The Passing Game

Warren Hoffman, a current theater grantee for his play The Last with the InterAct Theatre Company, Philadelphia, PA, shares with us a few thoughts on his new publication The Passing Game, available on all major online book stores.

“If asked to name an example of “queer Jewish American culture,” most people, if they think of anything at all, typically say Tony Kushner’s Angels in America. Kushner’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play was indeed a watershed in terms of gay Jewish representation, but contrary to popular belief, it was hardly the first American text to look at the intersections between Jewish and queer identity. Yet, in a post-Stonewall world, it’s texts such as Angels in America, Trembling Before G-d, Kissing Jessica Stein, and Torch Song Trilogy that people often call to mind as a “canon” of queer Jewish texts. What existed before all this?

This is precisely the question that I wanted to answer in my new book that was released last week The Passing Game: Queering Jewish American Culture (Syracuse University Press, 216 pages, $24.95). Looking at both English and Yiddish-language texts from 1907 until just after Stonewall in 1969, my new study demonstrates that queer sexuality played a key role in canonical Jewish American cultural texts and was a topic that intrigued Jews from Yiddish actress Molly Picon to authors Isaac Bashevis Singer and Philip Roth.

Among the texts discussed in The Passing Game are the 1907 Yiddish play God of Vengeance by Sholem Asch, the cross-dressing films of Yiddish actress Molly Picon, and several short stories by Isaac Bashevis Singer, as well as the English-language novels The Rise of David Levinsky (Abraham Cahan), Wasteland (Jo Sinclair), and Portnoy’s Complaint (Philip Roth).

Queer readings of some of the most canonical Jewish American texts may explain some textual conundrums that have plagued scholars and readers for years. For example, Jewish Daily Forward editor Abraham Cahan’s classic English-language novel The Rise of David Levinsky (1917) follows the story of Levinsky, a Jewish immigrant, who becomes a millionaire, but ends up depressed, ostensibly because he is unable to find a suitable woman to marry. The novel, though, is filled with many passages in which Levinsky expresses rather overt affection for his male friends. For me, these plot points are intimately connected, and Cahan’s book becomes not only a critique of capitalism, but also a case about the “unsustainability” of homosexuality as a public “option” in Jewish American life in 1917.

The world of Yiddish theater, meanwhile, had its own fascination with homosexuality. In 1923, the cast of Sholem Asch’s female homoerotic drama God of Vengeance was found guilty of presenting “immoral” drama on the American stage. When the play was first presented in 1907 in New York, it had caused some consternation in the Yiddish community, but newspapers and viewers never discussed its homoerotic issues, arguably in part because the term and concept of “lesbian” did not exist in Yiddish at that particular moment. What was perhaps only “surprising” or mildly shocking for Jewish audiences quickly become a “shanda for the goyim” when produced on the Broadway stage for a culture that seemed to know all-too-well about the “lesbian menace.”

While much has happened in the gay Jewish community very recently, Jewish culture has been engaging with queerness in quite complex ways for at least the past one hundred years. The Passing Game looks to uncover this often neglected, but crucial part of Jewish American history and culture.

The Passing Game is available for sale at all major online bookstores.”

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Warren Hoffman teaches literature at Temple University, where he works primarily on Jewish American literature and musical theater. He is the director of Arts and Culture Programming for the Gershman Y in Philadelphia.