Unheroic Conduct: The Rise of Heterosexuality and the Invention of the Jewish Man

Boyarin, Daniel

ISBN 10: 0520210506 / ISBN 13: 9780520210509

Published by University of California Press, 1997

About this Item

Offers an alternative to the Euro-American warrior/patriarch model of masculinity and recovers the Jewish ideal of the gentle, receptive male. Analyzing ancient and modern texts, this book reveals early rabbis - studious, family-oriented - as exemplars of manhood and the prime objects of female desire in traditional Jewish society. Series: Contraversions: Critical Studies in Jewish Literature, Culture & Society. Num Pages: 433 pages, 16. BIC Classification: JFCX; JFSJ; JFSR1; JHM. Category: (P) Professional & Vocational. Dimension: 229 x 152 x 22. Weight in Grams: 494. . 1997. 1st Edition. Paperback. . . . .

Seller Inventory # V9780520210509

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Unheroic Conduct: The Rise of Heterosexuality and the Invention of the Jewish Man
• Publisher: University of California Press
• Publication Date: 1997
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0520210506
• ISBN 13: 9780520210509
• Binding: Soft cover
• Edition: 1st Edition
• Condition: New

About this title

Synopsis

In a book that will both enlighten and provoke, Daniel Boyarin offers an alternative to the prevailing Euroamerican warrior/patriarch model of masculinity and recovers the Jewish ideal of the gentle, receptive male. The Western notion of the aggressive, sexually dominant male and the passive female reaches back through Freud to Roman times, but as Boyarin makes clear, such gender roles are not universal. Analyzing ancient and modern texts, he reveals early rabbis―studious, family-oriented―as exemplars of manhood and the prime objects of female desire in traditional Jewish society.

Challenging those who view the "feminized Jew" as a pathological product of the Diaspora or a figment of anti-Semitic imagination, Boyarin argues that the Diaspora produced valuable alternatives to the dominant cultures' overriding gender norms. He finds the origins of the rabbinic model of masculinity in the Talmud, and though unrelentingly critical of rabbinic society's oppressive aspects, he shows how it could provide greater happiness for women than the passive gentility required by bourgeois European standards.

Boyarin also analyzes the self-transformation of three iconic Viennese modern Jews: Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalysis; Theodor Herzl, the founder of Zionism; and Bertha Pappenheim (Anna O.), the first psychoanalytic patient and founder of Jewish feminism in Germany. Pappenheim is Boyarin's hero: it is she who provides him with a model for a militant feminist, anti-homophobic transformation of Orthodox Jewish society today.

Like his groundbreaking Carnal Israel, this book is talmudic scholarship in a whole new light, with a vitality that will command attention from readers in feminist studies, history of sexuality, Jewish culture, and the history of psychoanalysis.

About the Author

Daniel Boyarin is Taubman Professor of Talmudic Culture at the University of California, Berkeley, and author of Carnal Israel: Reading Sex in Talmudic Culture (California, 1993) and A Radical Jew: Paul and the Politics of Identity (California, 1994). Chapter 5 of Unheroic Conduct, "Freud's Baby, Fliess's Maybe; Or, Male Hysteria, Homophobia, and the Invention of the Jewish Man," received the Crompton-Noll Award of the Modern Language Association Gay and Lesbian Caucus.