In April 1959, The New Yorker published a short story called “Defender of the Faith,” by a young writer named Philip Roth. One of its main characters is a Jewish army recruit who tries to wheedle special favors out of his Jewish sergeant. Sheldon Grossbart is a liar, a conniver, a sharpie, a moral weakling. He is, in short, everything some Jewish readers felt the gentiles believed about the Jews. At least that’s what they wrote in angry letters to the magazine, to Roth, to the Anti-Defamation League.

The complaints would dog Roth for years: Why do you focus on the flaws of the Jews instead of their accomplishments? Why provide fuel for anti-Semites? Isn’t this the kind of stereotyping that led to the Holocaust?

The story brought Roth fame, notoriety — and a subject that has echoed throughout his work ever since. As Roth wrote in Commentary in 1963, “To me, Grossbart is not something we can dismiss solely as an anti-Semitic stereotype; he is a Jewish fact. If people of bad intention or weak judgment have converted certain facts of Jewish life into a stereotype of The Jew, that does not mean that such facts are no longer important in our lives, or that they are taboo for the writer of fiction.”

The Roth controversy seems a bit quaint now, reflecting an era when a piece of literature (as opposed to a movie or a television show) could still stir controversy, and when Jewish elders could wonder why an ambitious young writer was not acting like a Nice Jewish Boy.

That’s why I was struck by the reaction of some friends and colleagues to another New Yorker story by a young Jewish writer, this one published just two weeks ago. “Playoffs” is a first-person essay by the writer Shalom Auslander, who grew up in the Orthodox Jewish enclave of Monsey, NY — what he describes as “a pretty town where everything was forbidden.” In the essay, adapted from his forthcoming memoir, Auslander is living in another Orthodox enclave — Teaneck — and obsessing about the New York Rangers. And God. And how God will certainly punish Auslander and the Rangers if the author transgresses the rules of Shabbat.

“The people of Monsey were terrified of God, and they taught me to be terrified too,” he writes.

Nevertheless, Auslander already has one foot out of the door of an Orthodox upbringing he describes here and elsewhere as grim and dysfunctional. On Shabbat afternoons, he and his wife Orli hunker down behind drawn curtains and watch Rangers games on television, the sound turned low so as not to attract the attention of the young Orthodox couples in the courtyard below. True, Auslander decides he must walk the 16 miles between Teaneck and Madison Square Garden to watch a broadcast of a game on another Saturday. But when God seems to favor Vancouver over New York despite Auslander’s sacrifice, the author rebels by scarfing down a non-kosher hot dog.

By the essay’s end, Shalom and Orli have abandoned any pretense of observance, spending Shabbat afternoons at the mall and flaunting their purchases in front of their shocked neighbors.

Observant friends of mine of who read the piece — friends, who, like me, consider their Jewish practice as open-minded and sophisticated as their politics — said they were more puzzled than angry, but they weren’t happy. One felt the author was mocking the rules of the Sabbath and the observant Jews who follow them. Another worried that a reader who knows nothing about Orthodoxy would assume that Auslander’s unforgiving teachers — like his unforgiving God — were the norm in the yeshiva world. One woman, a rabbi, asked why I thought The New Yorker would publish the essay — by which I assume she meant, “Do you think the editors have an agenda in ridiculing Jewish tradition?”

What I didn’t hear — and what may well separate the reaction to Auslander’s writing from the reaction to Roth’s — is concern about what the gentiles would think. No, this seemed something internal, a suggestion that Auslander was exploiting a widening gap between Jews themselves — namely, the secular and the observant.

I’d be lying if I said I didn’t understand their point. I know Teaneck, I know those Jews. Hell, I am one of those Jews. Auslander says nothing about the observant world that we observant Jews don’t sometimes say about ourselves. As Rabbi Yitz Greenberg likes to say, “I don’t care what denomination you are, as long as you are embarrassed about it.”

But to see those embarrassments on display in The New Yorker! For a moment I felt like Wendy Shalit, who, in a much-discussed article in The New York Times, suggested it was the responsibility of Jewish writers to portray “age-old customs…in a way that reminds us of the deep satisfactions they can provide.” Me, a fan of Philip Roth, siding with a critic who thinks novelists should serve as p.r. agents for an ethnic group!

But if there is a cultural war among Jews, Auslander is a reluctant recruit. As he explained to me in an e-mail exchange, the essay is representative only of his own experiences. “The piece, as well as the forthcoming book it is taken from, is not a judgment on Judaism: it is the story of one person, raised under the thumb of a violent God, seeking some peace,” he wrote.

The essay, he wrote, was not a satire, as I had suggested in my end of the exchange. “It’s not a gag or a joke or a bit. It happened. It was felt. One man is raised with religion and finds it, later in his life, a comfort. Another — me, for example — finds it has left me paranoid, fearful, and ashamed. There’s a whole section in the bookstore for the first guy, not many for the second.”

It’s too early to tell if someone will read Auslander’s memoir, titled Foreskin’s Lament, and accuse him of doing the anti-Semites’ dirty work or of feeding what Jewish organizations insist is a “new anti-Semitism.” More likely, critics will take a clue from Shalit, casting the novel as a symptom of a divide between secular and observant Jews, as opposed to Jews and gentiles.

And maybe that’s my problem. I’m not worried how the story will be read by a WASP in Connecticut or a white supremacist on the Internet. I worry about how my observant lifestyle will be judged by cultured, worldly, secular Jews. It’s their approval I crave, not the gentiles’. Look at me — the defender of the faith.