Jewish Frontiers: Essays on Bodies, Histories, and Identities (review)

In this collection of loosely related essays, Gilman, the important cultural critic who gave us Jewish Self-Hatred (1986) and The Jew’s Body (1991), as well as works on the Jewishness of Freud and Kafka, seeks to establish the term “frontier” as the defining metaphor for contemporary Jewish identity. In this he partially succeeds. In his provocative introductory chapter, “The Frontier as Model for Jewish History,” Gilman distinguishes his definition from Frederick Jackson Turner’s iconic “closing of the American frontier” thesis as well as, more problematically, from Gloria Andalzua’s space she calls La Frontera. For Gilman, the frontier is neither Turner’s shifting and now completed site of manifest destiny, nor Andalzua’s celebration of a feminist/multicultural space. He defines the frontier as “the conceptual and physical space where groups in motion meet, confront, alter, destroy, and build” (p. 15), and this meeting space is permanently operating. Gilman’s post-modern definition sees the frontier as symbolic space linked to a variety of concrete locations and histories. Israel is of course a prime example of such a space, but there are many others, and thus Gilman can decentralize Israel as the touchstone of Jewish identity. Jews, like other globalized peoples today, share a Diaspora identity everywhere with everyone. Gilman wishes to escape the center-periphery duality, with Jerusalem as its center, that would locate the “authentic” in either the center or the margin.

The authentic, as we might expect from a literary critic and linguist, can be found, most reliably, in the struggle over language. Those who can negotiate among different languages on the frontier are the “true hybrids.” In the history of various language adaptations—Yiddish and Hebrew for example—Jewish identity can be established, for specific times and places. This, for Gilman, avoids the error of seeing Jews as nomads made synonymous with the shifting ideas of identity represented by an atemporal modernism. “Who are the Jews?” Gilman asks. “Those who understood themselves as Jews at specific moments in time. Does this definition change? It is constantly shifting and constantly challenged, which is why absolute boundaries must be constructed for the Jews within and without Jewish culture and ritual” (p. 25).

Gilman explores this shifting Jewish frontier identity in three not easily connected areas—in the representation of the Shoah in film, in the cultural construction of disease and the Jewish body, and, finally, in contemporary multicultural literature. Gilman’s concept of the frontier sheds new light on topics he has written about before. Yet at times, he loses sight of the master metaphor, which detracts from the “heuristic power” he claims for it. For example, the chapter, “Is Life Beautiful? Can the Shoah Be Funny?” raises important questions about the limits of representation, but the precise relation to Gilman’s concept of the frontier is unclear and his answer to the chapter’s title question inconclusive. While discussing Roberto Benigni’s Life is Beautiful (1998), Gilman makes the point that at the beginning of the film “Benigni’s character, Guido, is not seen . . . as a Jew. . . . Rather, he fulfills the stereotypes and self-image of the Italian Jew . . . that they were well integrated into Italian prewar society and no different than other Italians” (p. 85). But if we are not shown the confrontation of cultures that Gilman sees as characterizing the frontier, how is it operating in the film’s depiction of pre-War Italy? If, in the second half of the film, it is the Germans that make the protagonist’s Jewishness visible, then his death at the end should not, as Gilman concludes, make the audience “feel good about our laughter” (p. 86). The Jewish father is dead, has been sacrificed, so that the half-Jewish son and his non-Jewish mother can return to a “normal” life in a new post-war Italy. Why is this an “acceptable” comic representation of the Shoah? The Jew is once more made invisible, but this...