Queer Theory and the Jewish Question
Co-edited with Daniel Boyarin and Daniel Itzkovitz
December 10, 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.
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Praise
This book marks a glorious new installment in [the] history of courageous, even outrageous Jewish thought … It’s illuminating, hugely informative, and sexy as only rigorous and playful intelligence applied to transgressive subjects can be.
Tony Kushner, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes
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
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
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, 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