Queer Theory and the Jewish Question (29 page)

1. 1. Hulbert and Bowman,
      Abstract of the Preliminary Neuro-Psychiatric Examination
      , pp. 12, 16, 50–51, 54; and Hulbert,
      The Franks Case
      , p. 20.
      

   2. “The Loeb-Leopold Case: Psychiatric Report for the Defense,”
      Journal of the Amer- ican Institute of Criminal Law and Criminology
      , vol. 15, no. 3 (November 1924), p. 378.
      

   3. Leopold-Loeb Trial Transcript
      , box 19, vol. 3, pp. 1450–51. 88. Ibid., pp. 1448, 1551–61.
      

1. Genevieve Forbes, “Accused Boys ‘Crime Twins,’ Court Hears,”
   Chicago Sunday Tribune
   , 10 August 1924, part 1, p. 1.
   

2. Darrow,
   The Plea of Clarence Darrow,
   p. 95.
   

3. Sellers,
   The Loeb-Leopold Case with Excerpts
   , pp. 257, 319. In a strange twist of fate the
   New York Times
   reported that Judge Caverly himself suffered a “nervous breakdown im- mediately following the close of the trial.” See “Franks Case Judge Found in Hospital,”
   New York Times
   , 2 October 1924, p. 26. Also see “Caverly Ill in Hospital from Strain,”
   Chicago Daily Tribune
   , 1 October 1924, p. 1; and “Caverly Better; Will Rest for Another Week,”
   Chicago Daily Tribune
   , 2 October 1924, p. 9. Judge Caverly’s landmark ruling laid the groundwork for the official classification of homosexuality as a mental illness by the Amer- ican Psychiatric Association in the early 1950s, an epoch rife with nefarious, government- sanctioned campaigns to eliminate the putative threat of both homosexuals and commu- nists (read: Jews). See Ronald Bayer,
   Homosexuality and American Psychiatry: The Politics of Diagnosis
   (New York: Basic, 1981); and Jonathan Katz,
   Gay American History: Lesbians and Gay Men in the U.S.A.
   (New York: Crowell, 1976), pp. 91–95, 416–19.
   

4. Daniel Boyarin,
   Unheroic Conduct: The Rise of Heterosexuality and the Invention of the Jewish Man
   (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), p. 209. At his 1958 parole hearing, during which Carl Sandburg testified on his behalf, Leopold went to great lengths to convince his interlocutors that he had been born again as a “good” Jew: “I am an old man, a broken man, who humbly pleads for your compassion. Christianity, it always seemed to me, should be called the religion of the second chance. It teaches repentance,
   

atonement and forgiveness. I hope and pray you will find it in your hearts to give me that second chance. . . . I am a practicing, believing Jew. . . . I believe in the existence of one God, the Creator of the World. I believe He has given us the laws and commandments through Moses on Mount Sinai. I believe the essential part of the moral law is summed up in the Ten Commandments. I believe in the tenets and laws of my religion, faith, Judaism. I studied it in this prison, learned Hebrew.” See Elmer Gertz,
A Handful of Clients
(Chica- go: Follet, 1965), pp. 101–3. Leopold was released from prison on parole in March 1958 and moved to Puerto Rico, where he married a woman in 1961. He died there ten years later. Loeb met his end years earlier, on January 18, 1936, when his cellmate slashed him fifty-eight times with a straight razor in the prison shower. Claiming Loeb had made ho- mosexual advances, the perpetrator was tried but eventually acquitted.

Viva la Diva Citizenship: Post-Zionism and Gay Rights

ALISA SOLOMON

It was a down-to-the-wire, nail-biting finish for Israeli pop star Dana Inter- national as the last votes in the 1998 Eurovision song contest were tallied in Birmingham, England. But by the time Macedonia, the last country voting on the World Cup of pop tunes, had weighed in, it was certain that Dana In- ternational had edged out Malta, the nearest contender. She swept onto the stage for a victory bow, wearing a feather-bedecked Gaultier gown and wav- ing a large Israeli flag. The blue Star of David flapped triumphantly against a wash of magenta disco light as Dana curtsied and called out, “Next Year in Jerusalem,” appropriating an ancient prayer to refer to the Eurovision tradi- tion that the winner’s country hosts the contest the following year.
1

