Queer Theory and the Jewish Question

The essays in this volume boldly map the historically resonant intersections between Jewishness and queerness, between homophobia and anti-Semitism, and between queer theory and theorizations of Jewishness. With important essays by such well-known figures in queer and gender studies as Judith Butler, Daniel Boyarin, Marjorie Garber, Michael Moon, and Eve Sedgwick, this book is not so much interested in revealing―outing―"queer Jews" as it is in exploring the complex social arrangements and processes through which modern Jewish and homosexual identities emerged as traces of each other during the last two hundred years.

Daniel Boyarin is Taubman Professor of Talmudic Culture in the departments of Near Eastern studies and rhetoric at the University of California, Berkeley, where he is also an affiliated faculty member in the women's studies department and gay and lesbian studies program. He is the author of Unheroic Conduct: The Rise of Heterosexuality and the Invention of the Jewish Man. Daniel Itzkovitz is associate professor of English at Stonehill College in Easton, Massachusetts. He has published articles on Jewish studies, queer theory, and American literature and is the editor of a new edition of Fannie Hurst's Imitation of Life. Ann Pellegrini is associate professor of religious studies and performance studies at New York University. She is the author of Performance Anxieties: Staging Psychoanalysis, Staging Race.