Queer Theory and the Jewish Question (8 page)

In other words, Leopold Bloom’s transformation into a “woman,” and, moreover, into a pathological, infantile, and perverse figure who is also a “fe- male impersonator” capable of “Gomorrahan vices,” is not a sign that he is “a ‘new womanly man’ whose secret manliness may ultimately seduce and subdue insubordinate New Women,” as Gilbert and Gubar would have it (
Sexchanges
, 336), but rather a sign of the interimplication of the Jew, the homosexual, and the “woman” in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century culture.

These examples of gender crossover have focused on the feminization of the Jewish male, a common, even an obsessive concomitant to anti-Semitic thought and to the gesture of disavowal (“that is not me”; “that is the not-me”) exemplified in Hitler’s “recognition” of the Jew in
Mein Kampf
—a “recogni- tion” that, in effect, codes the Jew as the
unheimlich
, the uncanny, the repressed that will always return—the very essence of the Wandering Jew. I want to close this section, however, by briefly considering a couple of examples of anti- Semitic gender critique that work slightly differently, and then glancing at one theatrical strategy that repositions the cross-dressed Jewish man.

Jean-Paul Sartre’s novella, “The Childhood of a Leader” (“L’Enfance d’un chef ”), tells the story of a young boy, unsure about his own gender role, who fantasizes about his mother’s masculinity. “What would happen if they took away Mama’s dress, and if she put on Papa’s pants?” “Perhaps it would make her grow a black moustache—just like that.”
34
As Alice Kaplan points out, the moustache is “a clear cultural signifier, by 1939, of Hitler” and “a complex ideological sign in this novel,” since it marks an imaginary or fantasized pro- jection by the boy, Lucien, onto his mother’s face, and thus onto the face of the French motherland. The transitional object for Lucien is not only the moustache—the novella ends with his looking in the mirror and deciding to grow one of his own—but also anti-Semitism. He reads Barrès’s
Les Déracinés
, and determines on an identification for himself that involves the exclusion of “non-French” Jews. Lucien’s early experience with homosexuality contributes to his resolution to seek a renewed “masculinity” for himself. Treated in child- hood by his mother’s friends like a “little girl,” he reinvents maleness, through the fantasized phallic French mother, by defining it against the Jews—and the Jew (homosexual; “little girl”; child) in himself. “Only anti-Semitism,” as Ka- plan shrewdly notes, “succeeds in giving him the gift of masculinity he has sought since the first scene of the novel.”
35

My second example comes from
Cabaret
, the film about decadent Berlin in which—as we have already noticed—transvestism plays a key role. The transvestite “women” (Elke, Inge) encountered by the protagonist in the men’s room and the nightclub are not, so far as we know it, Jews: they are identified as male Germans in drag. But in the cabaret act performed by Joel Grey as the demonic master of ceremonies there
is
a representation of Jewishness, coyly disclosed in the scurrilous final line of a song apparently bathetic and empty. The act involves a female figure in a gorilla suit and frilly pink costume, about whom the m.c. croons, “If You Could See Her with My Eyes.” The song, ap- parently a lament for star-crossed love, describes the cruelty of the outside world in failing to acknowledge his beloved’s qualities; throughout, the goril- la twirls on his arm, bats her eyelashes, and generally makes herself ludicrous,

until the close, when the refrain “If you could see her with my eyes . . . ” con- cludes with a conspiratorial hiss: “ . . . she wouldn’t look Jewish at all.”

The band’s ironic fanfare underscores the point; the contrast with the film’s shy and beautiful Jewish heroine could hardly be greater. Here cross- species representation marks the Jewish woman as dark, animal, hairy, and witless; the “feminized” m.c. with his painted lips and the male-to-female transvestites in the chorus usurp and co-opt both all “male” and all “female” space onstage, leaving “the Jew” to be represented by a gorilla in a tutu.

As a final footnote to this we might take note of the anti-Semitic vaude- ville act in Joseph Losey’s 1976 film about Nazism and identity in wartime France,
Mr. Klein
. Modeled on the infamous Nazi propaganda film
Jew Süss
(1941), the act features a street singer whose jewelry is stolen by a sneaky car- icature of a Jew, while the club audience roars with delight. The singer is played by a “female impersonator, dressed and made up in dark expressionis- tic style.”
36
As with Joel Grey and his fellow vaudevillians in
Cabaret
, here “fe- male impersonator” itself becomes a privileged category, endorsing a certain kind of decadence and crossover while denying and stigmatizing the Jew as outside that aesthetic economy. Female impersonation, while on the one hand a sign of decadence, was thus also a prerogative of power. Jews could be “fem- inized,” but that was not at all the same as choosing to play a female role.

