped the future of its magic, to which all those succumb who turn to the soothsayers for enlightenment. This does not imply, however, that for the Jews the future turned into homogeneous, empty time. For every second of time was the strait gate through which the Messiah might enter.
Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History”
“Because what’s history?” he asked rhetorically when he was in his expansive dinnertime instructional mode. “History is everything that happens everywhere. Even here in Newark. Even here on Summit Avenue. Even what happens in this house to an ordinary man – that’ll be history too someday.”
Philip Roth, The Plot Against America
In this sense, if for no other, history becomes what it had never been before – the faith of fallen Jews.
Yosef Hayyim Yerushalmi, Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory
From the time of the publication of his first major work Goodbye Columbus in 1959 until the traumatic caesura of Portnoy’s Complaint in 1967, Philip Roth was the Jew that Jews loved to hate. His writing sought to skewer and disfigure the public image of the Ashkenazi Jews by looking deeply into the collective hypocrisies and misdeeds of his kinsmen. The emerging Jewish bourgeoisie, coming out of the horrors of the Holocaust and of American ethnic anti-Semitism, saw itself in emancipated terms and began to let loose. The accumulation of wealth and power, presaged in the fiction of Roth and his predecessor Saul Bellow, led to a freedom and a decadence – and a subsequent Puritanism.
Roth told tales of Jewish sexual obsession and dysfunction; men and boys whose eyes were wandering and women whose materialism and vanity led those men to find the fulfillment of their sexuality and their machismo elsewhere. Roth told a story that, at least this is the way that Jews saw it, portrayed his people as a nefarious and immoral bunch – the freedoms of assimilation had come to the Jews and they reveled in it.
For his sins Roth was punished and vilified – while at the same time becoming a best-selling author and a household name in American culture – a culture that prided itself on not reading books. Philip Roth was a literary celebrity whose claim to fame was as a self-hating Jew and a peddler of smut.
A funny thing happened at the end of the 1970’s: Roth abandoned his previous literary hijinks and his sexual preoccupations – not that they were abandoned forever, just re-channeled – and wrote a series of novels, beginning with The Ghost Writer in 1979, that introduced his readers to Nathan Zuckerman, a Roth stand-in, who took on the role of a Jewish scribe, a chronicler who began to excavate the modern history of the Jewish people. Roth, like Kafka and Freud, began to pontificate on who the Jews were, what made them tick, in order to try and explain why it was that his Portnoy so deeply affected these people.
In order to do this Roth developed a literary strategy that he has consistently deployed since then: On the one hand Roth has re-imagined Jewish history, taking on Anne Frank, the Holocaust, Zionism and the rest and going at it like a contemporary Jonathan Swift or Rabelais. There was nothing that Roth would not re-frame and re-imagine in his fiction. And while re-creating Jewish history from variant perspectives, Roth began to delve into his own personal biography and his own family history, writing stories of Newark and of his own past.
Thus the city of Newark, Roth’s birthplace, appears in many of his later novels. Roth struggles to understand who he is and what has happened in the years since he was born. A good deal of history and change has taken place and Roth has not shied away from examining that history in his prose.
A couple of years ago Roth was given a special award at the National Book Awards ceremony in New York. In his acceptance speech he listed his literary influences and rather than naming Rashi and Kafka, he insisted that his literature was modeled after Sinclair Lewis, Frank Norris and Stephen Crane – Roth asserted in no uncertain terms that he was an American writer whose Judaism was incidental to his work. Freud too insisted that his writings on psychoanalysis were European and not Jewish in nature. This literary swerve is an Oedipal move that attempts to universalize a writer’s work and lift it out of the realm of the parochial.
But it is worth taking Roth at his word.
America has become a central part of Roth’s oeuvre at this point in his career. His new book, The Plot Against America, is a historical reconstruction and re-imagining of the 1940’s based on a fictionalized portrayal of a Charles Lindbergh presidential victory in 1940 – leaving the FDR liberals and anti-fascists to fend for themselves. The novel is thus of a piece with the massive reclamation project that Roth has been constructing since The Ghost Writer; he sees himself as a journalist who is trying to report the story of the American Jews in the 20th century through his fiction.
In his books from the Zuckerman Unbound trilogy to American Pastoral, I Married a Communist and The Human Stain, Roth has tried to assess the Jewish condition in America from a number of different vantage points: He has looked at the grand dreams of assimilation, the idea that Jews could stop being Jews and become Americans; he has looked at Jewish privilege and the Jewish slide into Conservatism and reactionary beliefs through an examination of how the Holy Trinity of American Jews – the Holocaust, Zionism and Anti-Semitism – functions in the lives of Jews.
The Plot Against America, a major Roth work which has surprisingly become his most commercially successful novel since Portnoy’s Complaint, is a story of historical fantasy that works in an allegorical fashion to communicate some hitherto unexamined truths about the modern Jewish condition.
The story of the book is quite simple and distressing. The Roth family in Newark is an average Jewish clan trying to survive and thrive on the mean streets of post-Depression America. At a very crucial moment in this country’s history, the crossroads of the Second World War, the candidacy of FDR fails and Charles Lindbergh, a famous aviator and Anti-Semite, is elected president.
The tightly knit Jewish community of Newark is shaken to its very core. Divisions in the Jewish community begin to manifest themselves. The emergence of overt racism against the Jews develops. An agency of American Absorption is created in order to denature the Jews and assimilate them into Gentile society. The Lindberg administration remains neutral in the War and diplomatic alliances are made with Hitler.
Roth places his characters into difficult situations and shows how they handle the new realities. There is a segment of the Jewish community, led by Rabbi Alvin Bengelsdorf and Philip’s aunt Evelyn, who are buoyed by the Lindbergh victory and become an active part of the Jewish reconstruction effort. Indeed, Aunt Evelyn encourages Philip’s brother Sandy to go to Kentucky to work on a farm as part of the assimilation project.
Rabbi Bengelsdorf becomes a fixture in the Lindbergh White House and functions as the administration’s liaison to the Jewish community – many of whom go along with the new schemes.
In a very strange turn of events, Roth portrays the Jews as developing a love for Lindbergh as they gradually turn away from their liberal and progressive ideals and adopt the reactionary nativist Conservatism of the Christian majority. The strategy backfires as the violence against the Jews increases in the wake of the radio personality and gossip monger Walter Winchell’s speeches against Lindbergh.
