“The way [so says Naomi] you disapprove of your life! Why do you do that? It is of no value for a man to disapprove of his life the way that you do. You seem to take some special pleasure, some pride, in making yourself the butt of your own peculiar sense of humor. I don’t believe you actually want to improve your life.

Everything you say is somehow always twisted, some way or another, to come out ‘ funny.’ All day long the same thing.

In some little way or other, everything is ironical, or self-deprecating...”

“Oh, I don’t know,” I said, “self-deprecation is, after all, a classic form of Jewish humor.”

“Not Jewish humor! No! Ghetto humor.”

Not much love in that remark, I’ll tell you. By dawn I had been made to understand that I was the epitome of what was most shameful in “the culture of the Diaspora.” Those centuries and centuries of homelessness had produced just such disagreeable men as myself – frightened, defensive, self-deprecating, unmanned and corrupted by life in the gentile world...

When she finished I said, “Wonderful.

Now let’s fuck...”

“Mr. Portnoy,” she said, raising her knapsack from the floor, “you are nothing but a self-hating Jew.”

“Ah, but Naomi, maybe that’s the best kind.”

Passages like this were bound to offend Jews, and especially Jews no longer charmed by the self-deprecating humor of Yiddishkeit.

Portnoy’s Jewish complaint

Book assesses Philip Roth’s portrayal of American Jewish life on 1960s American Jews.