The timing back home couldn’t have been better. Israel was in the midst of celebrating its fiftieth anniversary as a state—indeed, Dana told one inter- viewer that her prize was a birthday gift to the nation
2
—and the country was pitched in bitter internal battle over national definition. Never mind the country’s jubilee slogan, “Together in Pride, Together in Hope.” As the Israeli historian and journalist Tom Segev said, “It’s four words long [in Hebrew] but half of them are wrong: We’re not together.”
3
Dana International’s victory came as a particularly vivid flashpoint, illuminating the increasing polariza- tion between theocratic and secular ideals of the state and marking a progres- sive victory in one skirmish of the escalating Israeli culture war.

Dana, after all, is a transsexual with abiding ties to Israel’s gay commu- nity. She started her career as a drag queen performing in the gay bars of Tel Aviv when she was still Yaron Cohen (born in 1969 to working-class immi- grant parents from Yemen). Her fitness to represent the country, even in a kitsch song contest, had been hotly debated for months in the pages of the Israeli press, and even on the floor of the Knesset. (The Israeli Defense Forces had already rejected her as unfit to represent the country through the

typically obligatory military service.) One right-wing religious party tried to win a court injunction to prevent her from participating in the contest, going so far as to threaten to bring down the government if she were al- lowed to sing for Israel.

The objection was not based on the ultra-Orthodox prohibitions against women singing in public; rabbis had determined that because Dana Interna- tional had been born male she was permitted to sing in front of men, and could even be counted in a minyan, the quorum of 10 men required for Jew- ish prayer. Rather, it was her transsexuality itself and her association with ho- mosexuality that riled the rabbis. “I won for Israel and for all the world’s gays,”
4
Dana told the press in Birmingham right after her victory. Israel’s deputy health minister, Rabbi Shlomo Benizri, of the far-right Shas party was not impressed. “Dana is an aberration,” he said. “Even in Sodom there was nothing like it.”
5

The Eurovision fi had taken place only days after Israel’s ultra-Orthodox political parties shut down a performance of the Batsheva Dance Company at the offi state anniversary celebrations in Jerusalem, objecting to a sequence in which male dancers stripped to their underwear. So when tens of thousands of Israelis poured into Rabin Square in Tel Aviv to celebrate Dana’s triumph, waving Israeli and rainbow fl alike, they were manifesting something more than pride in the popularity of the winning song, “Viva to the Diva.”
6
They were reveling in an almost literal instance of what Lauren Berlant calls “Diva Citizenship”:

Diva Citizenship occurs when a person stages a dramatic coup in a pub- lic sphere in which she does not have privilege. Flashing up and startling the public, she puts the dominant story into suspended animation; as though recording an estranging voice-over to a film we have all already seen, she re-narrates the dominant history as one that the abjected peo- ple have once lived sotto voce, but no more; and she challenges her au- dience to identify with the enormity of the suffering she has narrated and the courage she has had to produce, calling on people to change the social and institutional practices of citizenship to which they currently consent.
7

To be sure, Dana does not renarrate Israel’s history in the voice of those historically most abjected by the dominant story of Zionism. As she has noted herself, “It’s easier to be a transsexual in Israel than an Arab.”
8
Nonetheless, she does put the dominant story in suspended animation by bringing to the surface, and calling into question, the prime national ideals of heterosexual

masculinity. She challenges the dominant old story of Zionism as the making of a new Jewish man by proposing that Israel’s
new
new Jewish man may be a woman.

Much has been written in recent years about the masculinizing and het- erosexualizing project of Herzlian Zionism particularly for the European Jew- ish male.
9
The Jewish movement for expressing territorial nationalism was, according to this compelling view, a means of remaking the image of the pasty, degenerate, sissy—that is, queer—
Juden
of Europe as the powerful, dominant—that is, sexually normative—
Muskeljuden
of their own romantic homeland. As Daniel Boyarin has succinctly put it, Zionism can be construed as a male “return to Phallustine, not to Palestine.”
10

