Queer Theory and the Jewish Question by Daniel Boyarin, Daniel Itzkovitz, Ann Pellegrini

transvestites in the chorus usurp and co-opt both all “male” and all “female” space onstage, leaving “the Jew” to be represented by a gorilla in a tutu.
    As a final footnote to this we might take note of the anti-Semitic vaude- ville act in Joseph Losey’s 1976 film about Nazism and identity in wartime France, Mr. Klein . Modeled on the infamous Nazi propaganda film Jew Süss (1941), the act features a street singer whose jewelry is stolen by a sneaky car- icature of a Jew, while the club audience roars with delight. The singer is played by a “female impersonator, dressed and made up in dark expressionis- tic style.” 36 As with Joel Grey and his fellow vaudevillians in Cabaret , here “fe- male impersonator” itself becomes a privileged category, endorsing a certain kind of decadence and crossover while denying and stigmatizing the Jew as outside that aesthetic economy. Female impersonation, while on the one hand a sign of decadence, was thus also a prerogative of power. Jews could be “fem- inized,” but that was not at all the same as choosing to play a female role.
    It would remain, some years later, for a Borscht Belt comedian like Mil- ton Berle, whose routines so often included a drag act, to cross-dress for suc- cess, recuperating, however unconsciously, this “feminization” of the Jewish man, and deploying gender parody as an empowering strategy. For Berle, a Jewish comic nicknamed “Mr. Television” because of the popularity of his Texaco Star Theater when it appeared on NBC in 1948, was in some ways the premier video entertainer of the post-war era. “He was a man who wasn’t afraid of a dress,” wrote the New York Times in fond retrospect, “and for four years he owned Saturday night.” 37

    Notes
    Marjorie Garber, vested interests: cross-dressing and cultural anxiety
    (New York: Routledge, 1992).
Shaun Considine, Barbra Streisand: The Woman, the Myth, the Music (London: Cen- tury, 1985), 345.
Freud’s note comes in the context of a discussion of the Wolf-Man’s fears of castra- tion and his association of it with “the ritual circumcision of Christ and of the Jews in general.”
    Among the most tormenting, though at the same time the most grotesque, symptoms of (the Wolf-Man’s) later illness was his relation to every tailor from whom he ordered a
    suit of clothes: his deference and timidity in the presence of this high functionary, his at- tempts to get into his good books by giving him extravagant tips, and his despair over the results of the work however it might in fact have turned out. (The German word for “tai- lor” is Schneider , from the verb schneiden , [“to cut”], a compound of which, beschneiden , means “to circumcise.” It will be remembered, too, that it was a tailor who pulled off the wolf ’s tail.) Sigmund Freud, From the History of an Infantile Neurosis (1918), The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud , 24 vols. Ed. and trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth, 1918), 17:86, 87n.
James Brady, “In Step with: Amy Irving.” Parade Magazine , October 30, 1988.
Rebecca Bell-Metereau, Hollywood Androgyny (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 231. See also Jack Kroll, “Barbra, the Yeshiva Boy,” Newsweek , November 28, 1983, 109; David Denby, “Educating Barbra,” New York , November 28, 1983, 111; Pauline Kael, “The Perfectionalist,” New Yorker , November 28, 1983: 176.
Johnny Carson, Tonight Show , February 16, 1984. Considine, Barbra Streisand , 356–58.
Sigmund Freud, “Revision of the Theory of Dreams,” in New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-analysis (1933), SE 22:24.
Sigmund Freud, “Medusa’s Head” (1922), SE 18: 273.
New York Times , January 29, 1984.
Isaac Bashevis Singer, “Yentl the Yeshiva Boy,” trans. Marion Magid and Elizabeth Pollet, Short Friday and Other Stories (New York: Fawcett Crest, 1978), 160.
This blessing, from the Mishna Menachot 43B, is one of three ancient prayers. The