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  • The Passing Game: Queering Jewish American Culture Judaic Traditions in Literature, Music, and Art
  • Rachael Kamel (bio)
Warren Hoffman. The Passing Game: Queering Jewish American Culture Judaic Traditions in Literature, Music, and Art. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2009. xi + 206 pp.

In the American Jewish world, the presence of lesbians and gay men no longer seems particularly worthy of comment. This segment of the larger Jewish community began to create its own organizations, including synagogues, as early as the 1970s, consolidating itself throughout the 1980s and passing one milestone of communal acceptance after another as the twentieth century drew to a close. (The Jewish Mosaic website, www.JewishMosaic.org, offers a comprehensive and accessible overview of lesbian and gay inclusion in American Jewish life.)

Which is not to say, of course, that the battle for acceptance is complete; it continues in many ways, family by family and congregation by congregation. Its outcome, however, seems like a foregone conclusion, with the Jewish community among the most accepting in American life.

How did such a vast change take place, at what seems (relatively speaking) like lightening speed? A series of fascinating and suggestive clues is presented in The Passing Game, Warren Hoffman’s new study of precursors and harbingers of this massive cultural shift in Jewish life. As he clarifies early on, Hoffman is not seeking to document the histories of gay and lesbian Jews. His optic is both more indirect and more encompassing: He is searching for traces of a queer sensibility in American Jewish culture itself, whether explicit, implicit, or heatedly—excessively?—denied.

A scholar of literature and the theater, Hoffman looks at six key texts (and performers) of what he terms “the Jewish American cultural canon” (p. 4), devoting a chapter to each. As he notes in the book’s introduction, he is not searching for rarities of cultural production, but for works that attracted significant critical attention when they appeared, and (in some cases) are still discussed in college courses. In effect, he is drawing our attention to aspects of Jewish culture that have been hidden in plain sight. The works he has chosen include novels, plays, short stories and films, spanning the period from the earliest years of the twentieth century—midway through the [End Page 167] period of mass Jewish immigration from Eastern Europe—until immediately before and after the Stonewall Riots of 1969.1

Why does Hoffman use the term “queer”—which, he concedes, may feel disturbing to some readers—and what is the significance of his reference to “passing” in the book’s title? In both cases, his very deliberate choice of wording is discussed at some length in the book’s introduction. ”Queer,” particularly in contrast to the less charged term “gay,” signals his intention to “disengage from both GLBT and Jewish identity politics” in order to “interrogate why such queer ruptures appear at all in these texts” (pp. 4–5). By making this move, Hoffman both embraces the “strange sexual valence” (p. 5) of the word “queer” and situates his work within the realm of queer theory, which, since the early 1990s, has questioned just exactly what is “natural” about any and all forms of sexuality, including sexual orientation as well as gender identities, presentations and norms.

“Passing,” of course, is a term primarily rooted in the politics of race in the United States; as Hoffman notes, “various scholars have written how Jewish Americans attempted to pass along ethnic and racial lines, but what has been overlooked is how Jews also needed to pass along sexual lines” (p. 6). For feminist scholars, the idea that Jewish emancipation in Europe, followed by the creation of Jewish communities in the United States, involved various gendered accommodations to Christian (especially Protestant) cultural norms, particularly in the area of sexuality, may seem like old news.2 Still, Hoffman does explore new aspects of this shift, as American Jews, across both immigrant and U.S.-born generations, have sought to perform their modern-ness and American-ness in multiple ways throughout the twentieth century. In that sense, his work, which uses the methods of cultural history, is a welcome addition to more theoretically oriented works...

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