Not precisely, since Jones blames Jews working under FDR for “ethnically cleansing” Jews from cities by moving southern blacks up north, while Bernstein is focused on things advocated by FDR himself and views blacks as victims of FDR’s high-wage policies for destroying their jobs. I had linked to similar info on FDR’s stance toward Jews from Tablet when discussing The Plot Against America, whose premise I found implausible because it had Lindbergh winning the Solid South despite FDR winning his most overwhelming victories there. I haven’t read the book or watched David Simon’s recent adaptation both because of my skepticism of its premise (shared by historians Slate asked to comment on it) as well as because I thought I ought to start with the works that Roth built his reputation on (which Jones would still consider “acts of cultural terrorism“) rather than something known mostly because it was written by the already famous Roth.
As for Jones, he has a much longer review of Roth’s “Plot”, going about as far as possible to blame Jews for anti-semitism without actually endorsing the persecution of Jews. He’s a self-appointed champion of the Catholic “ethnics” in northern cities, so he doesn’t say as much about the south (though I did learn from him that the Klan burned a cross on the lawn of Father Coughlin’s church). It also reminds me that one of these days I should read Albert Lindemann’s “Esau’s Tears”. I briefly subscribed to The American Conservative specifically to read his review of Yuri Slezkine’s “The Jewish Century”, although I can’t remember the details of said review now. I don’t know if I’m interested enough in Soviet history specifically to read Slezkine’s follow-up, “The House of Government”, which Spotted Toad reviews here.
Speaking of books and Jews, Andrew Gelman has a short post reacting to Leah Garret’s “Young Lions: How Jewish Authors Reinvented the American War Novel”. Roth is not referenced, though his frequent point of comparison, Saul Bellow, is. The one short story I’ve read by Roth, “Defender of the Faith“, was inspired by his brief post-war military service.
Entitled to an Opinion 
June 20, 2020 at 12:17 pm
Not everyone in the mainstream media is ignorant of these things, with Matthew Yglesias actually knowing some of the history.
December 5, 2020 at 8:45 pm
This tweet seems to have disappeared. My recollection was that he was talking about how Democrats up until basically LBJ were totally complicit with southern segregationists, and that includes those most in favor of intervening in WW2.
December 5, 2020 at 8:43 pm
I have now finally watched the series. I normally keep my reviews of fiction to Disqus comments (Heinlein’s Starship Troopers was an exception) while non-fiction books are reviewed here. However, since the Pop Culture channel I was commenting since the AV Club switched to Kinja disappeared and took my comment history, I figure I should be on the safe side and repost my review below the blog post being referenced:
The Plot Against America shares the factor which I guessed helped Indignation, but not to the same effect. The problem might be that Roth only turned 7 in 1940, and thus making him closer in age to Azhy Robertson’s Philip Levin (who was surnamed “Roth” in the book, and presumably also 7 rather than Levin’s 10), and too young to have much sense of what was going on. Before even watching the series I (and a number of historians) noted the implausibility of the alternate political history, which I won’t need to rehash here since you can read it there. I do expect better of people who actually lived through a time to depict it with some degree of accuracy, even if a child wouldn’t know certain things about regional politics which any politically engaged adult would know. I do think it’s striking comparing the time in which the novel vs the miniseries were released. The salience of foreign policy is at a particularly low ebb now, while the choice between intervention & isolation is at the crux of FDR vs Lindbergh here. Of course, numerous reviewers read it as an allegory for Trump, even though the novel dates to the George W. Bush administration when the invasion of Iraq was the big issue and David Frum was associating opponents of it with Lindbergh (Frum himself has criticized this series, or at least the first episode, for moralistically simplifying things to the point of having things backward). One oddity is that Morgan Spector’s Herman is supposed to be a representative of liberalism (he’s a socialist that supported Debs), but he’s also an advocate for the conservative value of staying in one place near your kin, at odds with a child disrespecting his patriarchal authority and accusing him of being narrow-minded. While the Plot is inspired by big geopolitical events, the story aims to be a more small-scale domestic one centered on the Levin family, so it’s understandable that the mission Alvin took part in doesn’t appear onscreen, but I still felt like I was missing out on it. One other thing that seemed to be missing: there was no mention of the Japanese, even though they were actually the cause of America’s entry into the war. African-Americans are mentioned very briefly as comparable to Jews, even though Lindbergh had rather different things to say about their place in the country (since his political base was in the upper-midwest and not the south, contra Roth, he risked nothing by criticizing Jim Crow). In some ways it reminded me of the oft-mocked tweet by Matthew Yglesias (himself saner than his colleagues) saying “My guess is that in a Trump administration angry mobs will beat and murder Jews and people of color with impunity”. In a sense, this provides people the angry mobs they were missing out on as the dark night of fascism always descending on the United States only lands in Europe. If anything, the paranoia reflected in the series is somewhat Trumpian, particularly in how I’ve read the ending deviates from the novel.