It would remain, some years later, for a Borscht Belt comedian like Mil- ton Berle, whose routines so often included a drag act, to cross-dress for suc- cess, recuperating, however unconsciously, this “feminization” of the Jewish man, and deploying gender parody as an empowering strategy. For Berle, a Jewish comic nicknamed “Mr. Television” because of the popularity of his Texaco Star Theater when it appeared on NBC in 1948, was in some ways the premier video entertainer of the post-war era. “He was a man who wasn’t afraid of a dress,” wrote the
New York Times
in fond retrospect, “and for four years he owned Saturday night.”
37

Notes

Marjorie Garber,
vested interests: cross-dressing and cultural anxiety

(New York: Routledge, 1992).

1. Shaun Considine,
   Barbra Streisand: The Woman, the Myth, the Music
   (London: Cen- tury, 1985), 345.
   

2. Freud’s note comes in the context of a discussion of the Wolf-Man’s fears of castra- tion and his association of it with “the ritual circumcision of Christ and of the Jews in general.”
   

   Among the most tormenting, though at the same time the most grotesque, symptoms of (the Wolf-Man’s) later illness was his relation to every tailor from whom he ordered a
   

   suit of clothes: his deference and timidity in the presence of this high functionary, his at- tempts to get into his good books by giving him extravagant tips, and his despair over the results of the work however it might in fact have turned out. (The German word for “tai- lor” is
   Schneider
   , from the verb
   schneiden
   , [“to cut”], a compound of which,
   beschneiden
   , means “to circumcise.” It will be remembered, too, that it was a tailor who pulled off the wolf ’s tail.) Sigmund Freud,
   From the History of an Infantile Neurosis
   (1918),
   The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud
   , 24 vols. Ed. and trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth, 1918), 17:86, 87n.
   

3. James Brady, “In Step with: Amy Irving.”
   Parade Magazine
   , October 30, 1988.
   

4. Rebecca Bell-Metereau,
   Hollywood Androgyny
   (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 231. See also Jack Kroll, “Barbra, the Yeshiva Boy,”
   Newsweek
   , November 28, 1983, 109; David Denby, “Educating Barbra,”
   New York
   , November 28, 1983, 111; Pauline Kael, “The Perfectionalist,”
   New Yorker
   , November 28, 1983: 176.
   

5. Johnny Carson,
   Tonight Show
   , February 16, 1984. Considine,
   Barbra Streisand
   , 356–58.
   

6. Sigmund Freud, “Revision of the Theory of Dreams,” in
   New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-analysis
   (1933),
   SE
   22:24.
   

7. Sigmund Freud, “Medusa’s Head” (1922),
   SE
   18: 273.
   

8. New York Times
   , January 29, 1984.
   

9. Isaac Bashevis Singer, “Yentl the Yeshiva Boy,” trans. Marion Magid and Elizabeth Pollet,
   Short Friday and Other Stories
   (New York: Fawcett Crest, 1978), 160.
   

10. This blessing, from the Mishna
    Menachot
    43B, is one of three ancient prayers. The other two thank God for not making the speaker a heathen or a bondman. An Orthodox Jewish woman prays thanking God “who hast made me according to thy will.” For further information on these prayers, see Rafael Posner,
    Jewish Liturgy
    (Jerusalem: Keter, 1975) and Elie Munk,
    The World of Prayer
    (New York: Feldheim, 1954–63). I am grateful to Adam Z. Newton for these references.
    

11. Homer Dickens,
    What a Drag: Men as Women and Women as Men in the Movies
    

    (New York: Quill, 1984), 65.
    

12. Diane Owen Hughes, “Distinguishing Signs: Ear-Rings, Jews and Franciscan Rhetoric in the Italian Renaissance City,”
    Past and Present
    112 (August 1986): 17–18.
    

13. Otto Weininger,
    Sex and Character
    (London: Heinemann, 1906), 314.
    

14. Sander L. Gilman,
    Difference and Pathology
    (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), 33–35. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, “Review of Dr. Weininger’s
    Sex and Character
    ”
    Critic
    12 (1906): 414.
    

15. Sigmund Freud, preface to the Hebrew translation of
    Totem and Taboo
    (1930),
    SE
    

    13:xv.
    

