Queer Theory and the Jewish Question Read Online Free Page B

reading, Seidman suggests that the play enacts a symbolic marriage between the two fathers, 2 displacing the heterosexual relationship supposedly at the center of the tragedy. In fact, Seidman argues, the heterosexual narra- tive of The Dybbuk is epiphenomenal to the fathers’ ill-fated romance; it is the fathers’ love—with its tragic ending—that ultimately drives the young couple to their doom.
    From here we take a big step forward into another modernity—the Unit- ed States in the final third of the twentieth century—and Stacy Wolf ’s medi- tation on a quintessential object of Camp cathexis, “Barbra Streisand’s ‘Funny Girl’ Body.” In arguing for the buoyant queerness of Streisand’s body, defi- antly marked as Jewish, Wolf here offers a riveting companion essay to Mar- jorie Garber’s earlier discussion of Streisand’s attempts to normalize— straighten out—Yentl’s gender trouble. Wolf ’s imaginative engagement with Streisand effectively (and affectively) articulates a space of desire at the cross- roads of this cross-cultural cross-gendering: Jew/Queer/Lesbian/Woman. Im- portantly, Wolf ’s essay also brings out the “Jewess,” giving her pride of place. In this, Wolf is an odd woman out in this volume, as she traces something of the stakes for Jewish women’s bodies and subjectivities of the queer-Jew con- nection.
    Affect and performativity, which provide methodological touchstones for Wolf, are also critical to Michael Moon’s essay. Willing anachronism, he con- jures and imaginatively reconstructs Henry James’s apparent (and apparently queer) flirtation with Yiddish theater; Moon reflects on the Yiddish theater that at once attracted and appalled James, juxtaposing these reflections with a consideration of the latter-day theatrical turns of Charles Ludlam and Ethyl Eichelberger. After tracing the Yiddish/queer overlay in both Ludlam’s and Eichelberger’s bodies of work, in the end Moon lovingly indicates how such queer nexuses of desire and identification might powerfully contribute to an understanding of “protoqueer” childhood.
    The final cluster of essays comes at the queer-Jewish connections from the perspective of non-Jewish fantasies about the Jew (fantasies also illuminated in Moon’s discussion of Henry James). Jacob Press sets a historicist stage for us in his reading of one of the founding texts of English literature and culture,
    Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales . Press focuses his attention on the “Prioress’s Tale,” connecting that text’s narrative to allegations of ritual murder that were first brought against Jews in medieval England and then spread to the continent. As Press details, “The tale of ritual murder is premised upon the viability of a parallel between the pure body of the boy and virginity of Mary.” Both in turn represent the vulnerable body of the Church, which is threatened by penetration at the hands of perfidious Jews. Chaucer’s “Prioress’s Tale” is “by far the richest surviving medieval rendering of the narrative of ritual murder
    . . . written in close imitation of the stylistic and narrative conventions and content” of literary and popular renderings of the ritual murder of Little Hugh of Lincoln. After teasing out the (for lack of better term) homophobic aspects of these narratives of ritual murder, as they are brought against Jews, Press goes on to advance the startling claim—important for the history of sex- uality as well as for Jewish history—that “Chaucer’s embedded story is the distant but direct ancestor of modern psychological master-narratives of the consolidation of male homosexual identity.”
    David Hirsch also takes historicist aim at the English literary canon, read- ing Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist in the light of the development of British “family values” in the early part of the nineteenth century. In contrast to the mainstream of Dickens scholarship, Hirsch indicates “how [Dickens’s]