Upon its publication in

of March 14, 1959, “Defender of the Faith” provoked strong criticism from some Jewish organizations and rabbis, who denounced its relatively unknown, twenty-six-year-old author as an anti-Semitic, self-hating Jew. Since then this controversial narrative—collected in Roth’s

and

—has become the most frequently reprinted Roth short story and a major work in the Jewish-American literary canon.

“Defender of the Faith” is set on a military base in Missouri during the early summer of 1945, a period when the European war had just ended but the war in the Pacific was still producing appalling American casualties. Sergeant Nathan Marx, the story’s narrator, has recently returned to stateside duty

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Citation: Chura, Patrick. "“Defender of the Faith”". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 05 June 2010 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=30478, accessed 21 November 2024.]

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