In Shylock, a character who turns out to be a Mossad agent describes Israel as “a Jewish country without a Jewish soul.” Fake Roth accuses Israel of, “in many, many terrible ways, deforming and disfiguring Jews as only our anti-Semitic enemies once had the power to do.” Yet another character, this one an old Palestinian friend of Roth’s (who some critics presumed to be based on the Palestinian American scholar Edward Said), describes diasporic Jewish culture as “all human, elastic, adaptable, humorous, creative” but declares that, in Israel, “all this they have replaced here with a stick!”

DEFINE: The highlight presents contrasting fictional formulations of Israeli vs. diasporic Jewish identity, situating the reader within a literary-critical argument about what constitutes authentic Jewish culture.

Naomi Klein, Doppelganger, loc. 1004