The Passing Game: Queering Jewish American Culture
by Warren Hoffman
Syracuse University Press. 206 pages,$ 24.95
I GREW UP in a multicultural family that spoke several languages. As a family, we identified with being Jewish, Polish, Russian, Turkish, and American. We were Sephardic and Ashkenazi. Some of us were observant and others were political radicals. From an early age, I was acutely aware that my family background didn’t look anything like the Dick and Jane world of the school books. Yet, the mantra of my first-generation mother and naturalized father was “Blend.” The language in my home was Yiddish. At six, I was bilingual in Yiddish and English. Unfortunately, this led to many unwanted slips of the tongue in the classroom. One time, my first grade teacher asked me to read the word for spoon. I saw the English word but spoke its Yiddish equivalent; laughter broke out; I was humiliated. After class, several of my classmates ganged up on me and called me a “dirty Jew.” Within a year, I stopped speaking any Yiddish. I thought that this was a triumph—I had learned an important lesson in “the passing game.”
In The Passing Game: Queering Jewish American Culture, Warren Hoffman explores the idea of queer Jewish identity as expressed in drama, literature, and film. Hoffman interrogates and deconstructs many well-known Jewish cultural works, including Sholem Asch’s controversial play 1907 God of Vengeance, the 1936 film Yidl Mitn Fidl, which starred a cross-dressing Molly Picon, and the literary works of Abraham Cahan, among many others. In discussing these works, he deliberately uses the word “queer” rather than gay, and sets out to widen the definition to include Jewish Americans: “this text examines the Jewish American cultural canon and aims to widen the spectrum of queer identity by suggesting that queer sexuality, in a variety of forms, has been a defining factor in the development of Jewish American culture since at least the early part of the twentieth century.”
Hoffman has many new and refreshing ideas, including insights into the works of Jo Sinclair (aka Ruth Seid), Philip Roth, and Isaac Bashevis Singer. Jo Sinclair’s little-known novel Wasteland, published in 1946 (republished in 1987), is about Jake Braunowitz, a second generation heterosexual Jewish American and his struggle to come to terms with his immigrant family and his shame of being a Jew. His sister Debby is a lesbian and a source of embarrassment to Jake. His analysis of the relentlessly heterosexual Alexander Portnoy of Portnoy’s Complaint is just delicious. He conjures up the idea that there may be an imaginary gay lover living in Alexander’s unconscious. Portnoy’s queerness resides in his Jewish outsider status and his need to prove his masculinity to the goyish world that stereotypes Jewish men as effeminate. The author also offers an amazing discussion about five stories by the Yiddish writer Isaac Bashevis Singer that deal with “gender ambiguity.” Here he provides a window into the Talmudic influences upon Singer involving the issue of gender. We learn that Talmudic rabbis might have recognized up to seven genders.
Hoffman has written a wonderful book that asks important questions about assimilation, identity, gender, and the queering of the Jewish American experience. He digs deeply into the texts and comes up with hidden truths that are finally brought into the light.
Irene Javors is a psychotherapist based in New York. She teaches in the graduate program in mental health counseling at Yeshiva University.
