Queer Theory and the Jewish Question Read Online Free

of Cultural Formation.” In a fas- cinating exploration of an underexamined historical encounter, Geller de- scribes the very specific, very historical entanglements of Freud with sociologist Hans Blüher, the theoretician of homoeroticism in the German youth movement, the Wandervogel, to the greater illumination of the cultur- al entailments and meanings of both.
    In the light of Matti Bunzl’s challenge to queer theory to consider how the racialization of the Jew may have affected the production of the modern homosexual, Geller’s discussion of the little-known Blüher is especially in- triguing. Geller illuminates the crucial role played by Blüher in the “public dissemination of a racial typology of homosexualities: the opposition be- tween the healthy inversion characteristic of manly Germanic men and the decadent homosexuality of effeminate Jews.” Blüher’s typological distinction would later be taken up and institutionalized, though in very different di- rections, by German Jews. Magnus Hirschfeld embraced effeminacy under the banner of a third-sex model of male homosexuality, whereas Benedikt Friedländer, a convert to Christianity and an important source for the Freikorps (Theweleit) and the SS, rejected the effeminate, “Jewish” model of homosexuality, instead promoting the homosexual man as the purest expres- sion of Aryan manhood.
    Turning to roughly the same historical period in the United States, Paul B. Franklin offers a detailed excavation of the infamous Leopold and Loeb case to show how the homosexual and the Jew were implicitly and explicitly under- stood in terms of one another in early twentieth-century American popular culture. In the antisemitic and homophobic terrain of the American 1920s, “Leopold and Loeb were two Jewish boys whose Jewishness ‘naturally’ predis- posed them to homosexuality, a ‘crime against nature’ that incited them to fur- ther crimes against humanity.” Franklin’s meticulous analysis demonstrates how the American public came to understand itself against the multiple “crimes” that emerge in the case: not only the crime of murder but, more in- sidiously, the overlapping crimes of homosexuality and Jewishness. This essay thereby unearths astonishingly straightforward analogies between Jew and ho- mosexual (such as Edward Stevenson’s, who in 1908 challenged, “Show me a Jew and you show me a Uranian”). Even more significant, Franklin shows how a systemic set of associative interconnections between gays and Jews functions in public discourse.
    In her contribution to this volume Alisa Solomon traces the ongoing life of associations between Jewishness and queerness and their effect on the po- litical imaginary of the state of Israel. Solomon shows how Zionism’s exalted Muskeljuden , or “muscle Jews,” cast their shadow not only over Israel’s politi- cal mainstream but also over the fledgling gay rights movement in Israel. As she indicates, the contemporary political debate, in which an antigay religious right is pitted against a secular and “tolerant” liberalism lately welcoming of homosexuality, is still staged within the boundaries of an exclusively Jewish, masculinist—that is, a Zionist—mentality. Solomon challenges the limita- tions of this vision, suggesting that a truly queer internationalism—which she believes the Israeli drag queen Dana International emblematizes—is not real- ized in the contemporary Israeli gay movement.
    A masculinist imaginary is also the target of Daniel Boyarin’s essay, “Ho- mophobia and the Postcoloniality of the ‘Jewish Science.’” In this essay Bo- yarin turns his attention to the masculinist fantasies—and signal blind spots—of Freud. How, Boyarin asks, are we to make sense of the misogyny, racism, and homophobia that, as it were, color Freud’s thinking? As Boyarin suggests, some of the most deeply reactionary moments in Freud—such as his attribution of penis envy to all women and