📚 PCA 2025 Presentation

In April 2025, I presented on Roth's films at the Popular Culture Association. Below is the abstract: 

     Both starring Richard Benjamin, Goodbye, Columbus (1969) and Portnoy’s Complaint (1972) received vastly different reactions from critics. Columbus was well-reviewed, receiving an Oscar nomination and winning other awards despite its messy and human portrayal of postwar Jewish characters, while Portnoy was critically panned. Most notably, Roger Ebert called the film a “true fiasco” and claimed that “the movie has no heart and little apparent sympathy with its Jewish characters” (Ebert), a similar reaction some had to the novel just a few years before. When Roth was pressed about this issue, he explained that he wanted to portray Jews as capable of everything—both good and “repellent” (his word) acts. Some readers called for a “better” representation of Jews, but Roth insisted on his portrayals, as they were honest. In this paper, I examine both films to determine what went wrong adapting Portnoy for the big screen and why the reception for Columbus was so positive. Taken together, the reception of these films sheds important light on cultural shifts from the late fifties to the early seventies and make us reconsider what works, and what doesn’t, in Roth’s portrayals of his Jewish characters both on the page and on the screen.