Research Catalog

Title

Unheroic conduct : the rise of heterosexuality and the invention of the Jewish man / Daniel Boyarin.

Author

Boyarin, Daniel.

Publication

Berkeley : University of California Press, [1997], ©1997.

Items in the Library & Off-site

Details

Description

xxiv, 393 pages : illustrations; 24 cm.

Summary

• The Western notion of the aggressive, sexually dominant male and the passive female, as Daniel Boyarin makes clear, is not universal. Analyzing ancient and modern texts, he recovers the studious and gentle rabbi as the male ideal and the prime object of the 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 finds the origins of the rabbinic model of masculinity in the Talmud.
• The book provides an unrelenting critique of the oppression of women in rabbinic society, while also arguing that later European bourgeois society disempowered women even further. Boyarin also analyzes the self-transformation of three iconic Viennese modern Jews: Sigmund Freud, Theodor Herzl, and Bertha Pappenheim (Anna O.). 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.

Series Statement

Contraversions ; 8

Uniform Title

Contraversions ; 8.

Subjects

• Judaism and psychoanalysis
• Theological anthropology > Judaism
• Heterosexuality
• Sex > Religious aspects > Judaism

Bibliography (note)

• Includes bibliographical references (p. 361-385) and index.

Contents

Prologue: Justify My Love -- Pt. 1. Men Who Roam with the Sheep: Diaspora and the Image of the Jewish Man. 1. Goyim Naches; Or, the Mentsh and the Jewish Critique of Romance. 2. Jewish Masochism: On Penises and Politics, Power and Pain. 3. Rabbis and Their Pals: Rabbinic Homosociality and the Lives of Women. 4. Femminization and Its Discontents: Torah Study as a System for the Domination of Women -- Pt. 2. The Rise of Heterosexuality and The Invention of the Modern Jew. 5. Freud's Baby, Fliess's Maybe; Or, Male Hysteria, Homophobia, and the Invention of the Jewish Man. 6. "You May Not Tell the Boys": The Diaspora Politics of a Bitextual Jew. 7. The Colonial Drag: Zionism, Gender, and Mimicry. 8. Retelling the Story of O.; Or, Bertha Pappenheim, My Hero.

ISBN

0520200330

LCCN

96046047

OCLC

• 35638099
• ocm35638099

Owning Institutions

Columbia University Libraries