Warren Hoffman, The Passing Game: Queering Jewish American Culture—Judaic Traditions in Literature, Music, and Art

Abstract

In the American Jewish world, the presence of lesbians and gay men no longer seems particularly worthy of comment. This segment of the larger Jewish community began to create its own organizations, including synagogues, as early as the 1970s, consolidating itself throughout the 1980s and passing one milestone of communal acceptance after another as the twentieth century drew to a close. (The Jewish Mosaic website, www.JewishMosaic.org, offers a comprehensive and accessible overview of lesbian and gay inclusion in American Jewish life.) Which is not to say, of course, that the battle for acceptance is complete; it continues in many ways, family by family and congregation by congregation. Its outcome, however, seems like a foregone conclusion, with the Jewish community among the most accepting in American life. How did such a vast change take place, at what seems (relatively speaking) like lightening speed? A series of fascinating and suggestive clues is presented in The Passing Game, Warren Hoffman’s new study of precursors and harbingers of this massive cultural shift in Jewish life. As he clarifies early on, Hoffman is not seeking to document the histories of gay and lesbian Jews. His optic is both more indirect and more encompassing: He is searching for traces of a queer sensibility in American Jewish culture itself, whether explicit, implicit, or heatedly—excessively?—denied. A scholar of literature and the theater, Hoffman looks at six key texts (and performers) of what he terms “the Jewish American cultural canon” (p. 4), devoting a chapter to each. As he notes in the book’s introduction, he is not searching for rarities of cultural production, but for works that attracted significant critical attention when they appeared, and (in some cases) are still discussed in college courses. In effect, he is drawing our attention to aspects of Jewish culture that have been hidden in plain sight. The works he has chosen include novels, plays, short stories and films, spanning the period from the earliest years of the twentieth century—midway through the