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Representing the Jews: Philip Roth's Operation Shylock
- Pacific Time Virtual Program
$72.00
Course Summary for Search and Accessibility
This course, Representing the Jews: Philip Roth's Operation Shylock, is an Educational Program offered by New Lehrhaus. It is scheduled for four sessions beginning October 28, 2026 and ending November 18, 2026. The sessions are held on Wednesdays from 12:30 PM to 1:30 PM Pacific Time.
The total registration fee is $72.00. The course is conducted Online (via Zoom) and focuses on Philip Roth's novel Operation Shylock, Jewish identity, memory, and representation, and the First Intifada and the Holocaust in fiction.
What happens when a novelist writes himself and his double into his own novel and sends that double into the middle of an uprising? That's the premise of Philip Roth's 1993 novel Operation Shylock, set in Israel during the First Intifada and just as preoccupied with the Holocaust. It's a novel about the disorienting confrontation between Jewish powerlessness and Israeli power, the tension between fiction and nonfiction, the dialogue between memory and history, and the slippage between representation and reality. In this reading circle, we'll explore how Roth's postmodernist tour de force uses fiction to illuminate "the truth," ask how Operation Shylock has aged in the decades since, and consider what it means to read it now, in even more tumultuous and troubling times.
Who this is for:
- Readers of Philip Roth and 20th-century Jewish American fiction
- Anyone interested in Israeli history, the First Intifada, or Israeli-Palestinian literature
- Students of Holocaust memory and its afterlives in fiction
- Readers drawn to postmodern narrative and the blurred line between fiction and nonfiction
- Anyone who has read Operation Shylock before and wants to revisit it, or is reading it for the first time
What you'll leave with:
- A close, discussion-based reading of Operation Shylock and its central themes
- A sharper sense of how Roth uses doubling and unreliable narration to explore Jewish identity
- New context on Jewish powerlessness, Israeli power, and Holocaust memory in the novel
- A framework for thinking about how fiction can illuminate historical and political truth
- A perspective on how the novel reads today, decades after its 1993 publication
Four Wednesdays: October 28, November 4, 11 and 18, 12:30–1:30pm Pacific Time
IMPORTANT NOTE: Zoom link/details will be emailed to you once you complete registration, one week before your program AND the day before. Please keep this information in a location easy to find.
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| Representing the Jews | $72.00 100 available | |
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