Reading Jews in Drag: (Re)Interpreting Modern and Contemporary Performances of Jewish Gender-Bending

Session Submission Type: Panel Session

Abstract

Scholars of the past several decades have laid foundations for conceptualizing the perennial pairing of Jews, gender-bending, and drag performance in modern history and culture, demonstrating how Jewishness has historically figured as queerness and how queerness has aesthetically resonated with aspects of Jewishness in literature, film, and theater. Simultaneously, queer and trans studies has expanded conceptualizations of how marginalized people evolve across space and time, reshape coercive social messages, and build alternative families and communities. Drawing from these foundations, new scholarship is positioned to ask nuanced, critical questions about the discursive relationships between the queer gender stereotypes imposed on or embraced by modern Jews and the artmaking of actual Jewish performers who challenge gender norms. By what standards, for example, might such performances be read as affirming or denigrating of queer, trans, or Jewish positionalities? How might the tools of queer and trans theory expand our capacity to (re)interpret Jewish performances of gender-bending with sensitivity to queer, trans, and Jewish perspectives of the past, present, and future? And what is the relationship between the practice of drag and queer and trans identifications in the first place? Addressing these questions, this panel contextualizes and proposes critical readings of Jewish artists who employ drag, also considering the publics that engage with those artists’ creative output and legacies.

More specifically, Tova Markenson’s paper investigates the staging of a man in drag as the villain in Avrom Goldfaden’s Yiddish play THE SORCERESS (1887), theorizing how the historical notion of the Jewish witch might facilitate queer Jewish futurity for contemporary performances and readings of the play. Rafael Balling employs queer and trans theory to read the early twentieth-century literary and performative drag of German-Jewish Else Lasker-Schüler as the expression of a utopian wish to expand possibilities of Jewish identity, gender, and desire. Lastly, Golan Moskowitz analyzes how a creator of America’s drag pageant system in the late 1950s, Jack Doroshow, performed “Mother Flawless Sabrina” in ways that reimagined the twentieth-century Jewish American mother stereotype, diffusing and reforming its associations to champion the creativity of queer youth into the twenty-first century.

Sub Unit

• Gender & Sexuality Studies

Chair

• Kerry Wallach, Gettysburg College

Individual Presentations

• Jewish Witches in Performance: Queer Magic and the Yiddish Stage - C. Tova Markenson

• Else Lasker-Schüler’s Performance of Disidentification - Rafael Balling, Stanford University

• Flawless Sabrina and the Queer Art of the Jewish Drag Mother - Golan Y. Moskowitz, Tulane University

Respondent

• Kerry Wallach, Gettysburg College