The Plot Against America

by

Philip Roth

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Jewish Identity vs. Assimilation Theme Analysis

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Jewish Identity vs. Assimilation Theme Icon
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Jewish Identity vs. Assimilation Theme Icon

At the heart of The Plot Against America is an exploration of what it means to identify not just as a Jew, but as an American Jew. In Philip Roth’s auto-fictional alternate history, America elects the aviation-hero-cum-Nazi-sympathizer Charles Lindbergh as president in November of 1940, unseating Franklin Delano Roosevelt and installing an isolationist, anti-Semitic government in the White House. Over the years that follow, the young Philip and his family watch helplessly as anti-Semitism takes hold of America, as the Lindbergh administration enacts relocation policies for Jewish families, and as government-sanctioned assimilation programs aimed at young Jewish people become part of daily life. Ultimately, Roth suggests that Jewish identity in America is jeopardized by the pressure to put one’s identity as an American over one’s identity as a Jewish person, or to assimilate oneself and one’s family into a more mainstream, palatable version of the Jewish identity.

As the novel unfolds, Roth investigates what it means to his characters to be American Jews—and how that meaning changes as the fictionalized America of Roth’s imagination slides further into fascism and anti-Semitism. “America is our only homeland. Our religion is independent of any piece of land other than this great country… […] I want Charles Lindbergh to be my president not in spite of my being a Jew but because I am a Jew—an American Jew,” says the controversial New Jersey-based Rabbi Lionel Bengelsdorf in a speech endorsing Lindbergh early on in the novel. Bengelsdorf is the character in the novel most willing to abide by assimilationist policies. A Jewish man from South Carolina, the rabbi is the leader of a large Newark congregation and a prominent figurehead of the Jewish community there—yet he is a controversial man whom many Jewish people see as self-hating or at the very least self-denying due to his endorsement of and closeness to Lindbergh. When Philip’s aunt Evelyn, his mother Bess’s sister, becomes engaged to the rabbi, the Roths find themselves welcoming Bengelsdorf into their home—and listening to his lengthy speeches about the singularity of American Jews and the “great opportunity” they have to “participate fully in the national life of their country” without “dwell[ing] apart” from mainstream society. Bengelsdorf is an accessory to the Lindbergh administration—and as such, he takes it upon himself to spread messages encouraging assimilation and fealty to the American “homeland” among his congregation, his neighborhood, and even his extended family. Whether Bengelsdorf truly believes the things he says is a fact which Roth leaves open to interpretation—but what is clear is that Bengelsdorf disseminates dangerous stereotypes about Jewish people as existing “apart” from and refusing to “participate” in society. These falsehoods have been used against Jewish people around the world throughout history—and they were, of course, an important tool of the Nazis in justifying their “final solution” to the “Jewish problem” in Europe. Roth uses Bengelsdorf’s acceptance and encouragement of assimilationist policies to foreshadow the larger turns still to come for the Roths and all the Jews of America under the Lindbergh administration.

With the creation of the Office of American Absorption (OAA), more Jewish families find themselves faced with forced assimilation. When the OAA creates the Just Folks program with the aim of relocating young Jewish children to farms in America’s heartlands for extended periods of time, the Roths find themselves contending with the threat of assimilation. Philip’s older brother Sandy excitedly takes the chance to spend a summer working on a farm in Kentucky—when he returns, he speaks with a country accent and extols the simplicity of country life. He starts referring to his family as “you people” and speaking about “Jews” as if he is not a Jew himself, declaring his contempt for his family’s cultural and religious life. Sandy is a young teenager—as such, he is at an impressionable age. The Lindbergh administration taps into this fact by aiming their Just Folks program at young Jewish people who may harbor frustrations with their parents, with their religious lives, or with their own identities, using those frustrations and insecurities to assimilate young Jewish people and to detach them from their cultural lives. Roth demonstrates the fractures that Sandy’s self-loathing and newfound emotional and cultural distance from his family cause—and thus foreshadow the further measures the Lindbergh administration will soon take after the success of its exploratory programs. In 1942, the administration enacts Homestead 42, a new version of the Homestead Act of 1862—a piece of legislation which was meant to encourage westward migration by providing settlers with 160 acres of land. Homestead 42 is meant to offer “relocation opportunities” for Jewish families, moving them to the rural interior of the country. Philip’s parents recognize the legislation for what it is: an attempt to break up Jewish communities around the country, isolate Jewish Americans, and thus encourage assimilation into the American mainstream.  Homestead 42 is the legislation which clues Philip’s family and those around them in their Jewish community into the fact that the new administration is well on its way to dividing up Jewish communities around the country. It’s essentially forcing American Jews to detach themselves from their cultural and religious centers, from their neighbors and family members, and from the traditions and gatherings that define secular cultural Judaism in America. Roth’s indictment of such measures is not just limited to the fictional events to the novel—by using these fictional scenarios, Roth more broadly decries the idea that American Jews must blend in or forgo their long-held rituals and traditions in order to truly be a part of American society.

