American Anti-Semitism: Arthur Miller`s Focus and Philip Roth`s The Plot against America

The United States as a promised land is one of the more present images in Jewish-American literature. Specially in its early phases, where the immigrant experience was the guiding narrative, America was seen as the place where jews could flourish and prosper, finally free of the crushing European anti-semitism.

Nevertheless, a fear of a potencial anti-semitism has appeared in many novels by Jewish Americans, more prominently in Focus, by Arthur Miller, and The Plot Against America, by Philip Roth. Both of them are tales of of organized resistance against jews for being “less of Americans”.

Focus was written in 1945, as a result of the sense of urgency and danger felt by Arthur Miller; The Plot Against America was published sixty years later, but goes back to the forties and was perceived as an analysis of the authoritarian streak that was being made visible by the Bush administration.

Now, with the election of Donald Trump and anti-Semitism back at the public eye in the United States, this presentation aims to analyze these two novels and the line that connects them. The lecture proposes to address the specific character Anti-Semitism acquires in America, how jewish-American writers address it and their relationship with the mainstream narrative of acceptance and assimilation.