Philip Roth: Stung by Life | A Conversation between Steven J. Zipperstein and Scott Saul

Annual Diller Lecture

Presented by Berkeley’s Center for Jewish Studies. Co-Sponsored by the Magnes Collection of Jewish Art and Life.

Philip Roth (1933–2018) is one of the most celebrated American writers of his age. Born in Newark, New Jersey—where his short stories and thirty-one books were often set—he wrote with immense ambition and drive, along with a keen awareness of what must be done to produce great literature. Yet despite rubbing shoulders with the Kennedys and engaging in a spate of famous and infamous romances, he viewed himself as socially withdrawn, living much like an “unchaste monk” (his words).

In Philip Roth: Stung by Life (Yale Jewish Lives, 2025), award-winning biographer and scholar Steven J. Zipperstein captures Roth’s complex life and the astonishing range of his self-reflective writings, from Goodbye, Columbus and Portnoy’s Complaint to the Pulitzer Prize–winning American Pastoral and The Plot Against America.

Drawing on extensive archival research and more than one hundred interviews, including conversations with Philip Roth himself, Zipperstein places Roth’s work in the context of Jewishness, freedom, and sexuality in America. Deeply researched, highly original, and beautifully written, Zipperstein’s revealing biography yields the clearest picture yet of one of the twentieth century’s most influential writers.

This program will feature a conversation between Zipperstein and historian and critic Scott Saul, UC Berkeley Professor of English.

Wednesday, February 25, 2026 | 5:00-6:30 pm

at the Magnes Collection of Jewish Art and Life, 2121 Allston Way, Berkeley, CA

Reception and light refreshments: 5:00-5:30pm
Presentation and conversation: 5:30-6:30pm

For questions about accessibility or require accommodations to participate in this event, please reach out to magnes@berkeley.edu or (510) 643-2526 with as much advance notice as possible.

Steven J. Zipperstein is the Daniel E. Koshland Professor in Jewish Culture and History at Stanford University. He has taught universities in Israel, France, Russia, and Poland as well as England where he lectured on Jewish history at Oxford for six years. Zipperstein is the author and editor of ten books including Elusive Prophet: Ahad Ha’am and the Origins of Zionism and Pogrom: Kishinev and the Tilt of History. His biography of Philip Roth – drawing on some 120 interviews and dozens of archives – has been called “a work of literature itself” by The New Yorker writer Judith Thurman, and “literary biography at its best” by historian Sean Wilentz.

Scott Saul is a Professor of English at UC Berkeley teaching courses in twentieth-century American literature and cultural history. Saul’s interests run to the great cultural watershed that was modernism in the arts–whether it took the form of William Carlos Williams’s poetry, Charlie Chaplin’s films, or Duke Ellington’s music–and to the starburst of creative activity that has followed up to the present. He is especially interested in the connections between twentieth-century artistic movements and twentieth-century social movements or, on the individual level, how particular artists are catalyzed by the history they are living through. The author of Becoming Richard Pryor and Freedom Is, Freedom Ain’t: Jazz and the Making of the Sixties, he is also the creator of Richard Pryor’s Peoria, an extensive digital companion to his biography of the comedian.