Jewish Gender Performance and Drag Working Group

Golan Moskowitz 

Facing […] conceptual uncertainty around gender and its meanings in contemporary representations, I believe we can learn something from Jewish history. Jewish tradition allows for contexts in which intentional unknowability might serve as a marker of humane intelligence or even of divine will, rather than a question to be answered or a problem to be solved. […] I read the gender-expansive work of Jewish performance artists like Claude Cahun (1894-1954) and Sasha Velour (b. 1987) as intentionally employing abject indeterminacy and its various meanings, sometimes in direct dialogue with Jewish histories of resisting threats posed externally by hegemonic social law…

Read more of Golan Moskowitz’s thoughts on the functions and effects of embodied indeterminacies within Jewish creative representations.

Jonathan Branfman

Our group helped me consider an ongoing question in my own scholarship: how well can current theories of race, Jewishness, gender, and sexuality address the experiences of North American Jews of color? Likewise, how well can these theories analyze camp and drag performances (or any performances) by North American Jews of color?

Read more of Jonathan Branfman’s reflections on how reading queer-of-color critique in relation to works of Jewish cultural studies can help us to understand Black Jewish “camp” and other creative performances by Jews of Color.

Kathleen B. Casey

What has emerged quite clearly from all these discussions is that there is no (and has likely never been) a stable meaning of the term “drag”…drag has functioned as [in Esther Newton’s words] “a strategy for a situation,” a means through which individuals and communities have negotiated private and public space. […] Analyzing drag on its own terms necessitates considering the multiple nuances of drag on the stage, the television, the home, the criminal justice system, the theater, the night club, and the street. 

Read Kathleen Casey’s exploration of the term “drag” and its’ utility in and outside of the field of gender studies.

Allyson Gonzales

Although recent works have fruitfully explored various literary and sociological aspects of modern Sephardi citizenship in Spain, I wanted to probe at some of its novel aspects […] It was precisely the performative modalities, like disidentification or passing, that [José Esteban] Muñoz marks as potential strategies of [queer] survival (Muñoz 1997). Or, to reframe this concept in the context of modern conversos: One can only ask what lives and selves might be erased in the process of self-articulation as one adjusts to unstable appetites in a modern state—even as the cultural and political tides continue, even now, to shift. 

Read more of Allyson Gonzales’ reflection on how the Jewish Gender Performance and Drag working group helped her reconsider the performative and gendered experiences of conversos in relation to questions of citizenship. 

Roberta Mock

[Bryan] Roby observed that both [Blackness and Jewishness] might be understood as “fugitive states” that manifest in the “refusal to be identified with one territory”. This chimes loudly with [Danielle] Abrams’ performance of Black Jewishness via what we might classify as drag. […] Abrams [a mixed race African American and Jewish performance artist…] dunks her head in a 25 gallon vat of borscht, progressively dying her face a darker shade of crimson. For Abrams, it was a multivalent act which could be read as either embarrassment for a history of Jewish black face entertainers, or else “as a kind of bloodletting or cleansing — a mikvah. My intention was to review and resignify the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century blackface mask — one that paradoxically functioned as a Jewish portal to assimilation and whiteness.”

Read Roberta Mock’s reflection on the work of performance artist Danielle Abrams in relation to this working group’s focus on multifaceted, creative embodiments. 

Bryan K. Roby

I presented [on] Yemenite-origin Israeli Jewish artist Yossi Zabari […,] situating Zabari’s work within a global queer of color critique. [His poem] “I Always Wanted to be Ashkenazi” […] shows the practices and body politics of Israeli normativity that centers the national body as powerful, white, male, Jewish and Western European. Zabari’s poem has a similar framing to Oscar Brown Jr’s Def Jam recital of “I Apologize” which provides a lengthy satirical apology to white America for his Blackness and being that which is predicated upon white prejudice and stereotypes. Zabari has a Jewish take on the theme, framing the poem as a confession (viddui) of repentance and apology for being Black…

Read more of Bryan Roby’s thoughts on the ways that queer of color critiques deepen understandings of Jewish Afro-Asian and Mizrahi Israeli culture.