[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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