From Mount Meru to Newark: Teaching Philip Roth on the U.S.-Mexico Border

In a famous story told in the Babylonian Talmud a heathen came to Rabbi Hillel inquiring about conversion to Judaism. This vagrant taunts Rabbi Hillel by saying: “Tell me the entire Torah while standing on one foot.” Rather than be put off by the dismissive tone of his questioner, Rabbi Hillel calmly replies: “What is hateful to yourself do not do unto others—all the rest is commentary—go and study it” (Babylonian Talmud: Shabbos 31a).

As I stand in a literature classroom at the University of Texas at El Paso and gaze out the windows of Hudspeth Hall toward the violent slums of Juarez, Mexico, just a few hundred yards away—looking at streets that are erupting in violence that many of my students must pass through each day on their way to my classroom—I often recall this ancient story and ask myself: What possible significance could this Talmudic story hold for me and my UTEP students, most of whom are the very first members of their extended families to attend college? How does this story help illuminate what I value as a teacher of Philip Roth’s fiction on the U.S.-Mexico border?

On the often forgotten borderlands between the United States and Mexico my students and I create Jewish culture through the endless search for meaning and value. As Emmanuel Levinas observed in the aftermath of the Holocaust: “A true culture cannot be summarized, for it resides in the very effort that cultivates it” (Nine Talmudic Readings, xv). Levinas comes close to recapitulating Rabbi Hillel’s famous story. What Hillel means in his cryptic response to his rough interrogator is that if you wish to teach someone (and thereby grow yourself) you begin with a shared vision of humanism: “that which is hateful to yourself do not visit upon your neighbor”—and all the rest of any cultural tradition resides in the labor and love of study. Hillel’s response to that gentile is in reality an invitation to study—an invitation to dialectically create culture and form a united community of scholarship.

When it comes to teaching Roth, that invitation to a dialectic should come with warnings—it can be a complicated affair. Roth’s work does not sit comfortably and quietly in undergraduate syllabi, or graduate syllabi, for that matter. In his essay, “The Image of Proust,” Walter Benjamin writes: “It has rightly been said that all great works of literature either found a genre or dissolve one—that they are, in other words, special cases” (Illuminations, 201). And so we might consider Roth’s difficulty as also a special opportunity for discovery. I regularly teach Roth at the University of Texas at El Paso, a border university where my students are 90 percent Latina/o, and the many cognitive and intellectual pedagogical challenges Roth’s work presents are further complicated and enriched by my students’ life experiences. A large number of my students are international students (Mexican nationals) who daily spend up to three hours at one of the many border bridges linking El Paso, Texas, to Juarez, Mexico, waiting to cross into the United States to study Philip Roth’s body of work with me.

I think that teaching Roth from an interdisciplinary and intertextual perspective is a helpful pedagogical strategy—and this afternoon in the short time allotted me, I will attempt to give an example of this approach. In my own research, which focuses on the theological underpinnings of contemporary Jewish American writing, Roth presents several intriguing challenges. In interviews he dismisses the notion of the Jewishness of his work even while so much of his literary production is in numerous ways determined by and underpinned with textual Jewish history. These themes and ideas are complicated by Roth’s own often-stated antipathy to being categorized as a Jewish American writer and in typical Roth fashion he prefers the term “Newark Jew”—which is quite revealing of the specificity his work entails. While receiving The National Book Foundation’s Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, Roth said: “Don...