Redressing Power Through Hasidic Drag: Julie Weitz in My Golem as the Great Dominatrix

Abstract

ABSTRACT:This essay analyzes the video dance work of contemporary Jewish performance artist Julie Weitz through analysis of her seven-minute short The Great Dominatrix (2018). Inspired by Charlie Chaplin's critique of fascism in The Dictator (1940), Weitz mocks modern-day political power in Hassidic drag with Chaplin-esque physicality and layered cultural reference. Curls unfurl from under the fur of a traditional man's hat as golem enters in white tights and leotard, wrapped unorthodoxly in religious tefillin. She mounts a plastic inflatable globe as quick cuts speed through the myriad ways she sexualizes the prop. In one sequence, the artist gesticulates her white-caked face and body with exaggerated expressions of surprise, disgust, and desire while watching iPhone clips of Trump and Chaplin's Hitler playing with his own oversize globe. Satirizing today's rulers and their greed for world domination while libidinizing the sci-fi figure of Jewish folklore, Weitz embodies an ethnogender drag she describes as curiously empowering, if often misunderstood. Prioritizing these multiple mis/identifications as contestatory performance plays in porcelain slip, I argue that the artist deploys competing tropes to dethrone dictatorship while exaggerating antisemitic extremes to sculpt the Modern Jewess in bodily negotiation of (her own) power.