From Halakha to Hadassah: Queer Jewish Performance Art Carol

From Halakha to Hadassah: Queer Jewish Performance Art

Carol Zemel

In their Queer Jewish Performance art, Amichai Lau-Lavie (aka Hadassah Gross) and Tobaron Waxman probe issues of gender and Judaism. Clear as that may seem in its dual dimension—Queer, Jew- ish—the label evokes a particular but also perplexing hybrid. One term, ‘Queer,’ is avowedly unsettling and unfixed in its significations and meaning; ‘Jewish’ seems a settled category, but of course, it too is open to constant interpretation. Indeed, it is that tradition of que(e)ry, of ongoing study and debate about Jewish life that lends itself to such invigorating cultural practice.1 The genre of Performance Art occupies an artistic niche that strad- dles the creative, exhibition, and market spaces of visual art, media, and theater. Many of its practitioners come from the world of visual art, where permanence of work via video, website, and documented installation, rather than the repeated staging of conventional theater, is common. The audience for the genre also takes a different stand: informally gathered in a gallery space, and quite close to performers, viewers often act as participants, and they too become part of the work’s performative structure. What becomes clear in the doc- umentation, dispersal, and marketing of the genre is the elusive or ephemeral sense of an original. True to Walter Benjamin’s account of visual art and its mechanical—now digital—reproduction, an original may be forever out of reach, but the aura of the unique original has

Note: My thanks to Deborah Britzman, Jim Drobnick, David Shneer and Tobaron Waxman for helpful discussion of these issues. 1 there is a substantial body of work that addresses the problematics of gender and Judaism through traditional formats of painting, sculpture, and installation. Works by Eleanor Antin, Ken Aptekar, Helene Aylon, Rhonda Liebermann, Elaine Reichek, Hannah Wilke, come to mind; many were shown in the Too Jewish exhibition, curated by Norman Kleeblatt in 1996 at New York’s Jewish Museum. See also Lisa E. Bloom, Jewish Identities in American Feminist Art (New York: Routledge, 2006). 350 carol zemel transformed—not diminished—with little or no loss of ritual power.2 Performance Art modifies the temporal as well as the dramatic con- ventions of most theater, film or television, and toys with viewers’ museum/gallery expectations as well: often briefer that even a one- act play or alternatively lasting many hours or even days, Performance Art may seem like a protracted icon in relation to a visual image, like a condensed poem rather than description or anecdote, like a singular intense event rather than narrative. Israeli artist Rina Yerushalmi’s Bible Project (1995–98), to cite but one example, has performers recite fragments of Biblical text in Hebrew—like poetic utterances—as they ritualistically move through their interpretation of the ancient tale.3 Most artistic explorations of Jews-and-gender focus on inequities, and specifically the perceived limits of women’s status and practice within Jewish theology, law, and society. A more essentialist feminist approach has produced some celebratory work, emphasizing traditional women’s rituals like candle-lighting, or Elaine Reichek’s ironic and critical presentation of roles associated with domesticity and com- munity. Such works may call for revision or participation in the world of the Jewish men, but they rarely blur the fixed positions of the male- female binary. This is precisely the work of Queer, which uses gender shifts and inversions to explore a more fluid identity and a relatively uncharted Jewish space. I say “relatively” because Talmudic and halakhic commentaries, in fact, name no less than five sexual identities in addition to the normative male and female. Though usually focused on physiology and body structure rather than behavior, some of these distinctions may usefully inform Jewish thinking on Queer.4 Deborah Kass’s Triple Silver Yentl (My Elvis) (1993), deploys familiar theatricalities to illustrate Queer’s subversion of fixed positions and

2 walter Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibil- ity” (second version), Selected Writings, vol. 3, 1935–38 (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2002), 101–133. The essay is especially useful today in thinking through the terms of originality in relation to digital art, where an “original,” that is, a singular object of origin, may simply not exist. 3 sharon Aronson-Lehavi and Nissim Gal, “Wholly Unholy: Religious iconography in Israeli art and performance,” Performance Research 13: 3 (2008): 154–62. 4 For a summary of Jewish thought on the category, see Rabbi Alfred Cohen, “Tumtum and Androgynous,” Journal of Halacha and Contemporary Society, XXXVIII (fall 1990-Sukkot 5760), 62–85. Also Margaret Moers Wenig, “Male and Female God Created Them,” in Gregg Drinkwater, Joshua Lesser, David Shneer, Torah Queeries, Weekly Commentaries on the Hebrew Bible (New York: New York University Press, 2009), 11–18.