Roth goes back to history and reverses that history in a manner that many of the book’s readers wish to see as a prophetic allegory. It is deeply fascinating to see the Jewish neo-Conservatives now appropriating Roth as a fellow traveler. The same Roth who these same Jews excoriated in the 60’s and 70’s has now become – for them – a man who has seen the error of his ways. The allegory of The Plot Against America is seen by these Jews as a harbinger of the current worries of the Jews who see Anti-Semitism around every corner and who have developed an insular and aggressive sense of self that has closed itself from the world – one can see this on the pages of Commentary magazine as easily as looking at Eliot Abrams, Richard Perle and the rest of the Jewish Neo-Cons.
Is such an allegorical reading the preferred reading of the novel? Has Roth completely turned on us and become a member of the reactionary Jewish establishment?
In her book on Walter Benjamin, Emmanuel Levinas and Gershom Scholem, Fragments of Redemption, Susan Handelman discusses Benjamin’s view of allegory:
Benjamin saw allegory as the form in which the sharp pains of time, history and finitude were recognized – and as the key to understanding modernism, its history and aesthetics. In one sense, “modernism” is a “negative” strain of romanticism, a recognition of the irremediable gaps between mind and nature, and the underside of the “imagination” where prophetic vision becomes destructive apocalypse… Allegory preserved the gap, the disparity, the difference between this world and redemption. History was the site of ruin, and only out of an “unfaithful leap” or moment of reversal comes redemption.
How then are we to analyze the role and function of allegory in a literary work?
According to Handelman’s reading of Benjamin the underlying goal of an allegorical reading is to read the present in terms of the past in a way that restores to the present a sense of plenitude; the point of literary allegory is to see the present as lacking and to summon up the past to right the wrongs of the present.
The idea that Roth might have turned tail and switched sides thus remains an allegorical possibility. In the wake of 9/11, the Neo-Cons who have fueled the policies of the current president would have it that the Jews – in the figure of the state of Israel and its American acolytes – have once again been targeted by Arabs who now play the role of Nazis. In a recent roundtable at the New Yorker Festival of Books, the novelist Cynthia Ozick repeated the canard of Arabs as modern-day Nazis to the Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk who dismissed the comparison; Pamuk, correctly, insisted that the German Nazis and the Islamic fundamentalists have been fueled by very different views of the world and that Anti-Semitism in the two contexts could not be equated.
But the idea has been repeated in many reviews of The Plot Against America that Roth has now changed sides and has written an allegory of “Old” Anti-Semitism that is a harbinger for the “New” Anti-Semitism.
In my view this reading could not be farther from the truth.
It is totally unnecessary to have Philip Roth become something that he never was and has not now become just to reinforce the painfully pathetic ideology that now permeates the Jewish community; a community that in so many ways has betrayed the legacy of its American past.
In this novel Roth valorizes the strength and the commitment of his parents and their generation. He excoriates the betrayal of Liberal principles by those like Bengelsdorf and the others who make common cause with the Anti-Semites. In my reading of Roth’s allegory it may be argued that the Jews gravitate towards their enemies – Anti-Semites like Lindbergh – in order to reap the benefits of assimilation rather than standing firmly on principle.
From recent public pronouncements and his past record we know that Roth harbors an antipathy to the current president and his administration. The liberal values that permeated Newark’s Jewish community are effectively antithetical to the ideas that now guide the Jewish Neo-Cons. Roth’s prose is at its most luminescent when he discusses FDR and Fiorello La Guardia and the manner in which they promoted the values of liberalism and hope among the Jews and other minorities. Such Liberalism has become anathema within the Jewish community at present; a community that worries more about Israel than America.
The allegory of The Plot Against America can thus be seen as a covert attack upon the current degeneration of the American Jewish community against the very bedrock values that once made it such an important and vigorous part of civic discourse in this country. With the decisive Jewish move to the Right we see the abandonment of the values of Roth’s Newark; his book speaks in romantic and idealistic terms about the fight against a real and not imagined Anti-Semitism. The bunker mentality of the Jewish community at present is an affront to the memory of those Jews who really had to deal with racism. Roth serves to heighten that sense of Anti-Semitism by rewriting history and yet that heightening appears to teach us that the values of the past – the values of tolerance and compassion and liberalism – are, in comparison with the pathological and violent paranoia of the present, truly ideals worth fighting for.
One might see Rabbi Bengelsdorf as pre-figuring the many Bushite Jews who haunt the White House these days and who hold the president’s coat-tails. Roth allegorically presents these sycophants as decrepit figures – constantly extolling the virtues of Christianity and the need for Jews – as we see in the execrable pronouncements of idiotic self-hating Jews like David Horowitz, Dennis Prager and Michael Medved – to make common cause with the Christian Right.
In point of fact, it is clear to me that The Plot Against America is a fierce diatribe against the Jewish abandonment of Liberal values.
A cousin of mine recently raised the question of what happened to liberal Jews of the recent past. Where, he asked, have the progressive Jews like Philip Roth, Leonard Bernstein and Albert Einstein gone? While once Jews marched for civil rights, it is now Jews who seek to help the white racist majority of Bushites help roll back the fight for equality and civil rights. The relation between this Jewish reactionary behavior is linked as well to the emergence of Israel as a racist ethnocentric state of Ashkenazi Aryans. This too has been a subject of Roth’s fiction in books like The Counterlife and Operation Shylock.
The answer to my cousin’s trenchant and important question might be found in the Proustian musings of the current edition of Philip Roth.
Roth has turned his lens back toward the past – his past, our American Jewish past – and found Jewish saints and heroes who stood against intolerance and injustice. The allegory that I have unearthed in this brilliant novel teaches us that we need to retreat to the past in order to understand the present and its ills. From humility and charity Jews have moved towards arrogance and pomposity. From tolerance and humanism Jews have moved towards ethnocentrism and parochialism.
The Plot Against America is a major work of popular literature that is brilliantly written and crafted. Roth is perhaps the greatest American writer alive; a writer whose artistic vision is, as he has reminded us, of a piece with the great American authors of our collective national past. His characters are fully realized and humanely drawn. The novel is an accessible work of creative literary imagination that is a supreme act of devotion to the ideals of America and the promotion of an alternative patriotism to the jingoistic ravings of the current nativists.
The Plot Against America is another chapter in Philip Roth’s archaeology of the Jewish sojourn in this great country; a country whose greatness has recently been sold to the highest bidder by venal politicians who, like Lindbergh and his gang, refused to accept the pluralistic humanist vision of Jefferson, Madison, Hamilton and the rest of the Founding Fathers. The book is a paean to the greatness of the American ideal of the noble vision of Man that is enshrined in the Holy Scriptures of the American republic; the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.
