The late Philip Roth is my favorite novelist, and his novel The Plot Against America, now a widely-praised HBO mini-series, is an excellent, disturbing book. The book posits an alternate history in which an isolationist, antisemitic Charles Lindbergh defeats FDR for the U.S. presidency in 1940, and proceeds to enact a series of increasingly draconian antisemitic measures. Among those measures are sending Jewish youths out to the country to live with Gentile families to become “real patriotic Americans,” away from the implied malevolent of their families, the Jewish community, Jewish culture, and Judaism. The irony in the title of this...
