George Grant and the Jews

But the stranger that dwelleth with you shall be unto you as one born among you, and thou shalt love him as thyself —Leviticus 19:34

Among the virtues of Philip Roth’s The Counterlife is its exploration of Jewish identity and anti-Semitism. Larry Holmes, one of Roth’s zanier creations, knows that he is a Jew but leaves Israel asking plaintively: “How can there be Jews without baseball?” Nathan Zuckerman only discovers that he is a somewhat minimalist Jew when faced with the prejudices of his new English mother-in-law in “Christendom.” “Can’t there be a Jewish variety of Englishman?” he asks impatiently. Roth here provides two definitions of Jew. One is a self-definition: the collective version covers a diversity of individuals and groups who call themselves Jews, sometimes for religious reasons, sometimes for secular reasons, or both. The other is conjured up in the paranoid imaginations of...