Roth provides us with a vigorous reminder – at a time when we are so sorely in need of such a reminder – of what this great country once represented – and can still represent if we believe in its ideals of tolerance and justice. With the ideals of tolerance and justice currently in eclipse, it is up to us to re-imagine with Roth an America that destroyed those ideals so that we can better appreciate the achievement of America and what its values have given to our civilization.
David Shasha
From SHU 128, November 3, 2004
Tikvah Fund Anxiety Over Rabbi Bengelsdorf: Allan Arkush Against “The Plot Against America”
I was waiting for this one:
It is Allan Arkush’s Jewish Review of Books review of the HBO adaptation of Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America.
The complete article follows this note.
For those who have yet to read my essay on the book from 2004, here it is one more time:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/17QqdpyAW55FDY_4MBpjVpGkhROusHIpLQi41Ubpo2vE/edit
As is known, the Neo-Con Jewish Right has not been very fond of Roth and his Yid shenanigans:
Things have changed somewhat since Irving Howe went to the Commentary magazine barricades back in 1972:
But, as we can clearly see from the Arkush JRB review of the HBO series, Roth still has the ability to irk the Neo-Con Tikvah Fund types.
It is important to note that David Simon, who masterminded the production, was initially dismissive of the novel:
The reason that Simon took to the book was because of Trump:
That changed for him with the election of US President Donald Trump in 2016. Since then, Simon believes portions of American society have felt empowered to turn on black and brown people. But in addition to attacks on those groups, he cited violence against Jews, including the shooting at a synagogue in Pittsburgh.
“These are the people being ‘othered.’ When the hate train gets to leave the station, whenever intolerance is directed at anybody, anti-Semitism follows,” he said. “But I didn’t make this piece as a narrative directed at anti-Semitic tropes. I made it about hate against all targets.”
And here is where Tikvah Arkush comes in, as he seeks to make sense of Rabbi Lionel Bengelsdorf, the Jewish villain of the novel:
How plausible is such a rabbi? Was there a Conservative rabbi in the United States in 1940 who bore even a remote resemblance to Bengelsdorf? Perhaps one could imagine a Reform rabbi, of the kind who in 1942 founded the virulently anti-Zionist American Council for Judaism, taking such a collaborationist stance, but a Conservative one who, as the miniseries (but not the novel) shows, led his congregation’s prayers in Hebrew? The Conservative rabbinate at the time was divided between the traditionalists influenced by Louis Finkelstein, who had just been appointed chancellor of the Jewish Theological Seminary and the radicals who were under the sway of Mordecai Kaplan. All of them would have been appalled at the idea of transferring masses of Jews to the Midwest to make them more American and less Jewish.
It was pretty clear back in 2004 that Roth was talking about George W. Bush and the quisling Neo-Con Jews who had gained a head of steam after 9/11, after years of dutifully serving Reagan Republican Radicalism, and not about the JTS rabbis of the 1940s:
https://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/19/books/review/the-story-behind-the-plot-against-america.html
Even though Roth emphatically tried to disavow the clear impetus for the novel in very explicit terms:
Some readers are going to want to take this book as a roman clef to the present moment in America. That would be a mistake. I set out to do exactly what I've done: reconstruct the years 1940-42 as they might have been if Lindbergh, instead of Roosevelt, had been elected president in the 1940 election. I am not pretending to be interested in those two years -- I am interested in those two years. They were turbulent in America because they were catastrophic in Europe. My every imaginative effort was directed toward making the effect of that reality as strong as I could, and not so as to illuminate the present through the past but to illuminate the past through the past. I wanted my family to be up against it precisely as they would have been up against it had history turned out as I've skewed it in this book and they were overpowered by the forces I have arrayed against them. Forces arrayed against them then, not now.
For careful readers of Roth, this is nothing new:
In 2002 Roth was awarded the National Book Foundation’s medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters.
His acceptance speech was eventually published in The New Yorker in 2017 under the title “I Have Fallen in Love with American Names.”
I included the text in SHU 797:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!searchin/Davidshasha/797/davidshasha/5MUwqN8D2O8/8lGafsmWAQAJ
Here are two key passages from the speech:
The writers who shaped and expanded my sense of America were mainly small-town Midwesterners and Southerners. None were Jews. What had shaped them was not the mass immigration of 1880-1910, which had severed my family from the Old Country constraints of a ghetto existence and the surveillance of religious orthodoxy and the threat of anti-Semitic violence, but the overtaking of the farm and the farmer’s indigenous village values by the pervasive business culture and its profit-oriented pursuits. These were writers shaped by the industrialization of agrarian America, which caught fire in the eighteen-seventies and which, by providing jobs for that horde of cheap unskilled immigrants, expedited the immigrant absorption into society and the Americanization, largely by way of the public-school system, of the immigrant offspring. They were shaped by the transforming power of the industrialized cities—by the hardships of the urban working poor that were inspiring the union movement—as much as by the acquisitive energy of the omnivorous capitalists and their trusts and monopolies and their union busting. They were made, in short, by the force that has been at the heart of the national experience since the country’s inception, and that drives the national legend still: relentless, destabilizing change and the bewildering conditions that come in its wake—change on the American scale and at the American speed. Radical impermanence as an enduring tradition.
***
A Newark Jew—why not? But an American Jew? A Jewish American? For my generation of native-born—whose omnipresent childhood spectacle was the U.S.A.’s shifting fortunes in a prolonged global war against totalitarian evil and who came of age and matured, as high-school and college students, during the remarkable makeover of the postwar decade and the alarming onset of the Cold War—for us no such self-limiting label could ever seem commensurate with our experience of growing up altogether consciously as Americans, with all that that means, for good and for ill. After all, one is not always in raptures over this country and its prowess at nurturing, in its own distinctive manner, unsurpassable callousness, matchless greed, small-minded sectarianism, and a gruesome infatuation with firearms. The list of the country at its most malign could go on, but my point is this: I have never conceived of myself for the length of a single sentence as an American Jewish or Jewish American writer, any more than I imagine Dreiser and Hemingway and Cheever thought of themselves while at work as American Christian or Christian American or just plain Christian writers. As a novelist, I think of myself, and have from the beginning, as a free American and—though I am hardly unaware of the general prejudice that persisted here against my kind till not that long ago—as irrefutably American, fastened throughout my life to the American moment, under the spell of the country’s past, partaking of its drama and destiny, and writing in the rich native tongue by which I am possessed.
