Americanizing the Nuremberg Laws

Alternative-Historical Racial Reconfigurations in The Plot Against America

Bibliographic Data

ID11271887
AuthorsAustin Busch (SUNY Brockport, corresponding author)
Year2020
Volume45
Issue3
Pages152-179
Publication date2020-09-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueMELUS Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0163-755X • E-ISSN: 1946-3170
PublisherOxford University Press (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1093/melus/mlaa035
OpenAlexW3084089612
LanguageEN
References cited27

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.

Antithesis · Art · Judaism · Literature · Narrative · Plot (graphics) · Political science · Praise · Sociology · Theology · American and British Literature Analysis · American Jewish Fiction Analysis · History · Jewish and Middle Eastern Studies · Law · Philosophy · Religious studies

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