The Jewish Queer Continuum in Yeshiva Narratives

Abstract

The yeshiva narratives in two Jewish gay male novels produced at the turn of the new millennium—The Same Embrace (1998) by US author Michael Lowenthal and Mourning and Celebration (2009) by Canadian writer K. David Brody—imagine Jewish intellectual life as a new site of identification for queer Jews. In these works of fiction, the image of the yeshiva signifies an affective community that responds to the limitations of mainstream gay and Jewish cultures. This type of representation differs from dominant, normative constructions of Jewishness and queerness, from heteronormative and homonormative models of desire. The hevruta, as a study partnership and as a form of erotic, sexual, and romantic intimacy, performs the function of an alternative, nonheteronormative Jewish family. It is organized around a "text" model of queer desire, where the Torah mediates the homoerotic connections of male students or scholars to one another, forming an "erotic triangle" between the text and the study partners. This construction resists dominant binary discourses by arranging the sexual and the affective, the erotic and the religious as a Jewish queer continuum.