Race, Rights, and Recognition

Jewish American Literature since 1969

Dean Franco

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2012
• eBook ISBN: 9780801464485
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

In Race, Rights, and Recognition, Dean J. Franco explores the work of recent Jewish American writers, many of whom have taken unpopular stances on social issues, distancing themselves from the politics and public practice of multiculturalism. While these writers explore the same themes of group-based rights and recognition that preoccupy Latino, African American, and Native American writers, they are generally suspicious of group identities and are more likely to adopt postmodern distancing techniques than to presume to speak for "their people." Ranging from Philip Roth's scandalous 1969 novel Portnoy's Complaint to Gary Shteyngart's Absurdistan in 2006, the literature Franco examines in this book is at once critical of and deeply invested in the problems of race and the rise of multicultural philosophies and policies in America.

Franco argues that from the formative years of multiculturalism (1965–1975), Jewish writers probed the ethics and not just the politics of civil rights and cultural recognition; this perspective arose from a stance of keen awareness of the limits and possibilities of consensus-based civil and human rights. Contemporary Jewish writers are now responding to global problems of cultural conflict and pluralism and thinking through the challenges and responsibilities of cosmopolitanism. Indeed, if the United States is now correctly—if cautiously—identifying itself as a post-ethnic nation, it may be said that Jewish writing has been well ahead of the curve in imagining what a post-ethnic future might look like and in critiquing the social conventions of race and ethnicity.

Part I

PLURALISM, RACE, AND RELIGION

1

PORTNOY’S COMPLAINT

It’s about Race, Not Sex (Even the Sex Is about Race)

Early in Philip Roth’s notorious novel Portnoy’s Complaint, published in 1969, the adolescent Alexander Portnoy tells his parents that he will no longer attend synagogue on the High Holidays, for he is, he declares, not Jewish but a human being: “Religion is the opiate of the people! And if believing that makes me a fourteen-year-old Communist, then that’s what I am, and I’m proud of it! . . . I happen to believe in the rights of man, rights such as are extended in the Soviet Union to all people, regardless of race, religion, or color” (75).1 Portnoy then strikes closer to home: “My communism, in fact, is why I now insist on eating with the [African American] cleaning lady when I come home for my lunch on Mondays and see that she is there” (75). On a roll, young Portnoy directs his rage toward his father Jack, a life insurance salesman whose clients include African American families in the Newark ghettos: “I tell you, if he ever uses the word nigger in my presence again, I will drive a dagger into his fucking bigoted heart! Is that clear to everyone? I don’t care that his clothes stink so bad after he comes home from collecting the colored debit that they have to be hung in the cellar to air out. I don’t care that they drive him nearly crazy letting their insurance lapse. That is only another reason to be compassionate” (74–75). Roth’s satire of the Jewish family romance is transparent, but what is at stake in Portnoy’s citation of the rights of man, communism, and the Soviet Union when he attacks his father? A conventional approach to the question would be to track the character’s Oedipal rage: Portnoy overthrows his father by attacking his faith in America, including American racism. By aligning with the Soviet Union’s promise of true liberation from race prejudice, Portnoy folds Cold War politics into his rebellion against his family’s assimilationist agenda. However, this youthful utopian embrace of communism persists and matures beyond adolescent rebellion, becoming a politically trenchant position that is central to the plot; as an adult, Portnoy chooses a career as a civil rights attorney, eventually becoming “assistant commissioner” for the Mayor’s Commission on Human Opportunity. It is well established that in Portnoy’s Complaint, Roth was satirizing the midcentury Jewish family through the psychological templates of Oedipalism and sexual perversion. Here I propose to examine closely another point of satire, the Jewish American obsession not with sex but with race and rights.

By beginning not with the cooperation and conflict of black and Jewish civil rights activism of the 1950s but with the aftermath, including fear, skepticism, cynicism, and opportunism on both sides, this chapter initiates a significant theme for the book as a whole: Something went wrong. Between the conception of justice and its legal designation; between the success of Jewish ethnicity and its bowdlerization; between Jewish commitments to global human rights and the swap of “rights” for “intervention,” Jewish American writers have found the grammar of race, the social implications of rights, and the narrative lacunae of recognition to be a rich seam for literary exploration. As Roth’s novel makes clear, claims for rights and recognition necessarily pass through a politicized semantic field that has consequences for social policy, of course, but also for literature. In order to say something new about Jewishness, Americanness, and the Jewish American encounter with domestic and global multiculturalism, writers need to strip away, reimagine, or wholly reinvent the language of identity. Roth’s novel is an appropriate starting point for examining this sort of literary intervention for its direct and often very funny and frequently very sad satirization of rights-talk.