Like many great artists, Roth is very good at dissimulation. That tactic has been a key part of his Post-Modern narratology, with its duplicitous doppelgangers and shifty narrators; a matter I discussed in my review of his oeuvre “They All Come to Look for America: Philip Roth, Jews, and the ‘Promised Land’”:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1pJc6w23Z7xYrRGHUoZtz30e7xU0sr_LxaaVlbZtEIPY/edit
The Post-Modern thematic is explicated in my analysis of his “Zionist” novels The Counterlife and Operation Shylock:
In the lengthy sections of The Counterlife that deal with Zionism, we are prepared for the all-out war that Roth will wage in his Operation Shylock, this time using not Nathan Zuckerman as a double, but using Philip Roth himself as his own double.
In Operation Shylock we have a nightmare of epic proportion: Philip Roth the writer receives news from Israel that there is someone named “Philip Roth” going around Israel preaching some mishegas that all the Ashkenazim should go back to Europe! In the course of the novel, which is written as itself a doubling of the Zuckerman doubling, more meta-fictive Chinese boxes, Roth must undertake the role of detective to find out who the man is that is impersonating him!
The novel thus enables the very crafty real-life Roth to have it both ways: He can riff out on his Diasporism while still shielding himself from the Zionists that would hang him in the middle of Dizenghoff Street for the “theories” he puts into the mouth of the “fake” Roth.
In fact, I would say that his statements on not being a Jewish writer are deeply Freudian, as he attempts to deflect from his deepest concerns, and act as if he is something else entirely.
In the essay I sum up what I think is Roth’s ultimate meta-strategy:
These citations are particularly apt in the case of Roth’s Zuckerman and post-Zuckerman writings. On the one hand, Roth does not simply eschew his past work – he takes on the very body of his work and re-examines it. In Midrashic fashion, Roth seeks out and creates a Book-culture that is Hebraic in its compulsiveness. There is no fixed spot in Roth’s work after 1979, his literary poetics is continually transforming and evolving.
The strategy is itself rooted in Midrashic-Rabbinic narrative, as Roth’s friend and influence the “Diasporist” R.B. Kitaj has so eloquently phrased it:
People are always saying that the meanings in my pictures refuse to be fixed, to be settled, to be stable: that’s Diasporism, which welcomes interesting, creative misreading; the Zohar says that the meaning of the book changes from year to year! And now as I come to life after fifty, the room in which paint becomes a sort of permissive cheder (room, the room or school where one studies) in which art becomes what I think, dramatizing my mind’s life, while the ancient religion itself whispers its Covenantal, mythic, Midrashic, ethical, exegetical, schismatic, Zaddik-ridden, arguments.
Roth’s narratives are thus informed by the semantic complexities of the Jewish rhetorical tradition, and cannot simply be reduced to some strictly realist schema, as Arkush insists on doing.
We should thus ignore Roth’s formal pronouncements and continue to see The Plot Against America as an allegory of the Neo-Con movement and the myriad ways in which it partnered with White Christian America.
It was a process led by the Commentary magazine warriors, the ones who had years earlier vilified Roth’s work – and Roth himself for Jewish self-hatred:
Indeed, the process can be seen in the personal and professional story of Max Boot, currently a very zealous Never Trumper:
Boot makes it clear that his enthusiasm for his father—a self-described monarchist who now lives in England and devotes his time to denouncing atheism and the welfare state—is quite constrained. But Alexander’s gift of a National Review subscription to Max when he was thirteen left a lasting imprint. The younger Boot absorbed the worldview of its writers, ranging from the reactionary Austrian aristocrat Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn to William F. Buckley Jr. himself. Boot also read up on the standard conservative texts: Whittaker Chambers’s Witness, F. A. Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom, and Russell Kirk’s The Conservative Mind. Ronald Reagan, who inveighed against the “evil empire” that Max and his parents had fled, was Boot’s contemporary hero. The liberals who preached détente with the Soviet Union, or even accommodation, were the new appeasers.
Boot is one of the many Bengelsdorfs that Roth’s allegory in Plot is about.
We should keep in mind that Roth was a staunch opponent of the Neo-Con movement and its hawkish tendencies:
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/may/26/how-philip-roth-wrote-america
The Guardian article looks at Roth’s keen political sense in the context of his astounding artistic production:
Most of the books that lay claim to being a great American novel – if not the Great American Novel – give a sense of the infinite variety of the American experiment, while also creating the memorable individual voices that can speak for that experiment. Ishmael, Huckleberry Finn and Nick Carraway articulate a singular perspective on a plural, cacophonous society and its history. Roth takes his place in that list, without question, although his singular narrators were themselves plural, as Portnoy-Zuckerman-Roth prismatically refracted the nation, and the man, back to themselves. That is not merely an aesthetic project: it is an ethical one as well. His novels are deeply implicated in the history of their times. The second world war, the McCarthy period, the Vietnam war, the sexual revolution of the 1960s, political terrorism, Watergate, identity politics, the Clintons, the Bush years and 9/11, while with The Plot Against America he can be said to have anticipated the Trump years. In an interview, he once said: “Any satirist writing a futuristic novel who had imagined a President Reagan during the Eisenhower years would have been accused of perpetrating a piece of crude, contemptible, adolescent, anti-American wickedness, when, in fact, he would have succeeded, as prophetic sentry.”
Taking it a step further, Frank Rich analyzed the matter of Roth’s politics back in 2004:
https://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/26/books/president-lindbergh-in-2004.html
This is what he said then:
In truth, we've only just begun to be tested. We are still in the very early stages of two wars whose ends are nowhere in sight. The war in Iraq has already been pinned on Jewish neoconservatives by Senator Fritz Hollings of South Carolina, a Kerry-supporting Democrat, as well as by right-wingers like the unrepentant Pat Buchanan, as if the non-Jewish president and vice president were not among its architects. The other war, which politicians of all stripes want to pretend is a war on a tactic (terrorism) and not about religion, is, as everyone else seems to know, being fought against a bastardized form of Islam. Not unlike Jews in the 1930's, the innocent American practitioners of that creed are alien to many in the heartland of just folks.
This is a chilling foretelling of the current situation, and one that speaks to what Allan Arkush is so hopping mad about, as he states clearly in the JRB review:
Lindbergh had his supporters, to be sure, including Mussolini, and the American First Committee tried to defend him against the charge of antisemitism. “But in fact,” writes Dunn, “America First never recovered from the calamity of Lindbergh’s stop in Des Moines. Some of the members of the executive and national committees resigned, major contributors bailed out, and the head of the New York chapter, John T. Flynn, branded the speech ‘stupid.’”
