14 - The body and sexuality in American Jewish culture

Summary

Over the past several decades, historians have come to recognize the body as a central site for defining and contesting identity. At the end of the nineteenth century, modern nationalism sought to mobilize the body - most typically the male body - to serve the nation, as soldier, worker, or citizen. The classical ideal of a strong, healthy body promoted movements of physical fitness, while the modern nation’s need for population fostered efforts at sexual eugenics. Jewish nationalism, a product of the same trends, took up this cult of the body with such expressions as Max Nordau’s “muscle Judaism” as well as projects to cure the alleged sexual degeneration of the Jewish people. However, Zionism was by no means unique in this attempt to “modernize” the Jewish body. American Jewish culture, too, following, and, in some cases, leading trends elsewhere in the Jewish world, fostered new images of the body. Whether in the prominence of certain Jews in sports such as boxing and baseball or in athletic institutions such as the Young Men’s Hebrew Association, Jews in America refashioned their bodies as part of the overall struggle for integration in their new homeland. At the same time, though, persistent stereotypes of physical weakness and imperfection, as well as sexual neurosis, betrayed Jewish anxieties about the limits of assimilation for both men and women. The dialectic between contradictory perceptions of the body and sexuality and tensions between the genders around both of these issues remain, to this day, ongoing preoccupations of American Jewish culture.