The Passing Game: Queering Jewish American Culture (review)

Who knew that American Jewish culture was so queer? In this provocative and well-informed cultural study, Warren Hoffman shows how some quintessential icons of American Jewish culture are best understood through the lens of sexuality. The title of the book, The Passing Game, nicely articulates Hoffman’s core question—how Jews and queers and Jewish queers attempted to make themselves American. As Hoffman states, “the stories, novels, plays, and films in this study are not simply texts about Jewish assimilation on a national level but about assimilation along gender and sexual lines and the ways in which such sexualized roles changed over the period of Jewish American history” (11).

He starts with Tony Kushner’s Angels in America (1993), an obvious place to begin a book on queer American Jewish culture, but Hoffman refigures the history by suggesting that Kushner’s fusion of queerish and Jewish is nothing new. For Hoffman, Kushner only exists on the backdrop of a hundred years of queer American Jewish culture, which makes up the heart of the book.

One the most important contributions of Hoffman’s book is the equal treatment of Yiddish- and English-language culture. Hoffman moves back and forth between queer reads of these two cultures. He shifts between linguistic universes, not just to move away from an Anglocentric understanding of American Jewish culture, but also to argue for different understanding of queerness and Jewishness in American Yiddish and English cultures. He boldly argues that things could be said “queerly”—challenging normative gender and sexuality regimes—in Yiddish that couldn’t be said in English. Hoffman suggests that Yiddish did not have the same explicit notions of homosexuality and lesbian and gay identities that had begun to emerge in the English language in the 1920s and 1930s, and this was for the better: “Yiddish challenges the notion that as time goes on, sexual politics become more liberal, open, or freeing; rather, some of the early Yiddish texts in this study are more embracing of queerness than the English-language works that would follow them” (18). Thus, in a seemingly counterintuitive reading of culture, Hoffman argues that because the English language had these concepts, queer texts could be identified and therefore suppressed. Yiddish’s lack of vocabulary meant a freer linguistic situation. Although a potentially romantic reading of Yiddish and sexuality (as more flexible, nuanced, and queer than the medicalized, Christian-dominated English), Hoffman’s point is not about linguistic essentialism but rather about epistemology and language. How we know what we know is shaped by categories, language, and culture. If historian George Chauncey, in his Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890–1940 (1994), used the lens of class to shift us away from a monolithic, regressive history of twentieth-century queer life, Hoffman does something similar by using the lens of language.

He suggests that this was one reason why Sholem Asch’s Got fun nekome in 1907 was not framed as a deviant play in the same way that its English version, God of Vengeance, was in 1923. He convincingly shows that the different linguistic and epistemological universes of the plays’ audiences and the passage of an important fifteen years meant that the two plays were not really the same play at all. Critics who understand Got fun nekome as a lesbian play, Hoffman argues, miss the subtle ways that Asch figured queer sexuality in the Yiddish original.

Hoffman also reads several Molly Picon films, in which she cross dresses, and Isaac Bashevis Singer stories that play with gender as examples of American Yiddish culture’s ability to handle queer messiness, while American English culture was dealing with morality police, censorship codes, and compulsory heterosexuality. He compares Barbra Streisand’s heterofeminist interpretation of Bashevis’ “Yentl” with the original Yiddish story, in which it becomes impossible to tell whether Yentl (Anshel) is to be read male or female at any given moment. In Yiddish, Yentl/Anshel’s ambiguous...