That’s not exactly what happens in The Plot Against America. In Roth’s fictional version of events, “the very accusations that had elicited roars of approval from Lindbergh’s Iowa audience were vigorously denounced,” to be sure, not only by liberals and Jews but “even from within the Republican Party by New York’s District Attorney Dewey and the Wall Street utilities lawyer Wendell Willkie, both potential presidential nominees.” But Roth leaves out the displeased Republican journalists and says of the America First Committee only that “the broadest-based organization leading the battle against intervention in the war” continued to support Lindbergh after the Des Moines speech, “and he remained the most popular proselytizer of its argument for neutrality.”
As I remarked earlier, Arkush goes to great lengths to read Roth’s novel strictly as a piece of historical realism; judging the dystopian allegory on the basis of that historical reality, rather than as a blistering political commentary in the Midrashic modality.
The reason for this is, naturally, that Roth is implicitly after Arkush and his Bengelsdorf Tikvah crowd.
We have recently seen how Bengelsdorf Shmuley Boteach went ballistic when the identification was made:
https://www.jpost.com/opinion/the-guardian-calls-trump-a-nazi-and-jews-his-enablers-623979
As I have indicated before, the problem was set up by Roth himself, who chose to obscure his real political motivations in writing the novel.
But the current crop of Trumpist Tikvah Neo-Cons do not seem to be buying it.
They have read the David Simon interviews, and understand what the book is being used for.
And they know that they are in the crosshairs, as Arkush so strongly implies:
To make his story work, Roth had to downplay the extent to which the condemnations of Lindbergh’s speech went across the ideological board of America at the beginning of the 1940s. The HBO production distorts matters even further. It shows only Jews taking offense at Lindbergh’s words and strongly suggests that his antisemitic speech won him nothing but increased popularity among Gentiles. All of this flies in the face of the historical record, which shows that this country was not as primed in 1940 for an antisemitic leader as Roth and his adapters would have us believe it was. A speech like the one he actually gave in Des Moines in 1941 would likely have doomed the possibility of a Republican nomination for Lindbergh, let alone a successful presidential campaign.
Following my allegorical reading of these complicated and clashing intertexts, the Straussian Neo-Con Arkush is here seeking to defend the American Christians, as he insists that Lindbergh/Trump is not really what we – and Roth – are making them out to be.
At this deeper level, Arkush seeks to exonerate the Anti-Semites by seeking strict verisimilitude in a historically-grounded reading of Plot that will be relevant for the current situation. It is a pretty impressive PILPUL.
Americans were not Anti-Semitic in the 1940s – and they are not Anti-Semitic now!
It seems that Arkush is at pains to insist on this point.
Methinks he doth protest too much!
The point is critical to the Tikvah worldview, because it allows the Neo-Con Trumpscum Jews to deny the whole Bengelsdorf identification in toto.
As we saw in the Shmuley Boteach rant:
Guardian journalist Charles Bramesco decided to use a review of the series to attack Jews in general, and me in particular, as being a source of American antisemitism. As Jewish communities around the world are decimated by the coronavirus, Bramesco - who openly and expressly accuses President Donald Trump of being a Nazi - libelously accuses Jews of being pansies for the Hitler-like Trump and fascism.
Bramesco describes the Roth character of Rabbi Lionel Bengelsdorf, played by the John Turturro, as a stereotypical court Jew who defends Lindbergh against allegations of antisemitism, prompted in part by his flirtations with Hitler, and is rewarded with a position in the administration. Even as persecution of Jews escalates, the rabbi continues to be an enabler of the president.
“Bengelsdorf,” Bramesco writes, “typifies a lethal combination of confidence to the point of gullibility and an excessive fondness of power, which breed complicity in wrongdoing.”
Inexplicably, Bramesco then pivots to me and the object of his unfathomable loathing, Donald Trump. Apropos of nothing, he compares me to Bengelsdorf and President Trump to Charles Lindbergh (and perhaps Adolf Hitler?) He also employs a little Yiddish, calling me a worldwide shanda (embarrassment), “cozying up to President Trump in the presumptive belief that he’ll be exempt from the hatred now being seeded.”
Boteach then spends the rest of article being Bengelsdorf, as he praises Hitler Trump to the rafters:
I have had my areas of agreement with President Trump and my areas of disagreement. If there were racists who supported him, I’ve repeatedly condemned them as “disgusting, vile white supremacist nutjobs.” I strongly criticized the President’s campaign pledge to ban Muslim immigrants, which I labeled “a betrayal of both Jewish and American values.”
But on his unprecedented support for Israel and his strong efforts to combat antisemitism, I am unapologetically grateful. The same is true of my profound gratitude to the president for firing American missiles at the genocidal leader of Syria, the bloody Bashar Assad, for Assad’s using poison gas against Muslim men, women and children; a retaliatory measure that Obama failed to do.
Bengelsdorf too “condemned” the Anti-Semites that Lindbergh brought to the White House. But he continued to vigorously support his beloved president, and eventually watched his wife dancing with the Nazi Von Ribbentrop:
https://www.jewishboston.com/hbos-the-plot-against-america-makes-compelling-quarantine-television/
Literature can be an attempt to mimic reality, or it can be an attempt to create an alternative, heightened reality. Midrashic hermeneutics frequently seeks to juxtapose the real and the fictional in a way that deepens our understanding of reality.
Despite his protestations to the contrary, The Plot Against America was Roth’s attempt to make sense of the past in terms of the present.
More than this, David Simon’s intent in adapting the novel for HBO was to make that earlier process focus on Trump, adding another layer to the Midrash.
Arkush is not only picking a fight with Roth’s Midrash, which as a Neo-Con Tikvah Jew is offensive enough to him, but goes one step further and attacks Simon for having the temerity of giving us a Bengelsdorf who is eerily similar to him.
It is interesting to note parenthetically here, that for all the current academic work being done in the field of Judaic Studies on Midrash and rabbinic literature, there is little actual tachles understanding of what the Midrashic process is and how it functions as a dynamic rhetorical-literary construct. Again, it is all about atavism and doctrinal principles in the context of German Historical Positivism with its deeply Protestant – and deeply Anti-Semitic – thought-system.
Indeed, given what Roth did in Plot, it is very much a hall-of-mirrors gambit. The past is the present, the present is the past, and all that jazz. More and more Chinese Boxes.
