“My Place in Judaism”: Geography, Ethnicity, and Sexuality on Sarah Schulman’s Lower East Side

Novelist Sarah Schulman’s characters inhabit southern Manhattan’s lower East Side and the East Village, drawing on real and imagined histories of Jewish and gay activism and creativity in their search for physical and cultural space in which they can experiment with sexuality, art, and politics. Variant sexuality and minority ethnicity inform and amplify each other, as metaphors drawn from Jewish culture find their way into descriptions of queer life, and gay references function as comments on Jewish existence. Even while Schulman’s characters move through streets rich with references to both Jewish and gay communities, those references increasingly nod to the past, as Jews move out of “the city” to the suburbs and to other cities, and gentrification threatens the economic viability of lesbians and gay men living on capitalism’s margins. Schulman’s fictional “tours” of gay and Jewish spaces of lower New York both memorialize and construct these intertwined communities.