What Yentl Reveals About Orthodox Judaism's

Allison Hufford Professor Greenblatt 08/26/2019 The Question of Queerness: What Yentl Reveals about Orthodox Judaism’s Relationship to Gender Identity and Sexuality Orthodox Judaism is one of the most traditional branches of modern Judaism, and has historically been the slowest to break from conventional gender roles. Barbra Streisand’s movie Yentl, and Issac Singer’s short story “Yentl the Yestiva Boy” which it is based on, explore Orthodox Judaism’s relationship to queerness through the story of a Jewish woman, Yentl, who disguises herself as a man, Anshel, in order to study Torah. Whereas the short story can easily be read as a transgender narrative, the movie erases much of this gender-queerness by taking on more of a feminist approach. Both interpretations, however, represent, explore, and then ultimately abandon queerness as incompatible with Orthodox Jewish identity. Nevertheless, it is through this exploration of gender and sexual fluidity that the story of Yentl reveals the queerness inherent in Jewish culture, suggesting that each is not so disparate from the other as they may seem. Although the phrases ‘transgender,’ ‘non-binary,’ or even ‘queer’ are never explicitly written in the text, “Yentl the Yeshiva Boy” has been interpreted by many not as the story of a cross-dressing woman but as a trans-man inside a female body. This interpretation is not altogether unsupported, beginning with Yentl’s father telling his daughter that she has “the soul of a man” and that her female body is a “mistake” (Singer 8). Before she becomes Anshel, Yentl also frequently cross-dresses in front of a mirror—something that has no obvious purpose other than the presumed pleasure it provides her with. In one scene, Singer even writes, “In her dream [Yentl] had been at the same time a man and a woman, wearing both a woman’s bodice and a man’s fringed garment… Only now did Yentl grasp the meaning of the Torah’s prohibition against wearing the clothes of the other sex. By doing so one deceived not only others but also oneself. Even the soul was perplexed, finding itself incarnate in a strange body” (Singer 22). In this dream, Singer uses male and female garb on the physical body to reflect the internal struggle of the ‘soul’ between dual genders. The description of the ‘strange body’ even seems to hint at the experience of body dysphoria. Doubtlessly, these are themes that transgender individuals might find reflective of their own lives. Conversely, in the film Yentl directed and starred by Barbra Streisand, this confliction of gender identity is nowhere to be seen. Rather, Streisand replaces it by questioning not Yentl’s individual identity but Jewish Orthodox gender roles as a whole. Though Yentl expresses an interest in Torah study and other masculine pursuits—often failing at more feminine tasks, such as cooking—there is no indication that she considers herself a man. The first time she cross- dresses is after the death of her father, when her only other option is to marry a man and confine herself to a life without study, and beforehand her complaints are not about why she was born a woman so much as why women themselves are not allowed access to the Torah. In one scene, Yentl sings, “If not to hunger for the meaning of it all, then tell me what a soul is for?” (Streisand 11:28 – 34) and later, “If I were only meant to tend the nest, then why does my imagination sail?” (Streisand 12:34 – 40). Unlike Singer’s version, there is no distinction between a male and female soul—for, in Yentl’s view, all human souls hunger for knowledge. It’s only the expectation of others that women ‘tend the nest’ that prevents them from expressing it. In many ways, Streisand’s feminist take on the story can be read as a direct response to, what some call, “the antifeminist polemic” (Salberg 194) of Singer’s version. Paradoxically, though “Yentl the Yeshiva Boy” tells the story of a woman who strives to learn, it is full of demeaning rhetoric that criticizes women and their womanhood. Yentl, in striving to escape her femininity, consistently puts other women down. She believes she is above “chattering with silly women” (Singer 8) and often insults the romantic interests of the man she loves, calling his wife Peshe “a cow with a pair of eyes” (Singer 18), “a monkey” (Singer 23), and “an eyesore, a shrew, a miser” (Singer 34). In many ways, the very concept behind the story contains tendrils of sexism, for the only reason that Yentl is told she has the ‘soul of a man’ is because she excels at Torah study; the concept of womanhood and study are considered so widely disparate from each other that they cannot possibly exist in tangent. As Stephen