Closeted No More, or Why Jewish American Culture Really is Gay
I never set out to write The Passing Game: Queering Jewish American Culture, but you might say it was beshert – a sure thing.
Coming out of the closet while reading through the canon of Jewish American literature helped me to arrange the pieces of a puzzle that few people wanted to talk about or consider. The Passing Game, which looks at a variety of texts in Yiddish and English written from 1907 through the early 1970s, is my attempt to rethink Jewish American culture by considering the role that queer sexuality has played in the construction of Jewish American identity.
The post-Stonewall generation produced a number of notable gay- and Jewish-themed works, including Harvey Fierstein’s Tony Award-winning play Torch Song Trilogy (1982); Trembling Before G-d (2001), a documentary about the lives of gay Orthodox Jews; and Tony Kushner’s Tony- and Pulitzer Prize-winning masterpiece Angels in America (1993). I, though, wanted to examine works from earlier in the 20th century to show that queer sexuality is a topic that Jews have engaged way before the current debates on same-sex marriage and the ordination of openly gay rabbis were even conceived as issues to be fought over by the Conservative movement.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. To fully understand the genesis of the book, we have to go back to 1999, when I moved to California to enter the University of California- Santa Cruz as a Ph.D. candidate in American literature with a focus on Jewish culture. I didn’t know exactly what I wanted to research but I was fascinated by the ways in which Jewish Americans have told their stories in theater, literature, and film since the great wave of late 19th-century immigration.
At a conference of the National Union of Jewish LGBT Students in Austin, Texas, I learned that when NUJLS had called a variety of Hillels, including the one at my alma mater, it had been told that there weren’t any gay Jewish students there and then the phone was hung up. How sadly ironic, I thought. It was at my undergraduate Hillel that I first became involved with the Conservative movement and was able to explore what it might mean to be an observant Jew. To this day, I wonder if I would have come out earlier if Hillel had reached out to me. As I joined with other Conservative Jews for Friday night services at the Austin conference, though, I realized that being observant and gay were not mutually exclusive categories.
Progressing with my studies in Jewish American literature, the summer after Austin I packed my bags for the YIVO Summer Institute in New York City to study Yiddish. How pleasantly surprised I was to find a large number of gay and lesbian students at the YIVO program. Whereas the world of Torah seemed to be prohibitive in terms of homosexual behavior, at least for men, Yiddish seemed to say, “Come on in, you’re welcome here.”
One afternoon many of us watched the 1936 film Yidl Mitn Fidl, in which Molly Picon cross-dresses as a boy so she can travel through the Polish countryside with her father, a klezmer musician. Along the way, Picon falls in love with Froim, another musician, who doesn’t know that she is a woman and seems to have some sexual identity issues of his own. As some of my classmates made cracks about Froim being gay, I couldn’t help but think how queer, in all senses of the word, Picon’s film was. What on earth did Yiddish-speaking audiences think about this film when it premiered? Did they find anything queer about it, and if not, why not? The ideas for a research paper began forming in my mind.
Upon returning to California, I read my way through many of the classics of Jewish American literature, texts by Abraham Cahan, Philip Roth, and Isaac Bashevis Singer. Again and again I was surprised to find ongoing engagements with queer sexuality: male characters displaying homoerotic affection for other men, panic over purported homosexual advances, and characters with androgynous genders. Here were multiple examples of Jewish Americans engaging with queer sexuality in some of Jewish literature’s most famous texts, and yet almost all of the scholarly materials were virtually silent about this point. Clearly time for an examination into the intersection of these identities was long overdue.
As I read, two primary theories developed, one about English-language texts, the other about Yiddish texts. English-language texts, I found, were fairly prescriptive about queer identity, acknowledging queer sexuality only to reject it in the end as an option that shouldn’t be endorsed. What struck me, and what became the inspiration for the title of my book, was that if gay identity today is about visibility (“We’re here, we’re queer, get used to it”), the beginnings of queer Jewish culture in America, written in English, were all about assimilation and passing. Passing as white, passing as American, and passing as straight in an attempt to buck the 19th-century European stereotype that equated Jews (particularly men) with homosexuals. The Yiddish-language work, on the other hand, was connected to a worldview that lacked both the words and concept of modern homosexuality, and therefore, perhaps ironically, was more likely to embrace homosociality and less likely to condemn queer sexuality.
Queer readings of some of the most canonical Jewish American texts may explain some textual conundrums that have plagued scholars and readers for years. For example, Jewish Daily Forward editor Abraham Cahan’s classic 1917 English-language novel The Rise of David Levinsky follows the story of a Jewish immigrant who becomes a millionaire but ends up depressed, ostensibly because he is unable to find a suitable woman to marry. The novel, though, is filled with many passages in which Levinsky expresses overt affection for his male friends. For me these plot points are intimately connected, and Cahan’s book becomes not only a critique of capitalism, but also a case about the unsustainability of homosexuality in Jewish American life in 1917.
The world of Yiddish theater, meanwhile, had its own fascination with homosexuality. In 1923, the cast of Sholem Asch’s female homoerotic drama God of Vengeance was found guilty of presenting “immoral” drama on the American stage. When the play was first presented in 1907 in New York it had caused some consternation in the Yiddish community, but newspapers and viewers never discussed its homoerotic issues, arguably in part because the term and concept “lesbian” did not exist in Yiddish. What was perhaps only mildly shocking for Jewish audiences quickly become a “shanda for the goyim” when produced on the Broadway stage.
While much has happened in the gay Jewish community recently, Jewish culture has been engaging with queerness in complex ways for at least the last 100 years. I hope my book will add to the discussion on gay Jewish culture, because despite what people at my undergraduate Hillel might think, there are always gay Jews around, whether we want to acknowledge them or not.
Dr. Warren Hoffman teaches English, theater, Jewish studies, and American studies at Temple University in Philadelphia.
