Against "Jewish Totalism": Operation Shylock: A Confession's Missing Chapter

Abstract

ABSTRACT:This essay offers a close reading of the missing final chapter in Philip Roth's 1993 novel Operation Shylock. Reading the novel through my concept of diasporic heteroglossia, a combination of Bakthinian theory and the diaspora ethics of Daniel and Jonathan Boyarin, I argue that Roth thoroughly and energetically dismantles the Zionist narrative of Israel as the redemption of the Jewish diaspora, as the end of Jewish history, and as an innocent, unimpeachable state that now has the power to speak for—and act on behalf of—the entirety of the Jewish people. When Philip the narrator—as opposed to Roth the author—decides to withhold the eleventh chapter, which supposedly details his spywork on Palestinian activists and anti-Zionist Jews in Athens, he not only concedes to the demands of Smiles-burger, the elderly Mossad agent who instructed him to suppress the chapter, but his actions also reveal the dangers of holding up ethnic nationalism, in this case Zionism, at the expense of other kinds of belonging, such as the diasporic. For a text brimming over with voice, story, and argument, the fact that Philip's adventures in Athens and elsewhere are the only narrative element that is shut out of the novel deserves more than passing attention. The shocking moment of self-censorship that ends the novel reveals Roth's commitment in Operation Shylock to exposing the distorted worldview that is required in order for Jewish Americans to continue supporting the self-proclaimed Jewish state.