This book definitely has a great coming of age story involved in what is looked at as a historical novel. But the best insight that I got from it was something along the lines of this: it warns of the dangers of big government. And by that, i mean not the actuality of large government, but how a large government can fall in to the hands of the wrong people and easily become a dictatorship or a fascist state.

As a liberal, its easy to romanticize the New Deal era and all of its programs. One such program, the CCC, gave inner-city kids the chance to spend summers and other times of the year at camps, learning skills and generally being exposed to the outdoors that they rarely experienced in their day-to-day lives. SO in this novel, the Lindbergh administration introduces a similar program, but it is specifically for young Jews, so that they can live with gentile families with the overall, supposed goal of assimilating them. Of course, a number of people become suspicious of the real motives of this program, and other ways that the government is manipulating other programs to have assimilation goals. So to me, one of the questions that this novel is asking is: what if all these well intentioned, popular, successful New Deal programs had fallen into the wrong hands?

I think its interesting what this novel does, because so often conservatives use dictatorships, as the one that the US is on the brink of in this novel, as a reason why Americans should fear a big government, but I think the story told in this novel (and I don't think Roth deliberately put this lesson in the story, but it is a conclusion that i came to) its not a big government that we shoudl be afraid of, but of the wrong people being in control of the big government.