But if European Jews went to Palestine to become “normalized” as men, Dana International reversed the process. She went from Israel to Europe to become a woman (her 1993 genital surgery, described repeatedly and in de- tail in the Israeli press after the Eurovision contest, took place in Britain) and then she sashayed her queer femininity across the Eurovision stage. (Several European journalists could not resist the old imagery and made some kind of wisecrack about Yaron Cohen taking his circumcision a little too far.) Dana’s symbolic rejection of the fundaments of Zionism goes even further. She turned in a priestly, Israeli name for the moniker of a rootless cosmopolitan. What kind of Zionist calls herself International—and sings in Arabic as well as in Hebrew (and in French and English, as well)? “We don’t need borders,” Dana proclaimed exultantly the day after her Eurovision victory, in the ulti- mate rebuke to the ideal of the nation-state.
11

Though Dana demurs in interviews when questions about the Israeli- Palestinian peace process come up, claiming that she is not at all political, her act of Diva Citizenship has profoundly radical potential because it challenges the very core of Zionism at a moment when Israel is anxiously renegotiating its national self-image. Her emergence as a national emblem—of democracy or of decadence, depending on one’s point of view—throws light upon the way in which Zionism redeploys queerness as a trope precisely at a moment when the meaning of Zionism is being vigorously contested. It illuminates the way Israel’s gay movement functions within the paradigm of old Herzlian Zionism and, at the same time, both shapes and reflects a post-Zionist ideol- ogy. Finally, because acts of Diva Citizenship tend to “emerge in moments of such extraordinary political paralysis that acts of language [or song] can feel like explosives that shake the ground of collective existence,”
12
the commo- tion over Dana International helps open public space for the deeper critiques of Jewish collective existence offered by the left of Israel’s peace camp, a sig- nificant proportion of which is lesbian.

Post-Zionism’s Opening to Gay Rights

Two important developments over the last decade have made Dana’s inter- vention possible by themselves challenging Zionism’s early invocation of queerness as a negative term against which to define the national ethos. First, actually existing homosexuals offer a de facto rejection of Zionism’s hetero- sexualizing program. As they have come out of the closet in increasing num- bers in recent years and organized themselves into a civil rights movement, their very visibility has, of course, defied heterosexist presumptions. (Israel held its first gay pride parade in June 1998, drawing some three thousand marchers, eight Knesset members among them. Participants were quoted in press reports on the parade as crediting Dana International with motivating the high turnout.)
13
Along with the work of sympathetic straight legislators, Israel’s central gay rights group, the Society for the Protection of Personal Rights (formed in 1975) has pressed for legal recognition that gays have yet to win in much of the United States. Sodomy was decriminalized in 1988 when Shulamit Aloni quietly pushed repeal of the antigay law through the Knesset. Then, when the Labor party returned to power in 1992, a series of pro-gay initiatives rushed through the liberal opening. Yael Dayan spearhead- ed the addition of the words
sexual orientation
to workplace antidiscrimina- tion laws in 1992, and then chaired the Knesset’s first subcommittee on gay and lesbian affairs. In 1993, after the sensational testimony of a prominent scientist who had been hounded out of a top-secret army post because he was gay, the military asserted that gay men and lesbians would be recruited and promoted without regard to their sexual orientation. And a year later the Supreme Court ruled that El Al had to grant the same privileges to its em- ployees’ same-sex domestic partners that it did to their lawful spouses. Tel Aviv University quickly followed suit. Even the public school system institut- ed guidelines for counseling gay students. Soon a sitcom on the state TV channel sported a lovable, wise-cracking, out gay character, and a weekly pro- gram of political satire featuring a quartet of drag queens is wildly popular. At this writing, a lesbian couple is suing for the right to adopt each other’s chil- dren. An out lesbian was elected to Tel Aviv’s city council in October 1998.

The second development that has altered the value of queerness for Zion- ism has been the increasing political empowerment of Israel’s Orthodox right wing.
14
Partially in response to the visibility and achievements of the gay rights movement, the Orthodox right often rails against gays and lesbians, much like their fundamentalist Christian counterparts in the United States. In their campaign against Yitzhak Rabin’s pursuit of the Oslo peace accords in 1993, the rabbis of the right argued that he was unfit for office because,

among other things, he permitted the establishment of a subcommittee on gay rights in the Knesset and even authorized a permit allowing a Palestinian man from the Gaza Strip to remain overnight in Israel—so that he could stay with his Jewish-Israeli male lover.