The Tikvah Fund world of Neo-Con Jews, as we have seen in the case of Tablet magazine and its intrepid leader Alana Newhouse, has been dealing in Trump currency and will not seem to relent:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/Davidshasha/MBv7Kkr0O4A
We have also seen how Tikvah values have taken hold in the Modern Orthodox YU world:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/Davidshasha/OEeQVkfdoM4
To the best of my knowledge, there has been no actual reckoning with Trumpism in the Tikvah universe. Maybe they should worry more about Trump and his Alt-Right Nazis, than with poor old Philip Roth!
Arkush thus seeks to demolish the Rothian Midrash in an attempt to shore up that Tikvah alliance, and, like Shmuley Boteach, defend the current group of Bengelsdorf quislings from the charge of self-hatred as they aid and abet what is the most Anti-Semitic American president in memory.
The Plot Against America has become a sort-of Jewish Rorschach test which is designed to measure adaptation to Trumpworld as the product of a lengthy process that began when Norman Podhoretz wrote his seminal article “My Negro Problem – and Ours” in 1963; turning Commentary magazine, a forerunner of The Tikvah Fund and The Jewish Review of Books, into a Right Wing devotional which truly came of age in the Reagan era with its Evangelical Christian depredations:
https://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/12/books/12commentary.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_Podhoretz#Career
Philip Roth has always acted as a convenient target for this sort of reactionary Jewish rage, and it is interesting to see how different modalities of reading can produce different political visions of American Jewish identity at the present moment.
David Shasha
From SHU 958, August 5, 2020
Could It Have Happened Here? The Implausible Plotting of The Plot Against America
By: Allan Arkush
“The Plot Against America,” HBO films, produced by Ed Burns and David Simon, directed by Thomas Schlamme and Minkie Spiro
Watching HBO’s excellent production of Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America, I felt some of the same uneasiness I felt 15 years ago when I read the dystopian novel on which it is based. Now, as then, the first thing that bothered me was the figure of Rabbi Bengelsdorf, a South Carolina-born Conservative rabbi who appears first as an ardent supporter of the antisemitic Charles Lindbergh’s 1940 campaign for the presidency and then as an enthusiastic promoter of the Office of American Absorption, a sinister government program to remove Jews from the East Coast to the hinterland and thereby promote their more rapid assimilation.
How plausible is such a rabbi? Was there a Conservative rabbi in the United States in 1940 who bore even a remote resemblance to Bengelsdorf? Perhaps one could imagine a Reform rabbi, of the kind who in 1942 founded the virulently anti-Zionist American Council for Judaism, taking such a collaborationist stance, but a Conservative one who, as the miniseries (but not the novel) shows, led his congregation’s prayers in Hebrew? The Conservative rabbinate at the time was divided between the traditionalists influenced by Louis Finkelstein, who had just been appointed chancellor of the Jewish Theological Seminary and the radicals who were under the sway of Mordecai Kaplan. All of them would have been appalled at the idea of transferring masses of Jews to the Midwest to make them more American and less Jewish.
I know we’re dealing with fiction here, and some people will brush off such concerns by saying that a novelist can invent whatever and whomever he wants. That answer won’t work here, however, because Roth himself clearly thought otherwise. In an essay that he wrote for the New York Times shortly before The Plot Against America was published, he announced that his intention in the novel was to “alter the historical reality by making Lindbergh America’s 33rd president, while keeping everything else as close to factual truth as I could.” He didn’t do that in the case of Rabbi Bengelsdorf. Why not? Roth, who didn’t care a whit about theology, may not have thought about the matter at all. Or it may be just another example of his well-attested disdain for almost all rabbis. In any case, the character of Rabbi Bengelsdorf (played to oily perfection by John Turturro) rings historically false.
With respect to Lindbergh, Roth stressed his general adherence to the historical record prior to 1940, and he was justified in doing so. Charles Lindbergh was exactly the kind of isolationist antisemite that Roth depicts in his novel. The book deviates from history not by transforming a real-life hero into a villain but by placing Lindbergh in a spot where he never actually set foot: the tumultuous 1940 Republican convention, where his unexpected appearance on the scene leads to his surprise nomination. The rest of the story all follows from this one imaginative twist, but it does so more or less plausibly. Each of the historical figures who appear in the novel, as Roth insisted, “might well have done or said something very like what I have him or her doing of saying.” I see little reason to challenge this assertion (though it’s hard to believe that Hitler’s foreign minister, Ribbentrop, would have danced in public with a Jewess in 1942, as he does here).
What bothers me is Roth’s depiction not of specific individuals but of the American people as a whole, painting them as a very ready carrier of profound antisemitism. Of course, Roth had a historical leg to stand on. There was a great deal of discrimination against American Jews in the 1930s, and Jewish immigration was widely and tragically opposed. I know about Father Coughlin, the German-American Bund, and the rest. But I have my doubts about whether an openly antisemitic candidate could have won the presidency in 1940, as Lindbergh does in The Plot Against America.
Roth himself didn’t think it was far-fetched to imagine Lindbergh, “with his unshakeable isolationist convictions . . . depriving Roosevelt of a third term,” in 1940. (He got the idea from an aside in Arthur Schlesinger Jr.’s autobiography.) Maybe not, given the strength of the American people’s opposition at this point to getting entangled in World War II. But what if, in addition to being an isolationist, Lindbergh had been an outspokenly antisemitic candidate? Roth makes him one in the novel by doing nothing more than moving his notorious speech at an America First rally in Des Moines vilifying America’s Jews as subversive warmongers from September 1941, when he actually gave it, back to early 1940—before the Republican convention. In doing so, Roth wrote, he didn’t “alter its content or impact.”
True, at least with respect to the speech’s content, but how was it received, in reality? As A. Scott Berg wrote in a 1998 biography that Roth probably read before he wrote his novel, Lindbergh awoke the morning after the Des Moines speech “to a Niagara of invective. Few men in American history had ever been so reviled.” Berg goes on to describe how the leaders of America First sought to minimize the damage done by Lindbergh by declaring that their organization was open “to all patriotic Americans, whatever their race, color, or creed.”
