A01=Daniel Boyarin
aggression
anti homophobia
Author_Daniel Boyarin
bertha pappenheim
Category=JBCC9
Category=JBSF
Category=JBSR
Category=JHM
contraversions citrical studies in jewish literature culture and society
diaspora
eq_bestseller
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
feminized jew
gender norms
gender roles
gender studies
germany
jewish culture
jewish feminism
jewish identity
jewish masculinity
manhood
masculinity
militant feminism
oppression
orthodox jewish society
patriarchal model
patriarchy
psychoanalysis
rabbinic model
rabbis
sexuality
sigmund freud
talmud
theodor herzl
traditional jewish society
viennese modern jews
zionism
Product details
- ISBN 9780520210509
- Weight: 590g
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 13 Jun 1997
- Publisher: University of California Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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In a book that will both enlighten and provoke, Daniel Boyarin offers an alternative to the prevailing Euro-American warrior/patriarch model of masculinity and recovers the Jewish ideal of the gentle, receptive male. The Western notion of the aggressive, sexually dominant male and the passive female reaches back through Freud to Roman times, but as Boyarin makes clear, such gender roles are not universal. Analyzing ancient and modern texts, he reveals early rabbis - studious, family-oriented - as exemplars of manhood and the prime objects of female desire in traditional Jewish society. Challenging those who view the 'feminized Jew' as a pathological product of the Diaspora or a figment of anti-Semitic imagination, Boyarin argues that the Diaspora produced valuable alternatives to the dominant cultures' overriding gender norms. He finds the origins of the rabbinic model of masculinity in the Talmud, and though unrelentingly critical of rabbinic society's oppressive aspects, he shows how it could provide greater happiness for women than the passive gentility required by bourgeois European standards.
Boyarin also analyzes the self-transformation of three iconic Viennese modern Jews: Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalysis; Theodor Herzl, the founder of Zionism; and Bertha Pappenheim (Anna O.), the first psychoanalytic patient and founder of Jewish feminism in Germany. Pappenheim is Boyarin's hero: it is she who provides him with a model for a militant feminist, anti-homophobic transformation of Orthodox Jewish society today. Like his groundbreaking "Carnal Israel", this book is talmudic scholarship in a whole new light, with a vitality that will command attention from readers in feminist studies, history of sexuality, Jewish culture, and the history of psychoanalysis.
Daniel Boyarin is Taubman Professor of Talmudic Culture at the University of California, Berkeley, and author of Carnal Israel: Reading Sex in Talmudic Culture (California, 1993) and A Radical Jew: Paul and the Politics of Identity (California, 1994). Chapter 5 of Unheroic Conduct, "Freud's Baby, Fliess's Maybe; Or, Male Hysteria, Homophobia, and the Invention of the Jewish Man," received the Crompton-Noll Award of the Modern Language Association Gay and Lesbian Caucus.
