Unheroic Conduct: The Rise of Heterosexuality and the Invention of the Jewish ManIn 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. |
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... tion . It fills a blank space in our analysis of modern Jewish history in- asmuch as it sees concepts of manhood as the central facts which de- termine the attitudes of Jewish men toward themselves and toward women . The book is ...
... tion . It fills a blank space in our analysis of modern Jewish history in- asmuch as it sees concepts of manhood as the central facts which de- termine the attitudes of Jewish men toward themselves and toward women . The book is ...
Page xiii
... tion , Harry Brod , writes : " I found the feminist critique of mainstream masculinity personally empowering rather than threatening . As a child and adolescent , I did not fit the mainstream male image . I was an out- sider , not an ...
... tion , Harry Brod , writes : " I found the feminist critique of mainstream masculinity personally empowering rather than threatening . As a child and adolescent , I did not fit the mainstream male image . I was an out- sider , not an ...
Page xvii
... tion " is not experienced as a threat or a danger . I cannot , however , paper over , ignore , explain away , or apologize for the oppressions of women and lesbigay people that this culture has practiced , and there- fore I endeavor as ...
... tion " is not experienced as a threat or a danger . I cannot , however , paper over , ignore , explain away , or apologize for the oppressions of women and lesbigay people that this culture has practiced , and there- fore I endeavor as ...
Page xix
... tion of Judaic culture from without , while supporting the feminist cri- tique from within , dictates the structure of my work . Thinking about the sissy body of the " Jewish man , " I think simulta- neously about another discourse and ...
... tion of Judaic culture from without , while supporting the feminist cri- tique from within , dictates the structure of my work . Thinking about the sissy body of the " Jewish man , " I think simulta- neously about another discourse and ...
Page xx
... tion , is there not at least the possible danger of misreading - not only by " straight , male liberals " -this " devirilizing " performance as being complicit with an earlier , peculiarly Teutonic reading of the homosexual male body as ...
... tion , is there not at least the possible danger of misreading - not only by " straight , male liberals " -this " devirilizing " performance as being complicit with an earlier , peculiarly Teutonic reading of the homosexual male body as ...
Contents
1 | |
Men Who Roam with the Sheep Diaspora and the Image of the Jewish Man | 31 |
Goyim Naches Or the Mentsh and the Jewish Critique of Romance | 33 |
Jewish Masochism On Penises and Politics Power and Pain | 81 |
Rabbis and Their Pals Rabbinic Homosociality and the Lives of Women | 127 |
Femminization and Its Discontents Torah Study as a System for the Domination of Women | 151 |
The Rise of Heterosexuality and the Invention of the Modern Jew | 187 |
Freuds Baby Fliesss Maybe Or Male Hysteria Homophobia and the Invention of the Jewish Man | 189 |
You May Not Tell the Boys The Diaspora Polictis of a Bitextual Jew | 221 |
The Colonial Drag Zionism Gender and Mimicry | 271 |
Retelling the Story of O Or Bertha Papenheim My Hero | 313 |
Works Cited | 361 |
Index | 387 |
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Unheroic Conduct: The Rise of Heterosexuality and the Invention of the ... Daniel Boyarin Limited preview - 1997 |
Common terms and phrases
Anna antisemitic argue Ashkenazic Bertha Pappenheim Besht Biale body Boyarin Burrus castration century chapter Christian circumcision claim colonialism critical critique Cuddihy desire discourse dominant dream Edinger erotic European explicitly fact fantasies father female feminine feminism feminist fin de siècle Fliess Freud Geller gender gentile German Gilman girls Glikl Herzl heterosexuality homoerotic homoeroticism homophobia homosexual husband hysteria ideal identity interpretation Jewish male Jewish women Jews Kornberg male Jews manliness masculinity masochism misogyny modern moreover Moses mother narrative nineteenth Oedipus Oedipus complex Orthodox pain passive penis phallic phallus political practice produced psychoanalytic quoted Rabbi Rabbi Elazar Rabbi Yohanan rabbinic culture rabbinic Judaism reading representation Resh Lakish Roman Schreber seems sense sexual Sigmund Sigmund Freud social society story study of Torah suggest Talmud Theodor Theodor Herzl theory tion Torah study traditional Jewish culture Trans Vienna violence Weininger wife woman writes Yiddish York Zionist
Popular passages
Page 224 - By the rivers of Babylon — there we sat down and there we wept when we remembered Zion. On the willows there we hung up our harps. For there our captors asked us for songs, and our tormentors asked for mirth, saying, "Sing us one of the songs of Zion!
Page 241 - The castration complex is the deepest unconscious root of anti-semitism; for even in the nursery little boys hear that a Jew has something cut off his penis — a piece of his penis, they think — and this gives them a right to despise Jews. And there is no stronger unconscious root for the sense of superiority over women.
Page 33 - I was well dressed and had a new fur cap on my head. A Christian came up to me and with a single blow knocked off my cap into the mud and shouted: "Jew! Get off the pavement!
Page 3 - The man's power is active, progressive, defensive. He is eminently the doer, the creator, the discoverer, the defender. His intellect is for speculation and invention; his energy for adventure, for war and for conquest, wherever war is just, wherever conquest necessary. But the woman's power is for rule, not for battle, — and her intellect is not for invention or creation, but for sweet ordering, arrangement, and decision.
Page 44 - I really don't see anything romantic in proposing. It is very romantic to be in love. But there is nothing romantic about a definite proposal. Why, one may be accepted. One usually is, I believe. Then the excitement is all over.
Page 33 - I went into the roadway and picked up my cap," was his quiet reply. This struck me as unheroic conduct on the part of the big, strong man who was holding the little boy by the hand. I contrasted this situation with another which fitted my feelings better: the scene in which Hannibal's father, Hamilcar Barca, made his boy swear before the household altar to take vengeance on the Romans. Ever since that time Hannibal had had a place in my...
Page 33 - I may have been ten or twelve years old, when my father began to take me with him on his walks and reveal to me in his talk his views upon things in the world we live in. Thus it was, on one such occasion, that he told me a story to show me how much better things were now than they had been in his days. "When I was a young man...
Page 132 - Reigning everywhere, although prohibited in practice, hom(m)o-sexuality is played out through the bodies of women, matter, or sign, and heterosexuality has been up to now just an alibi for the smooth workings of man's relations with himself, of relations among men.
Page 341 - This girl, who was bubbling over with intellectual vitality, led an extremely monotonous existence in her puritanicallyminded family. She embellished her life in a manner which probably influenced her decisively in the direction of her illness, by indulging in systematic day-dreaming, which she described as her 'private theatre'.
Page 3 - She must be enduringly, incorruptibly good; instinctively, infallibly wise — wise, not for self-development, but for self-renunciation: wise, not that she may set herself above her husband, but that she may never fail from his side...