More recently, historian Susan Dunn has written that after the speech,“newspapers, columnists, politicians, and religious leaders lashed out at Lindbergh for sinning ‘against the American spirit,’ as the New York Herald Tribune put it. ‘The voice is the voice of Lindbergh, but the words are the words of Hitler,’ wrote the San Francisco Chronicle in an editorial that echoed dozens of others.” Waving a copy of Mein Kampf on the House floor, Luther Patrick, a Democrat from Alabama, exclaimed that “it sounds just like Charles A. Lindbergh.” Thomas E. Dewey, a Republican presidential contender in 1940, branded the talk “an inexcusable abuse of the right of freedom of speech.” Another, Senator Robert Taft, “called Lindbergh’s reference to Jews as a foreign race ‘a grossly unjust attitude.’”
Lindbergh had his supporters, to be sure, including Mussolini, and the American First Committee tried to defend him against the charge of antisemitism. “But in fact,” writes Dunn, “America First never recovered from the calamity of Lindbergh’s stop in Des Moines. Some of the members of the executive and national committees resigned, major contributors bailed out, and the head of the New York chapter, John T. Flynn, branded the speech ‘stupid.’”
That’s not exactly what happens in The Plot Against America. In Roth’s fictional version of events, “the very accusations that had elicited roars of approval from Lindbergh’s Iowa audience were vigorously denounced,” to be sure, not only by liberals and Jews but “even from within the Republican Party by New York’s District Attorney Dewey and the Wall Street utilities lawyer Wendell Willkie, both potential presidential nominees.” But Roth leaves out the displeased Republican journalists and says of the America First Committee only that “the broadest-based organization leading the battle against intervention in the war” continued to support Lindbergh after the Des Moines speech, “and he remained the most popular proselytizer of its argument for neutrality.”
To make his story work, Roth had to downplay the extent to which the condemnations of Lindbergh’s speech went across the ideological board of America at the beginning of the 1940s. The HBO production distorts matters even further. It shows only Jews taking offense at Lindbergh’s words and strongly suggests that his antisemitic speech won him nothing but increased popularity among Gentiles. All of this flies in the face of the historical record, which shows that this country was not as primed in 1940 for an antisemitic leader as Roth and his adapters would have us believe it was. A speech like the one he actually gave in Des Moines in 1941 would likely have doomed the possibility of a Republican nomination for Lindbergh, let alone a successful presidential campaign.
Why does this matter? Roth himself said he wrote The Plot Against America, in part, to show that “it might have been different and might have happened here.” Fortunately, he continues, “at the moment when it should have happened, it did not happen.” Still, the argument of his novel is that it easily could have, that a majority of the American electorate might have colluded in the “plot against America.”
Dubious as this is as a historical argument, it gains a lot of strength from Ed Burns and David Simon’s brilliant production (see Janis Freedman Bellow’s earlier thoughtful review in these pages). The show is bound to reach a lot more people than Roth’s novel ever did, especially now, with HBO’s huge captive, quarantined audience. Many of these viewers will be easily convinced by the meticulous sets and great performances that Roth was right, that it very well could have happened here (I don’t even want to think about those who will believe that it did happen).
Roth’s book didn’t make a convincing case that the US was, even briefly, as bad as he believed it to have been, and neither does HBO’s miniseries. Both versions of The Plot Against America leave a deeply misleading sense of what this country was like in 1940.
From The Jewish Review of Books, May 12, 2020
Notes on Lysol Lindy Trump and The Plot Against America
It’s Official: Trump is Lindbergh!
It has become eminently clear that The Plot Against America has gotten under the collective skin of the Trump Alt-Right Fascists:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/Davidshasha/2w-w1-pt3Tk
Now we have Rush Limbaugh confirming it in a very official Trumpist way:
He hates Philip Roth!
Yesterday on NPR, they've got a program called Fresh Air. One of their correspondents was reporting on a new biography of the American author Philip Roth. Now, in uber-left-wing literary salons and circles in Manhattan, Philip Roth is the end-all, the be-all. He's the Stephen Sondheim of the literary world, and so somebody's written a biography of the guy.
I suppose that means Sondheim is also an enemy of the state.
“West Side Story” is verboten!
I always enjoy seeing the Trumpscum Fascist Limbaugh use the word “Uber.” It is so very German of him.
He loves Nazi comparisons:
https://www.mediamatters.org/rush-limbaugh/rush-limbaughs-obsession-nazi-comparisons
Obama was Hitler!
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/limbaugh-adolf-hitler-lik_n_253412
Indeed, when looking at Limbaugh out of the Lysol Projection lenses, he does have a thing for Fascism and Dictatorship.
Just like his hero:
https://www.cnn.com/2019/07/02/politics/donald-trump-dictators-kim-jong-un-vladimir-putin/index.html
Moving from Obama Hitler to AOC Stalin Mao Hitler was not much of a stretch for him:
And do not forget the Feminazis!
https://www.mediamatters.org/rush-limbaugh/feminazi-history-limbaughs-trademark-slur-against-women
What we have here is a Trumpist Alt-Right that does not like to be called out for being Nazi. It appears that the truth offends them.
The Lysol Trump KKK Hoods
And then there are the Fred Trump KKK hordes:
Though there continues to be some confusion about Fred’s actual KKK bona fides:
We do know that he was a true hater of Black people:
His son is right there with him, as we saw in the Central Park Five case:
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/6/18/18684217/trump-central-park-5-netflix
It has become quite clear that the KKK and its members, like Grand Wizard David Duke, are all in with the MAGA:
https://www.vox.com/2017/8/12/16138358/charlottesville-protests-david-duke-kkk
There was most famously that David Duke amnesia:
https://www.factcheck.org/2016/03/trumps-david-duke-amnesia/
And now wearing the robe and hood appears to be a COVID fashion statement!
The Lysol Henry Ford Comes to Michigan
Taking a break from the monotony of the White House Pandemic Lockdown, the Murderer-in-Chief went to Michigan – where the Trump Nazis are:
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/michigan-gretchen-whitmer-racism-protests_n_5eaf1764c5b639d6e5783895
In the Plot Against America spirit he proudly channeled Henry Ford:
Love those “Good Bloodlines.”
Sieg Heil Trump!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1o6-bi3jlxk
We will recall that Philip Roth put the pro-Nazi Ford into the Lindbergh cabinet, as could be seen on the recent HBO adaptation:
https://www.vulture.com/2020/04/the-plot-against-america-recap-an-american-experiment.html
Send the message to Shmuley Boteach:
https://www.jpost.com/opinion/the-guardian-calls-trump-a-nazi-and-jews-his-enablers-623979
And to Alana Newhouse:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/Davidshasha/uZe9DWpcLg8
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/Davidshasha/MBv7Kkr0O4A
And to the rest of the Tikvah enablers, like Allan “It Couldn’t Happen Here” Arkush and Yoram “Just Call Me Alt-Right” Hazony:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/Davidshasha/2w-w1-pt3Tk
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/Davidshasha/1GNwF68ZC1M
Indeed, anyone who still thinks Lysol is not an Anti-Semite Fascist is an idiot.