In Roth’s imagination, the “unadulterated loyalty […] to the United States of America” that characters like Bengelsdorf express is at best a survival tactic and at worst a symptom of assimilationist rhetoric’s brainwashing potential. Roth uses The Plot Against America to metaphorize the constant choice that Jewish Americans must face: whether to swear fealty to a “homeland” that only wants an assimilated version of them, or whether to stand tall in their people’s history, traditions, and legacy of community and resistance.

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Jewish Identity vs. Assimilation ThemeTracker

The ThemeTracker below shows where, and to what degree, the theme of Jewish Identity vs. Assimilation appears in each chapter of The Plot Against America. Click or tap on any chapter to read its Summary & Analysis.
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Jewish Identity vs. Assimilation Quotes in The Plot Against America

Below you will find the important quotes in The Plot Against America related to the theme of Jewish Identity vs. Assimilation.
Chapter 1 Quotes

“Alvin’s going to go to Canada and join the Canadian army,” he said. “He’s going to fight for the British against Hitler.”

“But nobody can beat Roosevelt,” I said.

“Lindbergh’s going to. America’s going to go fascist.”

Then we just stood there together under the intimidating spell of the three portraits [of Lindbergh.]

Related Characters: Philip Roth (speaker), Sanford “Sandy” Roth (speaker), Alvin Roth, Charles Lindbergh, Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR), Adolf Hitler
Page Number: 26
Explanation and Analysis:

Harmless enough, and yet it drove some of the mothers crazy who had to hear us at it for hours on end through their open windows. “Can’t you kids do something else? Can’t you find another game to play?” But we couldn’t—declaring war was all we thought about too.

Related Characters: Philip Roth (speaker)
Page Number: 28
Explanation and Analysis:

“I am here,” Rabbi Bengelsdorf [said,] “to crush all doubt of the unadulterated loyalty of the American Jews to the United States of America. […] America is our beloved homeland. America is our only homeland. Our religion is independent of any piece of land other than this great country, to which, now as always, we commit our total devotion and allegiance as the proudest of citizens. I want Charles Lindbergh to be my president not in spite of my being a Jew but because I am a Jew—an American Jew.”

Related Characters: Rabbi Lionel Bengelsdorf (speaker), Charles Lindbergh
Page Number: 35-36
Explanation and Analysis:

It was when I looked next at the album’s facing page to see what, if anything, had happened to my 1934 National Parks set of ten that I fell out of the bed and woke up on the floor, this time screaming. […] Across the face of each, […] across everything in America that was the bluest and the greenest and the whitest and to be preserved forever in these pristine reservations, was printed a black swastika.

Related Characters: Philip Roth (speaker), Sanford “Sandy” Roth
Related Symbols: Philip’s Stamps
Page Number: 43
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 2 Quotes

We had driven right to the very heart of American history, and whether we knew it in so many words, it was American history, delineated in its most inspirational form, that we were counting on to protect us against Lindbergh.

Related Characters: Philip Roth (speaker), Herman Roth, Bess Roth, Sanford “Sandy” Roth, Charles Lindbergh
Page Number: 58
Explanation and Analysis:

It was from there that we heard him refer to my father as “a loudmouth Jew,” followed a moment later by the elderly lady declaring, “I’d give anything to slap his face.”

