Some reproach me with being a Jew, some praise me because of it, some pardon me for it, but all think of it,” fretted the German political writer Ludwig Börne in 1832. (Changing his name from Loeb Baruch and converting to Protestantism wasn’t enough to protect him.) This is another theme that emerges in Roth’s Operation Shylock: the supposedly eternal nature of Jew-hatred. By the end of the book, Roth’s real double turns out not to be Fake Roth at all. We learn that, in a way, there is no Real Roth, a man of letters and intellect, just as there is no Fake Roth, a zealous activist and evangelist of Diasporism. Both, within the world of the novel, end up being cast as Philip Roth the Jew. And that means that both are Shylock, the moneylending mutilator in Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice, determined to get his pound of flesh. For Roth, Shylock is the Jews’ eternal doppelganger. … This is how prejudice works. The person holding it unconsciously creates a double of every person who is part of the despised group, and that twisted twin looms over all who meet the criteria, always threatening to swallow them up. Having one of these doubles means that whoever you are, whatever identity you have fashioned for yourself, however fresh and unique your personal brand, and however much you distinguish yourself from the stereotypes associated with your kind, for the hater you will always stand in as a representative of your despised group. You are not you; you are your ethnic/racial/religious double, and you can’t shake that double because you did not create it.

XREF: Connects to Roth's Operation Shylock and the theme of doubles; resonates with ideas about stereotype threat and social identity theory.

Naomi Klein, Doppelganger, loc. 920