A week after Paul Maliszewski was attacked in The New York Times and on numerous book blogs for his Bookforum article about Michael Chabon, the tide seems to be turning as yet another commentator weighs in with an in-depth consideration supporting Maliszewski. In a devastating commentary for n+1, Marco Roth declares Alex Mindlin‘s Times attack to have been “a smear, and an unethical one” that “does not actually address the substance of Maliszewski’s essay.” After listening to Chabon’s “Golems I Have Known” lecture himself, Roth says “Maliszewski was right to sense something fishy about the lecture.” For one thing, he notes, if the talk was indeed a fiction, as Chabon now claims, that constitutes a technique that “allows Chabon to disclaim any responsibility for the truth,” but also “any authority for what he goes on to say about Judaism.” Roth then commences an intense, point-by-point analysis of Chabon’s lecture by noting that “Chabon’s faux Holocaust memoir,” for example, “is part of a writerly tactic to get the audience on his side by appealing to deep-seated prejudices and fears. It strengthens existing authority. True hoaxes are radical. Chabon’s posturing turns out to lend support to a conservative a vision of Jewish identity that’s ideologically noxious and, ultimately, cruel.” But Roth really unloads on Chabon for where he takes the lecture from there: “Chabon is certainly allowed to be a conservative Jewish writer if he desires. But he goes further. He ends the lecture with a conversion story. He and his second wife visit Yad Vashem. Afterwards, Chabon emerges into the sunshine, ‘tears streaming from my eyes,’ and finds he has one simple wish: ‘Let there be more of us. Let us not disappear.’ Any Jew can have this thought after seeing Yad Vashem. In the context of what’s come before, however, this plays less as a spontaneous reaction than an apology. It is an obvious attempt to coopt the Holocaust into Michael Chabon’s personal quest for American Jewish identity and to make it seem as though the only answer to the horror of genocide is increased isolationism and a politics of racial purity and proper breeding that the Nazis would admire.”