16. Sander L. Gilman,
    Sexuality: An Illustrated History
    (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1989), 265, citing Alexander Pilc,
    Beitrag zur vergleichenden Rassen-Psychiatrie
    (Leipzig: Franz Deuticke, 1906), 18.
    

17. George L. Mosse,
    Nationalism and Sexuality: Middle-Class Morality and Sexual Norms in Modern Europe
    (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985), 135; 142.
    

18. “Höre, Israel,”
    Die Zukunft
    , March 6, 1897, 454–62. Gilman,
    Sexuality
    , 267.
    

19. Terry Castle,
    Masquerade and Civilization: The Carnivalesque in Eighteenth-Century English Culture and Fiction
    (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1986), 35–36.
    

20. Marcel Proust,
    Remembrance of Things Past
    , trans. C. K. Scott Moncrieff and Ter- ence Kilmartin (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986), 2:639. Djuna Barnes,
    Nightwood
    (New
    

    York: New Directions, 1937). Radclyffe Hall,
    The Well of Loneliness
    (New York: Avon, 1981).
    

21. Adolf Hitler,
    Mein Kampf
    , trans. Ralph Manheim (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1971), 56.
    

22. Max Nordau,
    Zionistische Schriften
    (Cologne: Jüdischer Verlag, 1909), 379–81. Mosse,
    Nationalism and Sexuality
    , 42. Gilman,
    Sexuality
    , 267.
    

23. A. J. Langguth,
    Saki: A Life of Hector Hugh Munroe
    (New York: Simon and Schus- ter, 1981), 258, 83. Mosse,
    Nationalism and Sexuality
    , 121.
    

24. Benedict Friedländer, cited by Karl Franz von Leexow,
    Armee und die Homosexual- ität
    (Leipzig, 1908), 5, 61–63. Mosse,
    Nationalism and Sexuality
    , 41.
    

25. David Friedrich Strauss,
    Der alte und der neue Glaube: Ein Bekenntnis
    (Leipzig: G. Hirzel, 1982), 71; Gilman,
    Sexuality
    , 267.
    

26. Marjorie Garber, “Freud’s Choice: ‘The Theme of the Three Caskets,’” in
    Shake- speare’s Ghost Writers
    (London: Routledge, 1987), 75–86.
    

27. The Complete Letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess, 1887–1904
    , trans. and ed. Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson (Cambridge: University Press, 1985), 45–51, 113–18.
    

28. Stanley Cavell,
    The Claim of Reason
    (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), 480.
    

29. William Shakespeare,
    The Merchant of Venice
    , ed. Horace Howard Furness. A new variorum edition of Shakespeare (1888) (New York: American Scholar, 1965), 383.
    

30. Cited from the
    Literary Digest
    , October 26, 1929, in Toby Lelyveld,
    Shylock on the Stage
    (Cleveland: Western Reserve University, 1960), 126.
    

31. Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar,
    No Man’s Land
    , vol. 2:
    Sexchanges
    (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), 333–34.
    

32. James Joyce,
    Ulysses
    (New York: Random House, 1961), 493.
    

33. S. Lindner, “
    Das Saugen an den Fingern, Lippen etc. bei den Kindern (Ludeln.),
    ”
    Jahrbuch fur Kinderheilkunde und physische Erziehung
    14 (1879). Sigmund Freud,
    Three Es- says on Sexuality
    (1905),
    SE
    7:179–85; Gilman,
    Sexuality
    , 265.
    

34. Jean-Paul Sartre, “The Childhood of a Leader,” in
    The Wall (Intimacy) and Other Stories
    , trans. Lloyd Alexander (New York: New Directions, 1948), 86.
    

35. Alice Yeager Kaplan,
    Reproductions of Banality
    (Minneapolis: University of Min- nesota Press, 1986), 18.
    

36. Ilan Avisar,
    Screening the Holocaust
    (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), 170.
    

37. Jeremy Gerard, “Milton Berle Browses at Home and the TV Audience Gets a Treat,”
    New York Times
    , December 11, 1990, C15. Asked why he had had so many extra- marital affairs, Berle told an interviewer, “Maybe I had to prove my manhood to the out- side world that always saw me with my mother and wearing dresses in my act. Is she his ‘beard’? Is he gay? Maybe that’s why I played around so much.” Dotson Rader, “The Hard Life, the Strong Loves of a Very Funny Man,”
    Parade
    ,
    Boston Globe
    , March 19, 1989: 6.
    

Epistemology of the Closet