Consider, for instance, Alexander Portnoy’s phrase “collecting the colored debit,” which is a reference to Jack Portnoy’s door-to-door work in black neighborhoods, where he collects premium payments on life insurance policies. “The colored debit” is the amount of money owed, but the phrase suggests a debit, or debt, accrued by the fact of being black—the debt measuring their distance from a secure life in the racist America of the 1950s. Just who should pay this debt is a matter of dispute between Jack and Alexander Portnoy. Jack berates his clients for their supposed irresponsibility and lack of foresight. As an employee of Boston and Northeastern Life (insignia: the Mayflower), Portnoy’s father is a model minority metonymically grabbing the wages of whiteness with one hand while, with the other, wagging a finger back at the “niggers” who “can think to leave children out in the rain without even a decent umbrella for protection” (10, 6). “Niggers” here refers to the failure to demonstrate the morally responsible behavior that Jack associates with the middle-class nuclear American family. At the same time, the intimacy of debt collection, including the fatiguing walk through the neighborhood and the door-to-door visits, results in Jack’s figuratively collecting “blackness” in the sweat and stink of his clothes. Though Jack’s hypocritically racist line suggests that blackness has rubbed off through contact, we recognize something more analogical at work. The underpaid, unappreciated labor, the physical hardship of the walk, and the impossibility of ever being promoted in his company—“my father . . . wasn’t exactly suited to be the Jackie Robinson of the insurance business”—reveals the anxious proximity of working-class blacks and Jews in 1950s Newark (8). Jack uses the offending racial epithet as the distinguishing diacritic between black and white, anxiously occluding the contiguity of black and Jew, while Alexander affirms their common class position. Alexander Portnoy’s tirade reverses the meaning of the phrase “the colored debit”: the colored debit is precisely what the “colored” are owed. Portnoy assumes this debt by eating with the cleaning lady and scolding his father as a teenager and working for civil rights in New York as an adult.

The adult Portnoy holds the fictional equivalent of New York City’s assistant attorney general for civil rights, and as I explain below, there is a clear line connecting the young Portnoy’s commitment to international human rights with his later work in local civil rights issues. Portnoy’s concern for rights is not just undermined by his obsessive sexual neuroses. More than that, Roth has linked Portnoy’s insistent sexual desire—what we might call “rights of desire,” following the Marquis de Sade—with the normative framework of civil rights. That civil rights are tagged in this novel as “human opportunity” recalls the fact that U.S. civil rights laws correspond with the UN Treaty on Human Rights, while the UN framework is itself based on the Enlightenment-era document, The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. It was this 1791 French declaration that offered “tolerance” to Jews (among others), a foreign people in the midst of the republic, and Roth picks up on that tone—tolerance while holding one’s nose—in Portnoy’s defense of African Americans.2 I mentioned Sade above because of the obvious resonance between Portnoy’s exploration of desire and the same depicted in Sade’s work, but Sade, too, is an interlocutor of the emergent discourse of “rights” in the French Republic. I develop this argument further, but for now I posit that as the Marquis de Sade’s exploration of pleasure without limits is understood as a scandal to philosophy’s promotion of “freedom” and “human rights,” so, too, does Portnoy’s pursuit of limitless pleasure engage with and scandalize the liberal civic virtue of “human opportunity.”

Recall that the phrase “the colored debit” is linked to the broader issue of international human rights in Portnoy’s rant and that human rights was the controversial filter through which many U.S. activists viewed the question of domestic civil rights. By declaring himself a communist in support of human rights, young Portnoy may tweak his father’s patriotism, but Roth is doing more, as he is alluding to a significant controversy for American Jews. Jewish support for international human rights and domestic civil rights was a point of pride for many American Jews, and Jewish institutional support for rights was affirmed by both the American Jewish Committee and the American Jewish Congress in 1947. But there was a hitch. The rhetoric of “the rights of man” and of human rights was in use by communist sympathizers in the late 1940s and was taken up by leaders of the Soviet Union by the 1950s to critique American segregation. Indeed, young Portnoy declares himself a communist supporting human rights in 1947, the same year that the American Communist Party, the NAACP, and other black rights organizations petitioned the newly formed UN Human Rights Commission to investigate segregation and lynching in the U.S. South. Recognizing the legal merit in these petitions, Americans in the State Department and the Truman administration attempted to redirect the petitions themselves and then rewrote UN human rights treaties to appease southern states. The United States was at that time interested in leveraging the UN Human Rights Commission in its Cold War campaign against the Soviet Union, while the Soviets were eager to redirect the human rights lens on the Jim Crow South.3

Domestically, the war crimes trials at Nuremberg were routinely cited by human rights activists in the United States—including the NAACP, the American Communist Party, and the American Jewish Congress—as a fitting impetus for ending Jim Crow laws, at the behest of the United Nations if necessary. For the American Jewish Congress, assuming a leading role in the fight for civil rights in the United States meant spending some of the moral capital accrued from the Holocaust, another type of “colored debit.” To do so without seeming sympathetic to communism, the American Jewish Congress specified its commitment to rights around particular issues of religious freedom and freedom from racial discrimination while aggressively celebrating American democratic ideals.4 Arthur Goren phrases the dilemma this way: “Here was the snake in the garden: the agony and trepidation caused by the conspicuous presence of Jews among those accused of disloyalty and even espionage, and the presence of a marginal but vocal radical left within the organized Jewish community.”5 American Jewish organizations responded to McCarthyism and the persecution of left-wing Jews with a cautious, narrow, and liberal approach to human and civil rights.