March 9, 2022 at 10:21 pm
I now figure I might as well do the same thing here for my review of The Man in the High Castle (and since I’ve been linking to Josh Wimmer’s reviews of Hugo winners here’s his for that):
I read The Man in the High Castle in part because I read from historians that it’s alternate history of the US was more plausible than that of The Plot Against America (I was skeptical of the latter’s plausibility both before reading that article and after watching the adaptation). I was already interested because I heard that he conceived of the empathy-free “andies” from Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? while writing about the Nazis for this novel. But while there are multiple POVs in this book, including one German agent, none of them are actually Nazis. The closest would be the bootlicking proprietor of an “Americana” shop catering to the Japanese occupiers of the Pacific coast. Oddly, that character’s internal thoughts typically consist of sentences missing some words, as if he were a non-native speaking pidgin English (like some of his Japanese customers, although he always come across as more pathetic than them). I really could have done without so much of him, and more of the political plotline that is the hook of the series. That plotline involves some ironies as the characters have to confront how much worse things could get with certain high-ranking Nazis in charge vs others, and the dysfunctional infighting nature of said regime means it’s almost impossible for anyone to coordinate with the faction they’re trying to help. We don’t actually get to see much of said regime, because all but one small section near the end take place in either Japanese-occuppied San Francisco or the still unoccupied Rocky mountain states. Perhaps, as with Lovecraft Country, it was too unpleasant to look directly at the worst places and instead it was deemed better to just make references to some awful things that happened (like the complete eradication of all life in Africa). The consensus among all the characters that the Japanese occupiers are far more civilized (even if less technically impressive) suggests to me PKD didn’t research them as much. The book is famous for having its own alternate history book-within-a-book* written by the titular man**, Hawthorne Abendsen, titled The Grasshopper Lies Heavy which imagines the Allies winning, but amusingly in a still very different history from our own. I think that functions best in light of the characters who insist that Axis victory was inevitable, particularly as I’m one of those who thinks the opposite and didn’t have my opinion changed here. Some of my confidence presumably comes from that being the only real history I know, so it’s amusing to have someone like Abendsen who doesn’t know that history trying to come up with that as a pre-determined result and assuming very different requirements and deriving very different results. The other notable book that keeps getting referenced is The I Ching, which characters repeatedly (and very strangely to me) use as an “oracle” to tell them their fortune and make decisions. Since PKD himself apparently used that to write this (although I’m not sure to what extent), it might qualify for Eliezer Yudkowsky’s wish for probabilistic rather than authorial determined events in narratives (I can’t find the precise post I’m thinking of, but his one on Lawrence Watt-Evans is similar). I’d be interested in more stories written probabilistically, even if it comes across like a non-interactive pen & paper RPG.
*I had already seen the pilot of the TV series where it’s film reels instead, and I know that’s an attempt to attempt one medium for another, but it doesn’t work nearly as well for an item that can be easily spread around & accessed as samizdat.
**Who’s not quite as important as the title might indicate, even if he might be particularly interesting to PKD as an authorial insert.
July 6, 2021 at 10:22 pm
The Kinja comment system the AV Club uses has gotten even worse since I wrote the post above, and clicking on the link won’t take you directly to it but still require you to click another button to get to the comment section at all. Here’s my initial comment there (responding the summary of a video there) from 3/12/20 7:50pm, which resulted in a back-and-forth with one other commenter:
No, he didn’t run for President at all. Wendell Wilkie ran in 1940, and he was somewhat like Trump in being a former Democrat who had never been elected before or served in the military. There is speculation that British intelligence had a hand in nominating him, since he had basically the same foreign policy as FDR, but none of that mattered since FDR won overwhelmingly. Especially in the anglophile and bellicose “solid south”, which (pace Philip Roth) Lindbergh would have gotten the least support if he had run.
It sounds like you don’t know that “jingoism” means pro-war, when Lindbergh was notorious at this time precisely for arguing against joining the war. Jingoism and isolationism don’t really go together.
Based on the text, I was expecting the video to discuss Lindbergh, but they didn’t really. Keeping to that, I will agree with Zoe Kazan (a writer herself) that Under the Skin drastically changed the source material while still being excellent and retaining some core thematics. Arrival, on the other hand, is just dumber onscreen than on the page.
Back to Lindbergh: Louis Berg reviewed his wartime journals for “Commentary” and concluded that he wasn’t an anti-semite (fitting with how he’d seemed earlier), just a dupe fixated on how the western countries should ally with Germany against the Soviet Union and Japan.
February 26, 2022 at 3:01 pm
Speaking of Arrival, I thought I was alone & wrong in my interpretation of the source material:
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/links-for-february/comment/5214625
But Gwern appears to agree with me on it:
https://www.gwern.net/Story-Of-Your-Life
March 1, 2022 at 5:57 pm
Relevant to the above is Johnpeter Horst Grill and Robert L. Jenkins’ The Nazis and the American South in the 1930s: A Mirror Image?, which is gated but accessible via SciHub. It’s always worth looking into what people actually said & wrote at the time.
October 4, 2025 at 7:09 pm
I referenced this paper, and related ideas in this post, in an argument here in response to the film “One Battle After Another”.
July 10, 2025 at 10:58 pm
[…] old age (although Bloom died significantly younger than Bellow was in those final years), with Philip Roth being an example considered a peer of Bellow, so I’m doubly ignorant of that […]