Word: jew
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Portnoy's Complaint. My Life as a Man (1974) and The Professor of Desire (1977) returned to the sensitive roots of his wit: the conflicts between lust and respectability, art and burlesque, cultural ties and personal freedom, the problem of how to be-or not to be-a Jew. Civilization and its discontents were no longer a set of Freudian trampolines for a spry intelligence; the escape from solemnity required a more studied effort. Oddly, Roth's most exciting work of the '70s remains relatively unknown: two long stories first published in American Review...
...Mafia, where he is quickly impaled on the meat hooks of 243-lb. Albert ("King Kong") Karpstein, a.k.a. The Animal, a.k.a. Milky, for his diet of Milky Way chocolate bars. A part-time enforcer for Joe Hobo, a.k.a. Joe Hoboken, a.k.a. Joseph lacovelli, the simian Karpstein is a semidemented Jew whose appeal to his Italian bosses lies in the imagination and diligence he brings to his work. He would as soon see his creditors default as pay, for the added diversion of carving them up. But Milky is also an independent Shylock, one of the biggest and most ruthless around...
Only after the war did the boy learn what it had meant, in those years, to be a Jew. His allegiance shifted away from the Catholic Church to a belief in Zionism...
...being "an extremist" on civil liberties. His credo: "If there is discrimination against anybody, there is discrimination against everybody." He has fought for the rights of American Nazis to speak and assemble, and successfully defended Actor Harry Reems, the lead in Deep Throat, against obscenity charges. Though a Jew and an ardent Zionist, Dershowitz has criticized Israel for establishing settlements on the West Bank. For that, he says, "my mother really gave me hell...
...Merrill's last book of poetry, was a 90-page narrative that turned a parlor game into a trip through the first circles of the supernatural. The Book of Ephraim recounted how Merrill and his friend David Jackson used a Ouija board to contact Ephraim, a witty Greek Jew born in A.D. 8; it then followed the two-way conversations that ensued over the next 20 years. This device gave the added ballast of history to Merrill's already established lyric and autobiographical skills; Ephraim's was the spirit of a number of ages, and he proved...