Reading “Queer” Ashkenaz This Time from East to West Naomi Seidman The rise of feminist criticism and then postcolonial and queer studies had an immediate and productive impact on Jewish studies, producing an explosion of new insights and a host of fresh readings. If these new readings had a broad range, encompassing the Talmud as easily as they did American Jewish cinema, they also had a strong center, clustering most persistently around the couch in Freud’s Viennese study (see Gilman 1991, 1993; Pellegrini 1997a; Boyarin 1997; Geller 2007). It’s not hard to understand the magnetism of that attraction. In fin-de-siècle Vienna, the broadest currents of sociological and historical-political transformation met the deepest recesses of psychosexual subjectivity. With Freud, queer theorists working in Jewish studies found a range of flexible methodological tools, a paradigmatic case study, and a clear path through the charged intersection of secularization and sexuality. From this vantage point, Jewish modernization, Europeanization, and embourgeoisement emerged as an encounter between radically asymmetrical gender orders and sexual systems: on the one hand stood the traditional Ashkenazic structure, with roots in Rabbinic-Talmudic culture and rich embodiment among the Eastern European Jewish masses; on the other hand appeared the bourgeois European sex- ual system, with roots in Greco-Roman, Christian, and heroic-chivalric cultural formations, in which modernizing Jews aspired to participate. The Jewish romance with Europe was notori- ously unreciprocated: In the judgment of the dominant European culture into which Jews were (imperfectly) integrating — a perspective thoroughly internalized by aspiring Jewish citizens of Europe — Jewish men were unmanly cowards and effete hysterics, while Jewish women were hypersexual, coarse and unfeminine. Jewish “queerness,” then, is a symptom of Jewish moder- nity as cultural mismatch, category crisis, incomplete integration, and colonial mimicry. It is no coincidence, as Sander Gilman and others have noted, that the “invention of homosexuality” coincided with the entry of Jews into the Central European bourgeoisie, an entry productive of and complicated by the sexual stigmatization of Jewish men (Gilman 1991:126). Psychoanalysis, in a variety of related readings, was a primary effect of this stigma while also providing tools for its diagnosis and “cure,” but it was not the only such effect. Among the other significant rever- berations of this socio-sexual crisis was Zionism, as both the collective internalization of Jewish sexual stigma and treatment for the wounds of modern Jewish masculinity. There is no doubt that these insights can profitably illuminate Jewish modernization in Eastern Europe, as well. The distinctive conditions of Eastern Europe precluded real move- ment toward political or social integration, and Eastern European Jewish modernizers looked to Central Europe rather than their own urban centers for models of embourgeoisement and Naomi Seidman is Koret Professor of Jewish Culture and Director of the Center for Jewish Studies at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley. Author of A Marriage Made in Heaven: The Sexual Politics of Hebrew and Yiddish (University of California Press, 1997), and Faithful Renderings: Jewish-Christian Difference and the Politics of Translation (University of Chicago Press, 2006), she is presently working on a volume entitled The Sexual Transformation of Ashkenaz. [email protected] TDR: The Drama Review 55:3 (T211) Fall 2011. ©2011 50 New York University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/DRAM_a_00094 by guest on 01 October 2021 Jewish integration; in the absence of emancipation or broad integration, literature and drama became primary sites for Jews to imagine themselves as part of Europe. Hebrew and Yiddish lit- erature introduced readers to a range of European reading practices, genres, and literary con- ventions, all of which carried the strong charge of gender ideology. Modern Jewish literature produced, in Clifford Geertz’s terms, both “models of” and “models for” gender roles and sex- ual practices: The novel (called roman [romance] in Hebrew and Yiddish as in many other languages) was especially formative in educating Jewish men and women in the stylized chore- og raphies of private reading and heterosexual courtship (1973:93). Hebrew writers gener- As in Central European formations, ally took the high road, producing novels that modeled “proper” masculinity and feminin- the process of Westernization and ity in its heroines and the heroes who courted Europeanization manifested itself in and wed them, while Yiddish literature more Yiddish cultural production in a host often