Gay-valt: Queer performance and identity in twentieth-century Jewish-American literature, theater, and film

This dissertation is the first major study of queer sexuality in Jewish American cultural production. This work complements the work of gender and racial theorists in Jewish Studies by considering the role that sexuality has played in the formation of the twentieth-century Jewish American subject. The dissertation is a comparative study of Yiddish and English texts, examining the ways in which each language system has engaged with and addressed the topic of sexuality. By comparing texts from both Yiddish and English, I argue that different paradigms for understanding homosexuality existed within the Jewish community, depending on which language was utilized.; In order for Jews to become American and counter the perceived stereotypes that frequently conflated Jewish identity with homosexuality, all notions and references to queerness had to be repudiated by Jewish American cultural discourses. At the same time, I chart a parallel yet alternative trajectory for the Yiddish-speaking world in America, a community that engaged with sexuality in more fluid terms as it grappled with modernity. In approaching the multiple intersections between queer and Jewish identity, I primarily engage the topics of performance and language. I chart the relationship between performance and performativity, categories that despite attempts to keep them separate continue to reinforce each other. In particular, I look at how certain gender performances in Jewish texts signal queer sexuality.; This project engages with a variety of genres and texts. In terms of Yiddish texts, I look at the 1907 play Got fun nekome, the cross-dressing films of Yiddish actress Molly Picon, and five short stories by Isaac Bashevis Singer, examining the sexual epistemologies of these Yiddish works. I then turn to Abraham Cahan's The Rise of David Levinsky (1917) and Philip Roth's Portnoy's Complaint (1969) to examine how both texts construct Jewish masculinity and heterosexuality in an English-speaking context. This study thematically traces how issues such as performance, homoeroticism, masculinity, and queerness register in different historical moments and in different languages. The result is not just Jewish texts that are queered, but a rethinking of queerness itself, which is altered via its engagement with Judaism and Yiddish culture.