Mr. Taylor led us quickly away to a smaller hall just off the main chamber where there was a tablet inscribed with the Gettysburg Address and a mural whose theme was the Emancipation.

“To hear words like that in a place like this,” said my father, his choked voice quivering with indignation. “In a shrine to a man like this!”

Related Characters: Philip Roth (speaker), Herman Roth (speaker), Charles Lindbergh, Mr. Taylor
Page Number: 65
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 3 Quotes

“An independent destiny for America”—that was the phrase Lindbergh repeated some fifteen times in his State of the Union speech and again at the close of his address on the night of June 22. When I asked my father to explain what the words meant […] he frowned and said, “It means turning our back on our friends. It means making friends with their enemies. You know what it means, son? It means destroying everything that America stands for.”

Related Characters: Philip Roth (speaker), Herman Roth (speaker), Charles Lindbergh
Page Number: 84
Explanation and Analysis:

“The Jews of America […] are unlike any other community of Jews in the history of the world. […] The Jews of America can participate fully in the national life of their country. They need no longer dwell apart, a pariah community separated from the rest.”

Related Characters: Rabbi Lionel Bengelsdorf (speaker), Philip Roth, Aunt Evelyn, Charles Lindbergh
Page Number: 106-107
Explanation and Analysis:

We never followed anybody we thought was Jewish. They didn’t interest us. Our curiosity was directed at men, the adult Christian men who worked all day in downtown Newark. Where did they go when they went home?

Related Characters: Philip Roth (speaker), Charles Lindbergh, Earl Axman
Page Number: 116
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 4 Quotes

“Alvin can’t bear your president,” my father replied, “that’s why he went to Canada. Not so long ago you couldn’t bear the man either. But now this anti-Semite is your friend. The Depression is over, all you rich Jews tell me, and thanks not to Roosevelt but to Mr. Lindbergh. The stock market is up, profits are up, business is booming—and why? Because we have Lindbergh’s peace instead of Roosevelt’s war.”

Related Characters: Herman Roth (speaker), Alvin Roth (speaker), Uncle Monty (speaker), Philip Roth, Bess Roth, Aunt Evelyn, Charles Lindbergh, Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR)
Page Number: 124
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 5 Quotes

My brother had discovered in himself the uncommon gift to be somebody, and so while making speeches praising President Lindbergh and while exhibiting his drawings of him and while publicly extolling (in words written by Aunt Evelyn) the enriching benefits of his eight weeks as a Jewish farm hand in the Gentile heartland—while doing, if the truth be known, what I wouldn’t have minded doing myself, by doing what was normal and patriotic all over America and aberrant and freakish only in his home—Sandy was having the time of his life.

Related Characters: Philip Roth (speaker), Sanford “Sandy” Roth, Aunt Evelyn, Charles Lindbergh
Page Number: 184
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 6 Quotes

“And who will I talk to?” she asked. “Who will I have there like the friends I’ve had my whole life?”

“There are women there, too.”

“Gentile women,” she said. […] “Good Christian women,” she said,” who will fall all over themselves to make me feel at home. They have no right to do this!” she proclaimed. […] “this is illegal. You cannot just take Jews because they’re Jews and force them to live where you want them to.”

Related Characters: Herman Roth (speaker), Bess Roth (speaker), Philip Roth, Sanford “Sandy” Roth
Page Number: 208
Explanation and Analysis:

“I am not running away!” he shouted, startling everyone. “This is our country!” “No, my mother said sadly, “not anymore. It’s Lindbergh’s. It’s the goyim’s. It’s their country,” she said, and her breaking voice and the shocking words and the nightmare immediacy of what was mercilessly real forced my father […] to see himself with mortifying clarity: a devoted father of titanic energy no more capable of protecting his family from harm than was Mr. Wishnow hanging dead in the closet.

Related Characters: Herman Roth (speaker), Bess Roth (speaker), Philip Roth, Charles Lindbergh, Mr. Wishnow
Page Number: 226
Explanation and Analysis:

“I lived in Kentucky! Kentucky is one of the forty-eight states! Human beings live there like they do everywhere else! It is not a concentration camp! This guy makes millions selling his shitty hand lotion—and you people believe him!”

