© Columbia University Press
Queer Theory and the Jewish Question
Paper, 464 pages,
ISBN: 978-0-231-11375-5
$30.00
/ £20.50
December, 2003
Cloth, 464 pages,
ISBN: 978-0-231-11374-8
$90.00
/ £62.00
"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'sUnheroic 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 ReligioWhitman College
"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
"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
"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