Queer Theory and the Jewish Question Read Online Free PDF Page B

such a celebration of Jewish resistance and agency serves at once “to deflect from the present crisis of racist division and to enact its imaginary resolution.” Monument to memory and amnesia at once, then, the exposition promised a different kind of flashing up of past into present. As Butler explains, “The exposition was structured by a certain nostalgic utopia in which ‘the past’ furnished the resources for elaborating a multicultural ideal for Berlin, except that it is precisely Berlin’s past that is rhetorically cast as the obstacle to such a collaboration.”
    In her essay’s concluding anecdote, Butler herself becomes the anxious site/sight for the overlay of past and present, Jew and queer, foreigner and cit- izen. There is no simple resolution to the series of displacements (analogies run amok) Butler charts in her essay—and which she herself comes to em- body in her dizzying final scene. We are left rather with a cautionary tale about the work of analogy.
    The volume thus comes full circle to the question and questioning of anal- ogy: “Jews are like queers, aren’t they?” It is worth recalling, with Janet Jakob- sen, the considerable risks of analogy. To the extent that analogies demand like- ness (Jew = woman, Jew = queer, queer = Jew), they also produce it. Thus the very analogical thinking that strives to open up fresh insights may foreclose spaces for difference. These risks are more than academic. The larger project of this volume is how to hold open a space (the space of analogy?) for other pos- sible futures. These are queer and Jewish questions worth pursuing.

    Notes
For a recent study of the formative role played by the black/white “color line” in the invention and elaboration of U.S. models of homosexual identity, see Somerville’s Queer- ing the Color Line .
This is a bond more explicit than the homosociality thematized in Sedgwick’s Be- tween Men , but it is still played out over the bodies of women. As support for Seidman’s reading, we might mention here that in the Hassidic Shiv h ei Habesht (hagiography of the founder of Hassidism), a homoerotic love between the bride’s brother and the bridegroom is made the condition for the effectuation of a marriage, suggesting that this was, indeed, a Hassidic commonplace.
This dis-placement eccentric to “the family” recalls David M. Halperin’s enunciation of “queer” as a positionality resistant to the regime of “normal” heterosexuality. Hirsch’s contribution to the volume also articulates well with Mosse’s overlapping account of bour-
    geois sensibility, sexuality, and nationalism in his Nationalism and Sexuality and The Image of Man .
In contrast to earlier historicist moves that understand and read the text as a trans- parent reflector of its sociocultural and political histories, the newer historicism treats lit- erature as an opaque and complex participant in ramified and not at all self-consistent mo- ments. These moments themselves help to construct social and cultural differences in service of projects of hegemony and power, as well as—sometimes—in the service of high- ly critical treatments of those moments. Hence, the cooperation of close reading and con- text, arguably the most significant of contributions of theory to practical critical projects, to interpretation in praxis. “New historicist” reading is, therefore, anything but reductive, as all three of these exemplary essays show.
A compelling parallel to this phenomenon surfaces in Alice Kaplan’s reading of Jean- Paul Sartre’s The Childhood of a Leader . In that text Sartre shows how a feminized, homo- sexualized Frenchman constructs himself as male by the abjection of Jews. As Kaplan ar- gues with respect to that French fascist, “Only anti-Semitism succeeds in giving him the gift of masculinity he has sought” (19), thus anticipating Fischlin’s claim vis-à-vis Cocteau.

    Works Cited
    Bloch, R. Howard. “Medieval Misogyny.”