Re-inventing
the Jewish Man
Thursday 4 March 2004 8.30pm
Daniel Boyarin, Michael Gluzman, Chair: Ada Rapoport-Albert
In his provocative Unheroic
Conduct: The Rise of Heterosexuality and the Invention
of the Jewish Man (1997), Daniel Boyarin argues
that gender roles are not universal and traces the early Jewish ideal of the
gentle, receptive male as the object of female desire in Diaspora society.
Michael Gluzman, in his forthcoming The Zionist
Body, focuses on Zionism’s promise of an erotic revolution and the creation
of a more vigorous and muscular type of man as symbol of the new ‘normal’
society.
In this session, Daniel Boyarin
and Michael Gluzman, two of the world’s leading
writers on Judaism and sexuality, explored with Ada Rapoport-Albert, the changing nature of the Jewish male
over the centuries, and the impact on women of the new Jewish man.
The audience were indeed taken by this enthralling
session. One member of the audience, an optician, had even, during the course
of the evening, taken a fancy to Professor Boyarin’s
glasses. In what was for Daniel the highlight of his three-day visit to the UK,
this lady asked him if she could borrow his glasses to have them replicated! He
willingly agreed for an undisclosed figure and on the basis that someone led
him back to his hotel.
Daniel Boyarin is
Professor of Talmudic Studies, Near Eastern Studies and Comparative Religion at
the University of
California, Berkeley.
His publications include Carnal Israel: Reading Sex in Talmudic Culture
(1993) and Border Lines: The Partition of
Judaeo-Christianity (2004).
Michael Gluzman is
Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at Tel Aviv University. He
is the author of The Politics of Canonicity (2003).
Ada Rapoport-Albert is Reader in
Jewish History and Head of the Department of Hebrew and Jewish Studies at
University College London. Her forthcoming Female Bodies, Male Souls is published later this year.
