Unheroic Conduct: The Rise of Heterosexuality and the Invention of the Jewish Man (Contraversions - Critical Studies in Jewish Literature, Culture and Society , No 8)

Rating:
Summary: Boyarin is wild--Salkin goes one step further
Review: This is one of the best Jewish books that I have read recently. The best thing about Boyarin is that he has this ability to really synthesize the Jewish male ethos. I don't agree with his anti-Zionism, though...After reading this I read Rabbi Jeff Salkin's new book Searching for My Brothers: Jewish Men in a Gentile World. Salkin goes further than Boyarin, and even quotes him. Salkin believes that Zionism is Jewish macho, and he seems to approve. You will love Salkin's book if you love Boyarin's.

Rating:
Summary: Impressive in its ambitions, not so in its accomplishments
Review: This was book I really wanted to like because Daniel Boyarin has such a great and fascinating task at hand--a re-thinking of the common universalizing assignments of the binarisms of active/passive, strong/weak to the male/female dyad in Jewish culture. His archive from Talmudic and other Jewish historical documents is terrific and proves his thesis amazingly well, but in other places his argument wildly goes awry. The introduction is a bizarre rounding-the-bases of feminist and queer scholarship, critiquing and praising other scholars whose conclusions seem to have nothing to do with his own, and his embracement of psychoanalysis seems especially wrong-headed since it always counteracts what he discovers in the historical record (he winds up constantly having to make what could have been very straightforward arguments in extremely circuitous ways so as to jibe with the current work doen among psychoanalytic literary and cultural critics). And his chapter on Freud and Fliess decends into very weak and flimsy psychobiographical speculative interpretation that isn't always borne out by the record. I felt this was an instance where a scholar's own ideas and findings were greatloy weakened by his constant need to defer to other scholars' work rather than bolstered by it--what is truly fascinating in Boyarin's work becomes buried under others' work.