Title: Legacy of Rage: Jewish Masculinity, Violence, and Culture, by Warren Rosenberg
Abstract: Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2001. 312 pp. $34.95. The first and most famous proclamation of a masculinity deficit among males can be dated to Max Nordau's speech at 1898 Zionist Congress in Basel, in which he proclaimed need for a muscular that would rehabilitate image of timid and sickly European Jews of that era. From medieval period on, he declared, ghettoized Jews of Europe had been forced to practice an unnatural mortification of flesh, and result was an entire repertory of daily humiliations that could be remedied only by a physical rehabilitation that would reclaim personalities as well as bodies from their inferior status vis-a-vis other European males. Nordau described in painful detail contemporary image of Jew as physically out of control -- pathetically clumsy, tripping over his own feet, unable to stand up straight, etc. The caricatures of Jewish soldiers as ridiculous scarecrows that appeared in boulevard magazines, he wrote, provided amusement to and Christian antisemites alike. A full century after Nordau's call for a bold look in their eyes, popular and scholarly writing on masculinity is thriving. On popular side, there are books that celebrate culturally anomalous types like sports figures and gangsters. This genre emphasizes cultural pride in male performances while displaying less interest in what might be culturally anomalous about athletes and criminals in first place. Understanding such cultural anomalies requires a familiarity with centuries of social history, so it is hardly surprising that reader-friendly treatments of he-men do not include such historical excursions. These treatments of male heroes rather conform to Nordau's view that male dignity is to be achieved by adopting predominant Western masculine norms -- familiar emphasis on force of character and physical abilities that allow a man to conquer both his women and his enemies. Warren Rosenberg's book is a recent and important addition to a more scholarly literature on Jews and masculinity that dates from publication of Paul Breines' Tough Jews: Political Fantasies and Moral Dilemma of Modern Jewry (1990). Daniel Boyarin's Unheroic Conduct: The Rise of Heterosexuality and Invention of Man (1997) is another example of this subgenre. The distinguishing feature of these books is their combination of cultural history and redemptive ambition, for while essays collected in Sander Gilman's The Jew's Body (1991) present straightforward cultural history concerning racial folklore about Jews, Breines, Boyarin, and Rosenberg apply cultural and literary history to daunting task of persuading their fellow Jews that what Breines calls the historically dominant (if presently eroding) ideal of gentleness is true foundation of a genuinely masculinity. The subgenre to which Legacy of Rage belongs is thus unabashedly confessional in useful ways. The author's formative experiences around masculinity issues serve as points of departure for exploration of male experience in a more general sense. Rosenberg's claim that his experiences participate in a common cultural script for men (p. 15) can be confirmed in most of American literary texts he examines as well as in countless other sources beyond purview of his book that document nature of male experience throughout American twentieth century. The thematic center of Rosenberg's book is what he calls the contemporary male's dilemma. We have absorbed stereotype that we tend to be more verbal and smarter than other men, he writes, but we frantically resist implication that we are therefore somehow less than fully masculine, that we are 'all talk' (p. 1). The male, in short, is caught in the continuing tension in Judaism between passivity and action, acceptance and resistance, earthly physical force and cerebral evasion, Esau and Jacob (p. …
Publication Year: 2005
Publication Date: 2005-01-01
Language: en
Type: article
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Cited By Count: 1
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