[Mendele] Mendele Personal Notices & Announcements--New book, The Passing Game: Queering Jewish American Culture

Victor Bers victor.bers at yale.edu
Thu Jun 4 17:20:03 EDT 2009


MENDELE Yiddish Language and Literature
Personal Notices and Announcements

June 4, 2009

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_______________________________________________________________________
Date: Wed, 20 May 2009 20:27:55 -0400
From: Warren Hoffman <whoffman18 at gmail.com>
Subject: The Passing Game: Queering Jewish American Culture

Dear Mendele subscribers,

I hope you'll check out my new book The Passing Game: Queering Jewish 
American Culture which is a comparative study of Yiddish and 
English-language textsvis-a-vis the topic of sexuality.  Here's the 
official blurb:

Tony Kushner's award-winning epic play Angels in America was remarkable 
not only for its sensitive engagement of Jewish- American and gay culture 
but also for
bringing these themes to a mainstream audience. While the play represented 
a watershed in American theater and culture, it belies a hundred years of 
previous attention to queer Jewish identity in twentieth-century American 
literature, drama, and film. In The Passing Game, Warren Hoffman sheds 
light on this long history, taking up both Yiddish and English narratives 
that explore the tensions among Jewish identity, queer sexuality, 
performance, and American citizenship.
With fresh insight Hoffman examines the 1907 Yiddish play God of Vengeance 
by Sholem Asch, the cross-dressing films of Yiddish actress Molly Picon, 
and several short stories by Isaac Bashevis Singer. He also analyzes the 
English-language novels The Rise of David Levinsky (Abraham Cahan), 
Wasteland (Jo Sinclair), and Portnoy's Complaint (Phillip Roth). Hoffman 
highlights the ways in which the characters in these canonical texts 
attempt to "pass" as white, straight, and American in the early and 
mid-twentieth century. This pioneering work is a welcome contribution to 
the study of Jewish American literature and culture.

Warren Hoffman


Now available!
The Passing Game: Queering Jewish American Culture by Warren Hoffman 
Available at amazon.com and all other major bookstores
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