A spirited biography of Philip Roth's notorious novel, from the outrage it sparked to its impact on Roth to its legacy some forty years later The publication of Portnoy’s Complaint in 1969 provoked instant, powerful reactions. It blasted Philip Roth into international fame, subjected him to unrelenting personal scrutiny and conjecture, and shocked legions of readers—some delighted, others appalled. Portnoy and other main characters became instant archetypes, and Roth himself became a touchstone for conflicting attitudes toward sexual liberation, Jewish power, political correctness, Freudian language, and bourgeois disgust. What about this book inspired Richard Lacayo of Time to describe it as “a literary instance of shock and awe,” and the Modern Library to list it among the 100 best English-language novels of the twentieth century?
Bernard Avishai offers a witty exploration of Roth’s satiric masterpiece, based on the prolific novelist's own writings, teaching notes, and personal interviews. In addition to discussing the book’s timing, rhetorical gambit, and sheer virtuousity, Avishai includes a chapter on the Jewish community’s outrage over the book and how Roth survived it, and another on the author’s scorching treatment of psychoanalysis. Avishai shows that Roth’s irreverent novel left us questioning who, or what, was the object of the satire. Hilariously, it proved the serious ways we construct fictions about ourselves and others.

Promiscuous: "Portnoy's Complaint" and Our Doomed Pursuit of Happiness

Literature & Fiction

Bernard Avishai

Humor & Satire

Yale University Press

This original and acclaimed book explores how the impetus to settle in the "Whole" Land of Israel after 1967 derived from unexamined Zionist commitments which, though perhaps defensible in the 1930s, have become increasingly dangerous for Israeli democracy since the 1980s. It is also a chronicle of the unexpected, tragic ways the heroic Zionist theories and institutions have come to threaten Israeli democracy and to burden relations with Palestinians since the Six Day War.The subject of intense controversy when it was first published in 1985, The Tragedy of Zionism provides illuminating insight into the history behind the headlines. Now revised, this poignant chronicle addresses timely and compelling questions: could Israel be a democratic state if, in the name of being a Jewish state, it discriminated against non-Jews, including a fifth of its citizens who are of Palestinian Arab origin? Could it be a Jewish state without granting a privileged position to Jewish orthodoxy? The Tragedy of Zionism calls for democracy as an end in itself, not as a political luxury, but as an indispensable means to settle disputes nonviolently.

The Tragedy of Zionism: How Its Revolutionary Past Haunts Israeli Democracy

History

Middle East

Allworth Press

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Books by Bernard Avishai