Queer Theory and the Jewish Question

Daniel Boyarin is Taubman Professor of Talmudic Culture in the departments of Near Eastern studies and rhetoric at the University of California, Berkeley, where he is also an affiliated faculty member in the women's studies department and gay and lesbian studies program. He is the author of Unheroic Conduct: The Rise of Heterosexuality and the Invention of the Jewish Man. Daniel Itzkovitz is associate professor of English at Stonehill College in Easton, Massachusetts. He has published articles on Jewish studies, queer theory, and American literature and is the editor of a new edition of Fannie Hurst's Imitation of Life. Ann Pellegrini is associate professor of religious studies and performance studies at New York University. She is the author of Performance Anxieties: Staging Psychoanalysis, Staging Race.

The publication of Queer Theory and the Jewish Question is reason to get excited... [it] juggles theoretical concerns with popular culture and never condescends. But more than that, the book makes reading serious essays about homosexuality fun again. And that's saying a lot. The Guide This skilled collection does more than track the career of the queer-Jewish analogy from Spanish crypto-Jews to Israel drag queens... It's a vital, long-awaited book. -- Marissa Pareles Lambda Book Report This scholarly and well-documented volume is a strong addition to any academic or research collection focusing on the Jewish identity, homosexual identity, and particularly the relation between the two. American Jewish Libraries Newsletter Other than Boyarin'sUnheroic Conduct: The Rise of Heterosexuality and the Invention of the Jewish Man, this appears to be the first book to explore the inventions of the homosexual and the modern Jew. Seventeen insightful essays show how those inventions are mutually implicated... Highly recommended. Choice cultural analysis that offers scholars of both queer theory and Jewish studies fresh avenues for thought and research -- Michael G. Cornelius The Bloomsbury Review It is one of those rare academic works that is difficult, if not impossible, to put down. -- Melissa M. Wilcox, Whitman College Nova Religio Addresses in thoughtful and engaging ways the intersection of Jewishness and the queer in a range of cultural texts. -- David Moscowitz An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies

• Strange Bedfellows: An Introduction, by Daniel Boyarin, Daniel Itzkovitz, and Ann Pellegrini From Vested Interests, by Marjorie Garber From Epistemology of the Closet, by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick Queers Are Like Jews, Aren't They? Analogy and Alliance Politics, by Janet R. Jakobsen Freud, Bluher, and the Secessio Inversa: Mannerbunde, Homosexuality, and Freud's Theory of Cultural Formation, by Jay Geller Jew Boys, Queer Boys: Rhetorics of Antisemitism and Homophobia in the Trial of Nathan "Babe" Leopold Jr. and Richard "Dickie" Loeb, by Paul B. Franklin Viva la Diva Citizenship: Post-Zionism and Gay Rights, by Alisa Solomon Homophobia and the Postcoloniality of the "Jewish Science', by Daniel Boyarin Messianism, Machismo, and "Marranism": The Case of Abraham Miguel Cardoso, by Bruce Rosenstock The Ghost of Queer Loves Past: Ansky's "Dybbuk" and the Sexual Transformation of Ashkenaz, by Naomi Seidman Barbra's "Funny Girl" Body, by Stacy Wolf Tragedy and Trash: Yiddish Theater and Queer Theater, Henry James, Charles Ludlam, Ethyl Eichelberger, by Michael Moon You Go, Figure; or, The Rape of a Trope in the "Prioress's Tale', by Jacob Press Dickens's Queer "Jew" and Anglo-Christian Identity Politics: The Contradictions of Victorian Family Values, by David A. H. Hirsch Coming Out of the Jewish Closet with Marcel Proust, by Jonathan Freedman Queer Margins: Cocteau, La Belle et la bete, and the Jewish Difference, by Daniel Fischlin Reflections on Germany, by Judith Butler