Philip Milton Roth (born March 19, 1933, Newark, New Jersey[1]) is an American novelist. He gained early literary fame with the 1959 collection Goodbye, Columbus (winner of 1960's National Book Award), cemented it with his 1969 bestseller Portnoy's Complaint, and has continued to write critically-acclaimed works, many of which feature his fictional alter ego, Nathan Zuckerman. The Zuckerman novels began with The Ghost Writer in 1979, and include the Pulitzer Prize-winning American Pastoral (1997).

Operation Shylock: A Confession is novelist Philip Roth's 19th book and was published in 1993. The novel follows narrator "Philip Roth" on a journey to Israel. There he attends the trial of accused war criminal John Demjanjuk, while at the same time seeking out the impersonator who has appropriated his identity and celebrity in order to spread "Diasporism," a counter-Zionist ideology advocating the return of Israeli Jews to their countries of origin. The ensuing struggle between this doppelgänger-like stranger and "Roth", played against the backdrop of the Demjanjuk trial and the First Intifada, constitutes the book's main story.