You can run, but you can’t hide – just ask Rabbi Bengelsdorf:
https://www.litcharts.com/lit/the-plot-against-america/characters/rabbi-lionel-bengelsdorf
Four More Lindbergh Years!
David Shasha
From SHU 960, August 19, 2020
HBO “The Plot Against America” website:
https://www.hbo.com/the-plot-against-america
Can It Happen Here? In ‘The Plot Against America,’ It Already Did
By: James Poniewozik
There’s a repeating motif in David Simon’s passionate, gutting adaptation of Philip Roth’s 2004 novel “The Plot Against America.” A Jewish boy in early 1940s Newark is sitting in his bedroom when he hears an airplane overhead. Maybe it’s a warplane. Maybe it’s the president. Neither is a comforting thought.
The president is Charles Lindbergh (Ben Cole), the famous aviator who, in this alternative past, defeated Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1940 on a platform of antiwar isolationism laced with anti-Semitism, made nice with the Nazis and began a gradual program of persecuting American Jews in the name of assimilation.
That airplane motoring overhead is a symbol of what Simon and Ed Burns’s dazzling mini-series so mightily conveys: the ominous approach of history from a vantage where you can hear and see it but can’t touch it. It can only touch you.
“Plot,” beginning Monday on HBO, asks the audience to imagine the outlandish idea that the presidency might have been won by a celebrity demagogue new to politics who appeals to bigotry and fear, who ran on the slogan of “America First,” who boasts of having “taken our country back,” who sees fine people on the most reprehensible side of history, who cozies up to despots and behaves as if he were their puppet.
Roth, who died in 2018, insisted that he did not intend “Plot” as a political allegory. But history doesn’t always care what you intend.
In the 2020 version, Simon draws not a frighteningly different America — as in “The Man in the High Castle” or “The Handmaid’s Tale” — but a chillingly familiar one, both in its echoes of current fears and in its evocation of the past. The opening of “Plot” could be any remembrance of urban life just before World War II. Families gather for dinner, kids chalk up the street to play games, “Begin the Beguine” plays on the radio.
Roth created an unsettling intimacy by writing his novel like a memoir, from the point-of-view of 10-year-old Roth — Philip Levin (Azhy Robertson) in the series — as his family suffers from the rise and triumph of Lindberghism: first open bigotry on the street corners, then official singling out from Washington.
Simon and Burns trade Roth’s internal perspective for a third-person that captures the sweep of history as experienced by the whole Levin family. Philip’s father, Herman (Morgan Spector), an outspoken F.D.R. Democrat, unwinds by listening to Walter Winchell, the MSNBC of the anti-Lindbergh movement. Philip’s cousin Alvin (Anthony Boyle) is itching to take more direct and physical action.
America’s turn to smiley-faced fascism hits home when President Lindbergh establishes Just Folks, a program to foster urban Jewish children with gentile families in the country — deracination disguised as integration — which attracts Philip’s rebellious older brother, Sandy (Caleb Malis). The program, ironically, is the brainchild of Rabbi Lionel Bengelsdorf (John Turturro, with southern-fried smarm), an accommodationist convinced that Lindbergh has made anti-Semitic comments “out of ignorance” but regrets them “privately.”
When Lionel begins dating Philip’s rudderless, impressionable aunt Evelyn (Winona Ryder), she clashes with Philip’s mother, Bess (Zoe Kazan), who is both more cautious than her hotheaded husband and less starry-eyed about their chances in a country of emboldened bigots.
“Like it or not,” she says, “Lindbergh is teaching us what it means to be Jews.”
It’s a frog-in-boiling-water situation, and Simon keeps a steady hand on the burner dial, patiently moving through the stages — denial, anger, desperation — of realizing that you are a stranger in your own country.
The six-episode series builds to a fevered, violent climax. But arguably the most disturbing episode follows the Levins on a long-planned vacation to Washington, D.C. What should be a patriotic, educational family trip becomes a pilgrimage to the fallen monuments of a now-dead pluralism, a frightening recon mission into occupied territory. Herman, unable to stifle his disgust at what’s become of the country, is dismissed by pro-Lindy tourists as a “mouthy Jew.”
It’s a depressingly believable horror story, an invasion of the body-politic-snatchers. Even Philip’s stamp collection becomes a symbol of what’s been lost: tiny portraits of the wide world and of America’s idealized past brought into one book, as America is slamming the door on that world and renouncing those ideals.
“Plot” is a departure for Simon, who has not adapted a work of fiction before, yet it feels natural. Simon is an artist of granular realism, and the lived-in middle-to-working-class Jewish New Jersey he creates gives the series its power.
The Levins are a family in full, not just plot-advancement devices, and Kazan and Spector are especially strong anchors. (The depictions of fictionalized historical figures — Lindbergh, Winchell, the anti-Semitic Henry Ford, now secretary of the interior — are thinner.)
Simon, like Roth, loves a good argument, and the ones here are all too familiar and believable. The accommodationists believe that they can guide the administration away from its worst tendencies. The resisters debate whether simply listening to the radio and getting mad counts as action, or if more active steps are needed.
“Plot” is something of a thematic risk for Simon, too. His past work — “The Wire,” “Show Me a Hero,” “The Deuce” — is driven by the belief that individual acts can do only so much in the face of overpowering social systems. That might have made “Plot,” the story of how one man’s run for president might have nudged history off course, an uneasy fit for Simon’s philosophy, as much as it might mesh with his politics.
Instead, he’s produced a translation that’s at once fully Rothian and fully Simonian. He hasn’t changed a lot in the story, but where he has, it’s to emphasize that the charismatic bigot in the White House is not simply an aberration who can be erased and forgotten like a bad dream. The problem is as much the passions and cynicism that made him possible: the citizens whose prejudice was validated, the officials who got a taste of thugocracy, the society that learned the norms of decent behavior were always optional, the minorities who found that equality is revocable.
That merger of visions makes the difference between a dutiful adaptation of a great novel and a series that is great in itself. There is plenty of pugilistic optimism in this “Plot,” but it’s tough-minded. Maybe the clouds will part. Maybe the next plane to fly overhead will be a friendly one. But you will never feel as safe under that sky again.
From The New York Times, March 16, 2020