Queer theory and the Jewish question

Queer Theory and the Jewish Question, edited by Daniel Boyarin, Daniel Itzkovitz, and Ann Pellegrini. New York: Columbia Universiry Press, 2003. 403 pp. $24.50. In Gay is the Word, a gay bookstore in London, I heard a person pick up this very book, gaze at the cover's reduplicated images Barbra Streisand a la Andy Warhol's Marilyn prints, and ask her friend, Is Streisand gay? Although her friend answered, of course not, the editors this volume might have averred that Barbra was not so much gay as queer. The project this book is both a very expansive and timely one examining the analogical thinking in Western culture that renders interchangeable the terms Jew and woman, Jew and queer, and queer and Jew. Enter Barbra, or rather, Marjorie Garber's study Yentl as a film that precipitates a category crisis nor only in gender but in Jewish femininity as well. The editors frame their volume essays with this crucial cinematic articulation the intersection the Jewish and the queer, an intersection that the rest the essays in the volume take up in its historical, theoretical, and textual formations. In tandem with Garber's essay on Streisand and Yentl, a reprinted excerpt from Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's Epistemology the Closet provides another crucial linkage between closetedness and Jewish self-identification. Together the two essays chart the theoretical and historical possibilities for considering how modern Jewishness is conceived through categories race and gender. The nineteenth-century co-emergence the modern Jew and the modern homosexual provides the historical coordinate for much the writing in this volume, although a few essays venture into the intersections Jew and queer in medieval and early modern cultures. Janet Jakobsen's essay, Queers are Like Jews, Aren't They? considers the intersection the terms Jew and queer, itself, especially the troubling effects the analogy the two. She also, however, suggests a strategy destabilisation through the formation an alliance between Jews and queers and the deliberate playing norms off against each other. Enter Streisand again, not as Yentl this time, but as Barbra. All things Barbra aside, this volume addresses in thoughtful and engaging ways the intersection Jewishness and the queer in a range cultural texts, from the rhetorics antisemitism in the case Leopold and Loeb, to the contestation Zionism in transsexual drag queen Dana International, to the misogyny, homophobia, and self-contempt behind Freud's theory castration anxiety, to the queer implication Christian devotion to the Virgin and medieval antisemitism in a medieval tale by Geoffrey Chaucer. Canonical authors (besides Chaucer) such as Charles Dickens, Henry James, Marcel Proust, and Jean Cocteau come under scrutiny in this volume alongside less familiar works Yiddish theater from the turn the century to Abraham Cardoso's messianic writing in the seventeenth century, among others. …