Masculinity and The Making of American Judaism by Sarah Imhoff (review)

Sarah Imhoff has written an impressive work on gender and Judaism in America during the first few decades of the twentieth century. Analyzing the discourse of Jewish masculinity from 1900 to 1924 "on the margins," Masculinity and the Making of American Judaism offers important correctives to both gender studies and American Judaism, and deploys a wider lens to highlight significant but underexplored developments in Jewish modernity. Imhoff engages two methodological streams that have far-reaching effects for her study: 1) we learn more about gender dynamics in American Judaism when we "look to the margins, the unexpected places" and see how Jews and non-Jews constructed gender on the boundaries, and 2) gender studies is not only about women, and Imhoff shows how masculinity often goes "unmarked" in religious and national discourse. These two methodological claims actually work together, for "invisibility suggests that, to see masculinity and its forces more clearly, we may have to look in unexpected places" (21).

All this provides the methodological backdrop to the book's central, compelling two-part thesis: "first, in the early twentieth century acculturated American Jews championed a masculinity of self-sufficiency, courage, and physical health, but one that downplayed physical strength, aggression, and domination; and second, they argued that Judaism was an American religion because of its masculine virtues of rationality and universalism" (2). Masculinity and the Making of American Judaism stays quite close to these two claims, and I was never lost as a reader when working through the chapters. Imhoff opens each of her three sections—"An American Religion," "The Healthy Body and the Land," and "The Abnormal and the Criminal"—with helpful overviews that situate each of the chapter sections, and the chapters themselves begin with condensed and clear summaries of the main claims and argumentative narrative. This kind of clarity might actually work against close reading of some her most intricately woven chapters, for readers could easily read the summaries and chapter openings and then move on, falsely secured in the knowledge that they get the point.

But that would be a mistake, for Imhoff resituates those "unexpected places" in ways that make them central to the study of American Judaism. Although I find Imhoff's account of Protestant Christianity somewhat too confining, the first section shows how a particular kind of Protestant religiosity seeped into Jewish discourse. Scholars of modern Judaism, especially those who have read Leora Batnitzky's book How Judaism Became a Religion (2011), understand this terrain well, yet Imhoff productively tethers notions of masculinity to aspirational accounts of American religion.

The second part of the book explores masculinity and the land, and the ways that male Jews imagined the land as the fertile, feminine soil through which Jewish males could become manly Americans. I found Imhoff's chapter on native Americans to be the most fascinating, and in some ways the most problematic, of her chapters. Imhoff reveals how Jewish males appropriated a sense of the native to literally found themselves as Americans. But she does not reveal the invisible presence of another marked body: the African-American male, an omission that, as I argue below, is itself a compelling testament to the importance of race. Her third section is perhaps the most fun to read, for it concerns how masculinity, notions of sexual perversion, and American religion underwrite legal cases involving Jewish crime. Her two chapters on two of the best-known twentieth-century Jewish criminal trials—Leo Frank's trial in 1913 for the supposed murder of the white, thirteen-year-old Mary Phagan, and the Leopold and Loeb confessed murder of a fourteen-year-old boy—are fascinating reads about how Americans understood Jewish crime within the very contours Imhoff draws throughout her book.

All this is quite thorough and compelling, but I remained unconvinced by Imhoff's claims about Protestant Christianity, and I was disturbed by her relative silence about how racial discourse informs Jewish masculinity. It is now almost commonplace...