Beyond Flesh: Queer Masculinities and Nationalism in Israeli Cinema (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Beyond Flesh: Queer Masculinities and Nationalism in Israeli Cinema David Moscowitz Beyond Flesh: Queer Masculinities and Nationalism in Israeli Cinema, by Raz Yosef. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2004. 203 pp. $21.95. The ability to see beyond flesh requires an encompassing critical perspective, one that necessitates the careful, interdisciplinary articulation of ideas related to subaltern precepts of race, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, whiteness, religion, and of course, nationalism. These precepts are fundamental to the bricolage of Jewish identity, which has inspired centuries of cultural thought from thinkers such as Jean-François Lyotard offering blank(et) affirmations about the special position reserved for Jews within this context. Are Jews uniquely positioned to inform debates that arise from these arguments? If only. Nevertheless, the question becomes more interesting and complex when applied to the internal identity politics of Israeli Jews. Rather than analyzing Jewish identity in relation to the reliable contexts of diapora, suffering, and wandering, Raz Yosef offers to us an application of these debates within the victorious, vigilant, heteronormative state of Israel. The result is nothing but enriching and rewarding. Although he doesn't reflect on his choice specifically, Yosef's use of flesh in the book's title is illustrative of his analysis. This is a study that recognizes the role of flesh (its celebration of shiny, sweaty strength, its simultaneous fear of feminized exposure, its homophobic and constant threat of puncture) vis-à-vis debates revolving around Israel's voiceless citizens. Cinematic metaphor, depiction, and reality intersect often in this regard. Wouldn't frontier Jews escaping persecution and forming a new state be especially sensitive to questions of legitimacy and acceptance? Yosef methodically explores and evaluates how this is not so by progressing his analysis from the master narrative of founding Zionists to its impact on representations of the military and Mizrahim, Arabs, and the Aguda. I was particularly impressed in this regard. Yosef's arrangement holds together a nuanced argument that is complete and conclusive (although most chapters end abruptly with little resolution). A bevy of [End Page 144] Israeli films, predominantly from the 1970s to the present, provide illustrative support for how different Israeli identities are depicted and contextualized. The result invokes theories relying on psychoanalysis, masculinity, Zionism, and Jewish identity to reveal how Israeli cinema offers depictions of masculine flesh within a strongly nationalistic context. In particular, Yosef offers provocative ideas concerning cinematic masochism and the (pardon the pun) embedded nature of anal penetration. This counterweight to Freud's phallocentrism offers important assertions regarding subaltern depictions of queerness and Mizrahi identity within the heteronormative, Eurocentric confines that mark Israeli Zionist culture. In a sense, Yosef's concern for mainstream cinema constitutes an effective extension and application of Daniel Boyarin's 1997 study devoted to the evolution of gendered Jewish identity from a rebellion of heteronormativity to its instantiation of it. While Boyarin's historical treatise sought to examine Jews living and wandering within non-Jewish contexts, Yosef's contemporary study turns the tables to elaborate the position of Ashkenazi Jews holding power over other Jews and non-Jews. The result offers new perspectives regarding our understanding of "race," the liminality of queer theory and Jewish identity, and perhaps most importantly, larger questions involving the continual decline of nationalism in the new-century. In this last regard, I would have preferred more attention to how Yosef's analysis challenges contemporary arguments involving nationalism and globalism. How does this work's understanding of Israeli nationalism, in other words, articulate with those broader debates that are currently in vogue? David Morley and Kevin Robins note that "communications and transport networks and . . . the symbolic boundaries of language and culture" alter our traditional understanding of a "nation's 'natural limits.'" Along these lines, the reader is left to determine how this study impacts our understanding of Israel's "natural" and national limits. I also wonder if Yosef's preoccupation with identifying mainstream and benchmark cinema deprives his reader of the challenges posed by those more esoteric, alternative reactions to it. In his concluding chapter, Yosef reminds us of the hopeful words of Kobena Mercer and Isaac Julien: "Politics is about making connections." As a result, I wonder...