Americanizing the Nuremberg Laws: Alternative-Historical Racial Reconfigurations in The Plot Against America

At his dinner with the Roths in chapter 3 of The Plot Against America (2004), Rabbi Bengelsdorf schools Herman on the difference between President Lindbergh and Hitler. The rabbi, who advises the Lindbergh administration on matters related to the American Jewish population, draws a tendentious distinction between the president’s policies and the Nuremberg Laws:

What Hitler perpetrated on Germany’s Jews with the passage in 1935 of the Nuremberg Laws is the absolute antithesis of what President Lindbergh has undertaken to do for America’s Jews through the establishment of the Office of American Absorption. The Nuremberg Laws deprived Jews of their civil rights and did everything to exclude them from membership in their nation. What I have encouraged President Lindbergh to do is to initiate programs inviting Jews to enter as far into the national life as they like.

(111)

The first-person narrator’s sardonic hyperbole distances him from the positive impression the Rabbi’s remarks evidently made on his younger self: “[A] pouring forth of sentences as informed as these had never before occurred at our dining table or probably anywhere on our block.” Herman, too, although his son Philip finds it “startling,” recoils from Bengelsdorf’s sophistry: “Hearing a person like you talk like that—frankly, it alarms me even more” (111). Herman’s response will prove less a shock to Roth’s careful readers than it did to young Philip. They will likely notice the acerbic sarcasm in the more mature narrative voice’s ironically exaggerated praise, but they may also discern intersections between Nazi policies toward Jews and other European ethnic groups deemed undesirable and the variety of American racist laws and policies against African Americans and especially Native Americans that Plot imaginatively reconfigures in Lindbergh’s anti-Semitic policies. Against the background of those linkages, Jewish ethnic identity appears to occupy a particularly ambiguous liminal space in Roth’s alternative historical novel and his oeuvre more generally, as it does in American culture and history writ large.

Anti-Semitism and Other Racisms in The Plot Against America

Christopher Douglas observes that Roth’s novel “theorizes Jewishness by recapitulating the history of other racialized minorities in the United States” (787). Others have offered more censorious assessments of Plot’s thematization of the American Jewish experience. At one point in his complex exploration of the role memory plays in the novel, Andrew Gross claims that The Plot Against America “engage[s] in a politics of competing victimization” and “plagiarizes the black experience of segregation to represent an exaggerated version of American anti-Semitism” (421). A primary example of such “plagiarism” occurs in the chapter immediately preceding Bengelsdorf’s symposium at the Roths’ home. In this early section of the novel, the family takes a road trip south to Washington, DC, where they find themselves under constant harassment. At one point, Herman is called a “loudmouth Jew” and threatened because he objects to a comparison of President Lindbergh and Lincoln that he hears from another tourist at the Lincoln Memorial (Roth, Plot 64–65); later the same day, the Roths are ejected from their hotel on account of their Jewishness; and at the chapter’s close, Herman finds himself in a dangerous altercation with an anti-Semite at a cafeteria. Although refusing the violent confrontation his antagonist provokes, Herman nonetheless will not abandon his seat (77–79), imposing his patient bravery on his terrified family as well: “‘Keep eating your ice cream boys. . . . [Y]ou just keep eating and take your time.’ He smiled to make us smile” (80). The scene ends with Herman singing a patriotic song. “Though there was no applause,” the narrator notes, at the same time, “no riot ensued. Nothing. Indeed, by not quitting he appeared almost to have won the day” (81–82).

Chapter 2 of The Plot Against America attributes the actual historical experiences of African Americans in the Jim Crow South to the fictional Roths in alternative-historical Washington, DC. While scholars have occasionally noted correspondences between African American history and Roth’s counterfactual narrative in this chapter (Slivka...