Putting the topic of human rights at the center of Portnoy’s tirade against his father is typical Roth mischief, poking at a sore spot on the border of Jewish public and private cultures. Though not as spectacular as the resurrected and sexually dynamic Anne Frank of Roth’s The Ghost Writer, the subject of rights plucks at some similarly sensitive chords. Consider that the celebrated “black-Jewish alliance” breaks down—famously, not to mention painfully—over the very issues of communism, human rights, and support for American norms of democracy. Jewish American institutional support for human rights in the late 1940s would constrict to more firm and pro-American support for liberal democratic rights by the 1960s. I begin here with Portnoy’s adolescent support for human rights to suggest that his interest in race and rights exists in tandem and in tension with a wider Jewish American current of thinking on rights and that through Portnoy, Roth satirizes the postwar Jewish commitment to liberalism. Portnoy’s Complaint is supremely a satire, and as such, it does not offer a positive or a normative model of rights—human, civil, or otherwise. Nor even does the novel model ethical relations between whites and blacks or blacks and Jews (or parents and children or men and women . . .). Instead, the novel’s satiric representation of race, class, and gender relations amounts to a scathing critique of the biases and blind spots of postwar liberalism, especially among the ascendant third generation of Jews—a group unusually educated, politically active, staunchly liberal, and above all outspoken for civil rights in the 1950s and 1960s.

Writing that Portnoy’s Complaint is “about race” is my attempt to call attention to the centrality of race to the novel.6 Of course, sex is central also—central, that is, to the critique of race and rights. This chapter proceeds first by discussing the novel’s depiction of race politics in New York during the 1950s and 1960s. I link Portnoy’s Complaint to a perhaps unexpected parallel text, Eldridge Cleaver’s Soul on Ice, also published in 1969 and also obsessed with sex, shame, and race.7 Rather than treat sex and race as separate topics, I bring them together with the analytic of “rights.” What is more, although I take Portnoy’s Complaint to be a first-rate satire, I also argue that there is a deep and difficult critique of the idea of “rights” at work in the novel, but it is one that can only be accessed by analyzing how race affects the sex in the novel.

It’s about Race

Published in 1969, Portnoy’s Complaint was Roth’s most polarizing novel to that point, satirizing what he has called the “folklore” of the Jewish American family—including the overbearing mother, the long-suffering father, and the pathologically good son—and hyperbolizing the Freudian war of id and superego in the character of Alexander Portnoy, the masturbation-addicted adolescent who grows up to be a highly respected civil rights attorney and who also happens to be a misogynistic sex addict.8 Portnoy’s mother is obsessed with purity and cleanliness, while Portnoy is committed to defilement, a dialectic internalized and performed in Portnoy’s adult social and professional life as well. Portnoy pinpoints the origin of his sexual and social transgression in his mother, whose own Jewish body Portnoy both fears and longs to protect. But even here, between the mother and the son is the specter of race. The “primal scene” of the novel comes as a moment of discovery not of gender but of color, when Portnoy spies Sophie, his mother, washing utensils previously used by their black maid:

Once Dorothy chanced to come back into the kitchen while my mother was still standing over the faucet marked H, sending torrents down upon the knife and fork that had passed between the schvartze’s thick pink lips. “Oh, you know how hard it is to get mayonnaise off silverware these days, Dorothy,” says my nimble-minded mother—and thus, she tells me later, by her quick thinking has managed to spare the colored woman’s feelings. (13)

As with Portnoy, Dorothy’s “defilement” is policed and sanitized by his mother, and in retrospect her cause becomes his moral crusade to protect minorities from discrimination. At the same time, Portnoy does not relinquish the abjecting stereotype of Dorothy’s racial otherness. This dynamic of internalization of and resistance to the mother’s shame structures Portnoy’s subsequent anxieties and excesses, which are likewise always marked by race.

Portnoy calls attention to the knife Sophie washes as the source of his castration complex—the hyberbolized maternal prohibition against masturbation—and it is precisely the knife’s potential as an instrument of castration that establishes Judaism as a belated racial category for Portnoy.9 Circumcision is the peculiar mark of Jewish racialization, the retroactive racialization of the Jewish male body that thereby folds the male child into the clan.10 Circumcision thus supplements matrilineal genetic descent with cultural descent, with the mother ambiguously poised between race and culture. Portnoy’s obsession with his mother—desire and repulsion—is analogous to his obsession with racial Jewishness—affirmation and rejection. At this point, a discussion of Portnoy’s Complaint would typically proceed by analyzing the dynamics of generational conflict—how the second generation, which understood itself as more or less a “race,” certainly a “tribe,” clashes with the third generation, which has not only freed itself from the binding logic of race but has also so mastered its politics as to participate fluidly in race discourse.11 This teleological and diachronic anal...

Table of contents

• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I. Pluralism, Race, and Religion
• Part II. Recognition, Rights, and Responsibility
• Epilogue
• Notes
• Bibliography