Davison, N., Jewishness and Masculinity from the Modern to the Postmodern: [Review]

Neil Davison is not the first or last to foray into the field of Jewish masculinity. He follows a long list of scholars from George Mosse and Sander Gilman to Emmanuel Levinas and the Boyarin brothers, whose various opinions and approaches are presented in the introduction to his ambitious and erudite study, Jewishness and Masculinity from the Modern to the Postmodern. Notably, Todd Pressner’s 2007 study Muscular Judaism: The Jewish Body and the Politics of Regeneration probed the role of the “Muscle Jew” in Zionist history, while Michal Dekel, in The Universal Jew: Masculinity, Modernity and the Zionist Moment (2011), fired a militant feminist riposte at a patriarchal Zionist reading of history and literature. Brother Keepers: New Perspectives on Jewish Masculinity (edited by Harry Brod and Rabbi Shawn Israel Zevit, 2010), a sequel to Brod’s edited collection A Mensch among Men (2008), gives a broader view of contemporary American Jewish “men’s studies,” based largely on personal confessions and creative writing, although two chapters (by Israel Bartal and Michael Gluzman) provide a historical account of Jewish masculinity at critical junctures in Jewish history. Jewish masculinities do have a history, one that cannot be understood without examining the nuanced negotiation of Jewish and German identities in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and, in particular, hermaphroditism and other gender ambiguity, a story explored in Jewish Masculinities: German Jews, Gender, and History (edited by Benjamin Maria Baader, Sharon Gillerman, and Paul Lerner, 2012).