“I already told you about the dirty words, and now I’m telling you about this ‘you people’ business. ‘You people’ one more time, son, and I am going to ask you to leave the house.”

Related Characters: Herman Roth (speaker), Sanford “Sandy” Roth (speaker), Philip Roth, Bess Roth, Walter Winchell
Page Number: 230
Explanation and Analysis:

“But who could have taken them? Where could they be? They’re mine! We’ve got to find them! They’re my stamps!

I was inconsolable. I envisioned a horde of orphans spotting the album in the woods and tearing it apart with their filthy hands. I saw them pulling out the stamps and eating them and stomping on them and flushing them by the handful down the toilet in their terrible bathroom. They hated the album because it wasn’t theirs—they hated the album because nothing was theirs.

Related Characters: Philip Roth (speaker)
Related Symbols: Philip’s Stamps
Page Number: 236
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 7 Quotes

Of course, that no Jew could ever be elected to the presidency—least of all a Jew with a mouth as unstoppable as Winchell’s—even a kid as young as I was already accepted, as if the proscription were laid out in so many words in the U.S. Constitution. Yet not even that ironclad certainty could stop the adults from abandoning common sense and, for a night or two, imagining themselves and their children as native-born citizens of Paradise.

Related Characters: Philip Roth (speaker), Charles Lindbergh, Walter Winchell
Page Number: 244-245
Explanation and Analysis:

“Well, like it or not, Lindbergh is teaching us what it is to be Jews.” Then she added, “We only think we’re Americans.” “Nonsense. No!” my father replied. “They think we only think we’re Americans. It is not up for discussion, Bess. It is not up for negotiation. These people are not understanding that I take this for granted, goddamnit! Others? He dares to call us others? He’s the other. The one who looks most American—and he’s the one who is least American!”

Related Characters: Herman Roth (speaker), Bess Roth (speaker), Philip Roth, Alvin Roth, Charles Lindbergh
Page Number: 255-256
Explanation and Analysis:

A previously unpublicized section of the homesteading plan called the Good Neighbor Project [was] designed to introduce a steadily increasing number of non-Jewish residents into predominantly Jewish neighborhoods and in this way “enrich” the “Americanness” of everyone involved. […] The underlying goal of the Good Neighbor Project like that of Just Folks, was to weaken the solidarity of the Jewish social structure as well as to diminish whatever electoral strength a Jewish community might have in local and congressional elections.

Related Characters: Philip Roth (speaker), Charles Lindbergh
Page Number: 280-281
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 8 Quotes

I wept all the way to school. Our incomparable American childhood was ended. Soon my homeland would be nothing more than my birthplace.

Related Characters: Philip Roth (speaker), Herman Roth, Rabbi Lionel Bengelsdorf
Page Number: 301
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 9 Quotes

My father was a rescuer and orphans were his specialty. A displacement even greater than having to move to Union or to leave for Kentucky was to lose one’s parents and be orphaned. Witness, he would tell you, what had happened to Alvin. Witness what had happened to his sister-in-law after Grandma had died. No one should be motherless and fatherless. Motherless and fatherless you are vulnerable to manipulation, to influences—you are rootless and you are vulnerable to everything.

Related Characters: Philip Roth (speaker), Herman Roth, Alvin Roth, Seldon Wishnow, Mrs. Wishnow
Page Number: 358
Explanation and Analysis:

This was how Seldon came to live with us. After their safe return to Newark from Kentucky, Sandy moved into the sun parlor and Seldon took over where Alvin and Aunt Evelyn had left off—as the person in the twin bed next to mine shattered by the malicious indignities of Lindbergh’s America. There was no stump for me to care for this time. The boy himself was the stump, and until he was taken to live with his mother’s married sister in Brooklyn ten months later, I was the prosthesis.

Related Characters: Philip Roth (speaker), Sanford “Sandy” Roth, Alvin Roth, Aunt Evelyn, Charles Lindbergh, Seldon Wishnow, Mrs. Wishnow
Related Symbols: Alvin’s Prosthesis
Page Number: 361-362
Explanation and Analysis: