Portnoy's Complaint

Portnoy’s Complaint explores the experience of being Jewish in mid-20th century America. Alexander Portnoy obsesses over his ethnic identity and his religious background, veering between pride and rejection on a paragraph-by-paragraph basis. His anxieties reflect many of the tensions of the Jewish experience of American life. Jewish people have lived in North America since the early colonial period. By 1700, for example, several hundred Jewish people had already emigrated to the Thirteen Colonies. Jewish people continued to emigrate to the nascent United States throughout the 18th and 19th centuries. Many originated from Eastern Europe, particularly from countries that persecuted Jewish people or suffered from economic problems. A large number of these Jewish immigrants settled in New York City, forming Jewish communities that coexisted alongside other large immigrant communities such as Italian and Irish. By 1915, newspapers printed in Yiddish (a West Germanic/Hebrew language spoken predominantly by Jewish people) had a circulation of 500,000 in New York City, and more than double that number circulated nationally. By the end of the 20th century, states like New York and California were home to more than a million Jewish people. Cities such as New York, Miami, and Los Angeles have larger Jewish populations than most cities outside