Whitfield explains it, “Normative Judaism exhibited its patriarchal character by granting to men a virtual monopoly over learning, which is why—whatever Singer’s own interpretive assertions—Streisand’s feminist version hardly appears strained or ahistorical” (Whitfield 15). Streisand flips Singer’s misogynistic narrative by making Yentl into a woman who fights her gender role rather than her gender, and even fights for other women rather than against them—for instance, she tutors another woman, Hadass, in studying Torah. In making Yentl’s story a feminist one, however, there is also something lost: as Joel West writes, “Her awareness of her own gender makes Streisand’s Yentl, in essence, a drag king, a woman who is always woman who performs an idealized version of man. Because of this rigidity, Streisand’s Yentl lacks the ambiguity and humor of action, voice and meaning which are so very important and telling in Singer’s original version of the story” (West 11). In pushing feminism into Yentl, Streisand erases not just the story’s original connotations but the queerness that exists at the story’s center and drives its narrative. Yentl becomes a “binary, single gendered women” (West 11), and so much of the inherent complexity of her character is lost. Nevertheless, queerness can be found in more than just gender fluidity—even in an interpretation of Yentl that entirely regards her as a woman, it’s difficult to overlook the homosexual, bisexual, and even polyamorous themes that pervade the narrative. This can be seen specifically in the relationships that Yentl has with Avigdor, the man she loves, and Hadass, the woman she marries. In the short story, it’s fairly clear that Avigdor and Yentl, as her male alter- ego Anshel, have an intense emotional connection. As Avigdor even tells her, “Why can’t a woman be like a man? … Why couldn’t Hadass be just like you?” (Singer 16). As this quotation indicates, the kind of connection and intimacy that Avigdor wants from his romantic relationships is something that he largely already gets from his—as far as he knows—male-male friendship with Anshel. In fact, the way he phrases this, it’s almost as if the only thing that stands in the way of their intimate friendship becoming romantic is the social barrier of them both being of the same gender. Later, this is proven true when Yentl admits her secret to Avigdor, and he responds, “If you had only told me earlier, we could…” (Singer 44)—the obvious implication being that he means to finish his sentence with: ‘we could have gotten married.’ Minutes before, Avigdor had thought Yentl was a man, and yet suddenly he wishes to marry her—it’s clear these romantic feelings didn’t appear out of nowhere. Transferring the intimacy of the study-partner relationship into a marriage-partner relationship is strikingly easy for him, suggesting how little difference there is between them. The un-platonic connotations of Avigdor’s and Anshel’s relationship is made even more clear in the movie, not only in all the intimate moments of eye-contact and playful touching that can be witnessed between them, but in what Avidor admits following Anshel’s reveal as a woman. After screaming at Yentl for her sin, they collapse and cry into each other’s arms, and Avigdor says, “All those times I looked at you and I touched you, I couldn’t understand why… I thought there was something wrong with me… Yentl, I loved you too” (Streisand 1:55:58 – 57:23). With these words, it’s undeniable that Avigdor felt romantic affections and even physical attraction towards Anshel, even when he thought she was a man. He had no way of knowing otherwise, and thus even Yentl’s secret womanhood doesn’t cancel out the fact that Avigdor felt homosexual love towards his Torah study partner. On the other end of the spectrum, there’s also much to be said about Yentl’s relationship to the other woman in Avigdor’s life, Hadass. In the beginning, Hadass is a source of comparison and even envy for Yentl—the ‘ideal’ feminine woman whom Avigdor wants and whom Orthodox Jewish society accepts, unlike masculine Yentl and her Torah-study habits. However, the longer Yentl stays disguised as Anshel and gets to know Hadass, the more this changes. In the short story, Singer writes how, “Anshel looked at [Hadass] as she stood there—tall, blond, with a long neck, hollow cheeks, and blue eyes… A pity I’m not a man, Anshel thought” (Singer 20). Alone, the listing off of Hadass’ characteristics in such great detail comes across as some kind of attraction, but when Anshel then follows this by wishing she were a man, it has the same connotation as Avigdor wishing ‘a woman could be like a man’.

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