Roth's Jewish Weequahic: Perception or Reality and Why It Matters

Abstract:Philip Roth gets a lot of things right about Jewish Weequahic, at least for the time in which he lived there. Nevertheless, there are some aspects of the Jewish landscape of Weequahic and Newark that escaped him. Some of what he misses explains a development he was surely unaware of, the rejuvenation of traditional Jewish life in Weequahic after his departure from Newark, which takes place in the very period in which Roth has "the Swede," Seymour Levov, cast off any connection to his Jewish roots. It is argued here that Roth misreads some of what he witnessed and was ill-informed about developments in Weequahic beyond 1950. Had it been otherwise, his take on the local and national Jewish condition might have been very different. Much of the story of the Jewish community of Newark has yet to receive the full scholarly treatment it deserves. When it is written, it will shed new light not only on Roth's writings but also on the struggles, realities, and meaning of being Jewish in mid-twentieth-century America.