Queering Euro-American Jews

Queer Theory and the Jewish Question. Daniel Boyarin, Daniel Itzkovitz, and Ann Pellegrini. New York: Columbia University Press, 2003. ix + 413 pp.

Reading edited volumes can be like serial monogamy or group sex. While my perverse fantasies tend toward the latter, my reading habits tend toward the former. It was therefore with mixed feelings that I sat down to read this volume of sixteen essays, for fear that each essay would be too short to satisfy me and the whole would be without sufficient unity. The essays consider a range of subjects, from a Spanish Jewish kabbalist to the contemporary gay rights movement in Israel, from Freud to Proust to the infamous Leopold and Loeb case to the iconic Barbra Streisand. But if the thematic links are attenuated, the volume's breadth covers the scope of questions provoked by bringing queer studies and Jewish cultural studies into conversation with one another. The volume proceeds from the dual premises that the modern (European) racialization of Jews relied on the idea that Jews embodied nonnormative sexual and gender identities and, conversely, that the modern (European) homosexual was racialized in relation to anti-Semitism. These premises play themselves out in the volume in a relay between analogies and articulations of queerness and Jewishness. Before I could whip out my critique of analogies, Janet R. Jakobsen did it for me in her insightul entry, "Queers Are like Jews, Aren't They?" in which she delineates the dangers of analogies but also the promises of alliances between Jewish and queer identities if they are contextualized properly and thought of more in terms of "complicity" (80).

After Jakobsen and excerpts from Marjorie Garber's Vested Interests and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's Epistemology of the Closet, the volume addresses three interrelated themes. The first interrogates the historical relationship between homosexual and Jew. Jay Geller's "Freud, Blüher, and the Secessio Inversa" is a fascinating excavation of Freud's correspondence with the German sociologist Hans Blüher, who, Geller argues, played a crucial role in disseminating a racial typology of homosexualities by creating an opposition between the healthy inversion of manly Germanic men and the decadent homosexuality of effeminate Jews. Alisa Solomon's essay, "Viva la Diva Citizenship," one of the volume's highlights, twins nicely with Geller's. Solomon implicitly traces in Israel the obverse of Blüher's types, which grew, needless to say, out of the Holocaust: the associations between Jewishness, manliness, and the "sissy within" that underwrite Zionism. She demonstrates how Israel's gay rights movement both challenges and upholds Zionism in a public debate that pits the antigay religious right against secular liberals, who have begun to embrace gay rights in the name of liberal Zionism. Solomon concludes that a truly queer position is an anti-Zionist one that supports equality for all of Israel's citizens, a position taken up by radical lesbians in the peace movement. Daniel Boyarin, addressing Freud's castration theory in "Homophobia and the Postcoloniality of the 'Jewish Science,'" convincingly argues that Freud's writings reveal a direct link between anti-Semitism, misogyny, and fantasies of phallic lack. This interconnection is, in turn, the product of a divided consciousness for Freud, whom Boyarin provocatively considers a postcolonial subject.

The second theme concerns Jewish responses to the abjection of linking Jewishness with threatening sexual difference. The highlight for me in this cluster of essays is Bruce Rosenstock's "Messianism, Machismo, and 'Marranism.'" Rosenstock's close reading of Abraham Miguel Cardoso's seventeenth-century messianic texts represents them as a signal moment in the history of Jewish homoeroticism. Placing them in the context of Cardoso's humiliating experiences as a Spanish converso, Rosenstock convincingly demonstrates that Cardoso's messianism was informed by "phallic narcissism" (201), which underlay an unabashed homoeroticism in his writings between himself and his messianic hero, Sabbatai Zevi. This imaginative repertoire repaired the wounds inflicted by the machismo narcissism of Iberian culture.

The final...