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Jewishness and Masculinity from the Modern to the Postmodern (review)

Neil R. Davison. Jewishness and Masculinity from the Modern to the Postmodern. New York: Routledge, 2010. 262 pp. $125.00.In Jewishness and Masculinity from the Modern to the Postmodern, Neil Davison explores how the intersections of race, religion, and Zionist politics affect representations of twentieth-century Jewish masculine selfhood in works by such Jewish and non-Jewish authors as George DuMaurier, Theodor Herzl, Ernest Hemingway, James Joyce, and Philip Roth. Situating his study within the ongoing conversation regarding the figure of "the Jew" in modern culture and literature, Davison aligns himself with Emmanuel Levinas and Zygmunt Bauman, who both acknowledge the significance of race and religion in modern Jewish identity struggles, as well as with Daniel Boyarin, who connects these racial and religious components specifically to formations of gender (10). However, Davison believes that Boyarin's focus on Rabbinic masculinity "only functions well as a sine qua non of male Jewishness unaltered by the effects of modern movements," and argues instead that modern and postmodern representations of manhood are, in fact, greatly influenced by Reform and Zionist revisions of Talmudic codes of Jewish masculinity (14). Drawing in part from George Mosse and Sander Gilman's sociological and race-based studies of gendered Jewishness, Davison interrogates the ubiquitous figure of the "feminized Jew" in a number of primary texts to explore the ways in which constructions of gendered Jewishness are informed not only by racial stereotypes, but by contemporary religious tensions as well.Some of the best support for Davison's thesis can be found in his chapters on Herzl, Joyce, and Roth. Leaning heavily on biographical criticism in his reading of these authors' works, Davison examines the role of race, religion, and politics in each text's representation of Jewish masculinity. In chapter 2, for instance, Davison argues that Herzl's notion of Jewish masculinity is inseparable from his interpretation of Judaic doctrine, and that Herzl's Zionist politics in Der Judenstaat (1896) demonstrate his internalization of the stereotype of the feminized Jew, a stereotype that, in Davison's view, prompted Herzl to call for a more hyper-masculine performance of Jewishness through Zionism. In an impressive display of cross-cultural reading, Davison is also able to draw connections between Herzl's Zionist opus and the figuration of Jewish masculinity in Joyce's Ulysses (1922). Drawing from Joyce's familiarity with both Zionist politics and Judaic doctrine, Davison points to a significant alteration in the representation of the feminized Jew, arguing that Leopold Bloom "represents a semi-queer Jewishness" whereby "femininity as degenerative in a male is transformed into creative energies...that stem in part from Joyce's sense of himself as a semi-queer, modern artist" (21).It is in his chapter on Roth that Davison most clearly and thoroughly engages with the interrelation of race, gender, politics, and religion as they construct the modern Jewish man, here weaving in biographical criticism with more extended textual analysis. Davison explores the ways that Roth confronts post-1967 Zionism in The Counterlife (1986) and Operation Shylock (1993), examining the intersection of gendered Jewishness with the religious and political dimensions of Zionism-what he calls a "Jewish-gender-Zionism complex"-that he believes to be rooted in Goodbye, Columbus (1959) and Portnoy's Complaint (1967) [163]. Treating representations of both the feminized Jew and the hyper-masculine "muscle Jew" in Roth's texts, Davison argues that Roth's later works confront "a polyphony of Jewishness within postmodern/postcolonial identity to discover the performativity of gender and yet the inescapability of both history and Judaic consciousness" (163).One might question Davison's assertion that it is in The Counterlife that "Roth faces for the first time in his career how a Jewish male cannot reconstruct a gendered-self without history" (190). …