pitched low, turning inward and back- ward to shed comic, satirical light on the of odd, perverse, inverted, and cross- traditional Jewish gender order. As the pri- dressed literary characters, misfires mary arena for internal Jewish sexual critique, of the performative requirements Yiddish literature is thus richly populated with cross-dressed characters, feminized Jewish of modernization. men fleeing from their shrewish wives, match- makers marrying off men to one another, and brides speaking in suspiciously deep voices. As in Central European formations, the process of Westernization and Europeanization manifested itself in Yiddish cultural production in a host of odd, perverse, inverted, and cross-dressed liter- ary characters, misfires of the performative requirements of modernization. Modernization continued in waves well into the 20th century, and contemporary Jewish lit- erature continues to return to the scene of sexual trauma. But while 19th-century writers skew- ered the traditional marriage system for its mercenary suppression of the freedom of young people to choose a mate, 20th-century modernist revision often infused the traditional world with eroticism. S. Ansky’s Dybbuk (1920), according to David Roskies, was the first literary work to combine the (archaic, “traditional”) horrors of demonic possession with the (modern, European, heterosexual) erotic sublime (Roskies 1992:xxvii). Twentieth-century Yiddish culture thus found romance in precisely those places that earlier writers had seen as erotic wastelands. Nevertheless, this literature is often read as only critical of Eastern European Jews, rather than as celebrating their alternative conceptions of sexual and gender identity. In one reading of the 1983 Barbra Streisand film treatment of Isaac Bashevis Singer’s 1962 story “Yentl, the Yeshiva Boy,” Marjorie Garber describes Yentl, or Anshel, as embodying “this subtext of the [male] Jew as always-already a woman,” asking whether “the ‘real’ story” is “one of a woman who needs to ‘become a man’ in order to study Torah — or the story of Torah scholar who is ‘revealed’ to be a woman” (1992:227). Daniel Boyarin echoes and explicates Garber: On one hand, it is clear that the one who is cross-dressed is the girl, Yentl, who dresses as a boy in order to study in the Yeshiva; her very study is cross-dressing as well. On the other hand, the fact that she is indistinguishable as a girl dressed as a boy owes something to the effeminate or cross-dressed nature of the boys vis-à-vis European norms of manli- ness in the Yeshiva as well. (1997:143)1 Reading “Queer” Ashkenaz Reading “Queer” It may be no coincidence, given these gender anxieties, that the most popular star of the Yiddish stage and screen was an American-born actress famous for her cross-dressing roles. In 1. What distinguishes Boyarin’s readings from many others is that Boyarin considers traditional Jewish norms of masculinity not merely as historically and contingently different from those of Christian Europe, but as deliber- ately and subversively so, from their rabbinic origins to later formations. 51 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/DRAM_a_00094 by guest on 01 October 2021 the 1936 Yidl with the Fiddle (directed by Joseph Green), Molly Picon plays a young woman who disguises herself in male garb to play in a klezmer band. It could be argued that Yidl, like Yentl, escapes detection as a boy since Jewish boys are so much like girls. And as with Yentl, which Garber sees as “smoldering” with repressed homosexuality that is ultimately regulated, Yidl with the Fiddle gives the audience the frisson of watching an apparently homosexual romance develop while remaining secure in the foreknowledge of a properly heterosexual happy ending: mar- riage, musical celebrity, and a first-class voyage to thegoldene medine — America the golden land. In this as in other films, the queerness of traditional Jewish gender is both allowed its moment and ultimately overcome. Despite the persuasiveness of the queer studies approach I have been describing, it seems to me that it has reached something of an impasse, of which the predictability and repetitive- ness of new readings are symptomatic. Various difficulties apparent at the outset remain unre- solved: Ann Pellegrini long ago argued that the queer studies approach had limited itself by its near-obsessive focus on Jewish masculinity (even when the subject is ostensibly cross-dressed women); in “the implicit equation of Jews and women...the Jewish female body goes missing” (1997b:109). The framework of comparative masculinity has also left little room for theoriz- ing Jewish heteronormativity and patriarchy. These difficulties may themselves reflect larger theoretical