From Schlemiel to Sabra

Philip Hollander is Assistant Professor of Israeli Literature and Culture at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He has published numerous articles and chapters dealing with Hebrew, Jewish and Israeli literature, film, and culture.

"While the macho New Jew was admired as an ideal and has been the focus of much scholarship, Philip Hollander shows how a number of important Hebrew writers of the early days of the Yishuv were pursing alternative ideals."—Naomi Sokoloff, editor of Gender and Text in Modern Hebrew and Yiddish Literature"Philip Hollander traces the image of the Israeli as the New or Muscle Jew and the role that gender, sexuality, and stereotype had in the formation of a new society."—Stephen Katz, author of Red, Black, and Jew"Hollander tells an absolutely fascinating story about the formation of language and gendered identities in the revolutionary context of Zionist aesthetics and politics."—Ranen Omer-Sherman, author of Imagining the Kibbutz: Visions of Utopia in Literature and Film"Hollander convincingly demonstrates the role of gender and sexuality in forming the Israeli state and in doing so demonstrates the place of literature as a force in politics as much as in the formation of culture."—ChoicdF"Philip Hollander sheds light on developments in Hebrew literature at the turn of the twentieth century that complicate and enrich our understanding of this period. Eschewing any simple equation of literary representation with masculine role modeling, Hollander identifies a cluster of male writers as advocates for "Self-Evaluative" masculinity."—Anne Golomb Hoffman - Fordham University, AJS Review

• AcknowledgementsNote on Transliteration and TranslationGeneral Introduction. A Rhetoric of EmpowermentOf Their Time and Their Places: A Biographical Introduction to the Self-Evaluative WritersChapter 1. Holding Out for a Hero: Crisis and the New Hebrew ManChapter 2. "He Needs a Stage": Masculinity, Homosociality and the Public SphereChapter 3. Contested Masculinity and the Redemption of the Schlemiel Chapter 4. Homosexual Panic and Masculinity's Advancement Chapter 5. Self-Evaluative Masculinity's Interwar Apex and Eclipse Afterword. The Lesson, Legacy, and Implications of Self-Evaluative Masculinity Selected BibliographyIndex