Queer Jewish lives on screen

Abstract

ABSTRACT This piece explores the clashing preconceptions and elective affinities regarding queerness and Jewishness in the filmic representation of intersectional queer and Jewish sensibilities from the 1980s to the present, a period in which postmodern paradigms came to the fore in popular culture, academic theory and alternative community politics. As I argue, these films convey a tug and pull between religious tradition and cultural innovation; between the old essentialisms and new fluidities associated with ethnicized, gendered and sexualized constellations and between Israel and the Diaspora, with varying relevance to cosmopolitanist and nationalistic discourses.