Queer Theory and the Jewish Question [Hardcover]

Daniel Boyarin (Editor), Daniel Itzkovitz (Editor), Ann Pellegrini (Editor)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0231113749 | ISBN-13: 978-0231113748 | Publication Date: December 3, 2003

The essays in this volume boldly map the historically resonant intersections between Jewishness and queerness, between homophobia and anti-Semitism, and between queer theory and theorizations of Jewishness. With important essays by such well-known figures in queer and gender studies as Judith Butler, Daniel Boyarin, Marjorie Garber, Michael Moon, and Eve Sedgwick, this book is not so much interested in revealing -- outing -- "queer Jews" as it is in exploring the complex social arrangements and processes through which modern Jewish and homosexual identities emerged as traces of each other during the last two hundred years.

Editorial Reviews

Review

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 3/1/05)

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 vol 24, no 1)

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's Unheroic 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 )

Review

It would be an easy, and incorrect, presumption to see this amazing, diverse collection of essays as simply proclaiming: out of the closet and into the Kabala. But the enigmatic, interrelated recognitions between the subjects of this book 's queerness and Jewishness are far more complex, and far more astonishing, than such an easy assumption would allow. While Queer Theory and the Jewish Question deals with Jews, queers and everyone in-between, its central subject is the endless permeable nature of identity and outsiderness. These essays touch upon a startling range of cultural figures -- from Leopold and Loeb to Fagin, from Freud to Fanon, from Fanny Brice to Yentl (both by way of Barbara Streisand) -- neatly explicating the underlying, often unspoken, social and political underpinnings of the 20th century.

(Michael Bronski

author of The Pleasure Principle: Sex, Backl, author of The Pleasure Principle: Sex, Backlash and the Struggle for Gay Freedom )

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 464 pages
• Publisher: Columbia University Press (December 3, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0231113749
• ISBN-13: 978-0231113748
• Product Dimensions: 8.7 x 6.7 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,097,882 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)