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)|
Jews and queers? What's not to like! This volume has everything one could wish for to facilitate forms of cultural analysis as provocative as they are timely. Bringing together now-classic and specially commissioned essays exploring a range of historical topics--from Chaucer to Leopold and Loeb, and from Proust to Barbra Streisand-- Queer Theory and the Jewish Question assesses powerfully the possibilities and limits of thinking together the terms of its title, terms its authors show to be both irreducible and bound intimately to each other.
(Andrew Parker, Amherst College)