Rereading Operation Shylock at Philip Roth’s Grave

Philip Roth died in New York City on May 22, 2018, and was buried, alongside Hannah Arendt, the poet Anthony Hecht, and several other professors in the Bard College cemetery in Annandale-on-Hudson, a few steps from my office. I occasionally visit the College burial grounds, where students place votive objects at some of the graves, especially Arendt’s and Roth’s. Some lay pebbles, others place pens, while spendthrifts abandon paperbacks authored by the deceased—titles written decades ago that suddenly feel current. In recent years, I’ve spotted copies of The Plot Against America, Roth’s alternative history about Charles Lindbergh’s victory in the 1940 American election and the antisemitic wave across the country that follows.

These days, I half expect to stumble across a copy of Operation Shylock: A Confession nestled before Roth’s simple tombstone (“PHILIP ROTH 1933-2018”). The book is a riotous, metafictional affair in which Philip Roth learns that another man who calls himself Philip Roth is preaching a radical philosophy of “Diasporism” in response to a violent upsurge in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Diasporism has been having something of a moment, especially among a certain set of young Jews. There’s a surge of enrollment in Yiddish courses, a growing interest in books like Shaul Magid’s The Necessity of Exile, and a new willingness to question the tenets of Zionism.

The Diasporism in Operation Shylock is of a particularly virulent strain, one whose extremism is played (by the authorial Roth) for comic effect:

Diasporism seeks to promote the dispersion of the Jews in the West, particularly the resettlement of Israeli Jews of European background in the European countries where there were sizable Jewish populations before World War II. Diasporism plans to rebuild everything, not in an alien and menacing Middle East but in those very lands where everything once flourished, while, at the same time, it seeks to avert the catastrophe of a second Holocaust brought about by the exhaustion of Zionism as a political and ideological force.

To be honest, with the troubling rhetoric we’ve been hearing since October 7, this now strikes me as more disturbing than amusing. Of course, Operation Shylock is a Roth novel, one that sports a penile implant, a self-help group called Antisemites Anonymous, and an eight-page-long satirical (auto-)antisemitic screed that begins with questioning the veracity of the Holocaust, ends with a reference to “Jewish Control Central,” and along the way demeans a host of American Jewish novelists, including Roth himself. In short, Operation Shylock does what we expect Roth to do: slay, resurrect, and re-slay the Jewish world’s sacred heifers.

Even with Roth’s penchant for controversy, it is remarkable to find the “real” Roth impersonating the impersonator and passionately lecturing a Palestinian activist and an Israeli soldier on Diasporism. Perhaps even more troubling is the defense offered when Diasporism is shown to be ridiculous, utterly impractical, and immoral:

In his day Herzl too was accused of being a satirist and of making an elaborate joke when he proposed the establishment of a Jewish state. Many deprecated his plan as a hilarious fantasy, an outlandish fiction, and called him crazy as well…[This] is no hilarious fantasy.

Operation Shylock was published in 1993, when the optimism of the Oslo Accords was waxing. Somehow, it feels even more current and transgressive in 2025. Like a house of mirrors, you know it’s a joke, yet you can’t stop wondering whether the disturbing image reflected back is somehow real.