Angels, Monsters, and Jews: Intersections of Queer and Jewish Identity in Kushner'sAngels in America

Abstract

The discursive ligature between the Jew and the sexually transgressive is crucially revised in Tony Kushner'sAngels in America.Kushner creates a powerful series of metonymies between the queer and the Jew that suggest their affinities but refuse to reify a unitary queer-Jewish identity. The center of this imaginative project is Kushner's Roy Cohn, who both illustrates and transforms the image of the queer Jewish power broker that circulated in American anti-Semitic discourses of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. But Cohn's fate in the play suggests that the author's attitude toward Jewishness is conflicted, and the play's turn to Christian imagery confirms the suggestion. To fulfill laudatory political ends, Kushner deploys a typological vision common in American imaginative production and fulfills a pattern of assimilation equally common in American Jewish experience. I conclude by turning to Walter Benjamin, one of Kushner's sources, for a different model of identity formation that might avoid this fate.