EBOOK
The Marriage Plot
Or, How Jews Fell in Love with Love, and with Literature
Naomi SeidmanSeries: Stanford Studies in Jewish History and Culture(0)
About
For nineteenth-century Eastern European Jews, modernization entailed the abandonment of arranged marriage in favor of the "love match." Romantic novels taught Jewish readers the rules of romance and the choreography of courtship. But because these new conceptions of romance were rooted in the Christian and chivalric traditions, the Jewish embrace of "the love religion" was always partial. In The Marriage Plot, Naomi Seidman considers the evolution of Jewish love and marriage though the literature that provided Jews with a sentimental education, highlighting a persistent ambivalence in the Jewish adoption of European romantic ideologies. Nineteenth-century Hebrew and Yiddish literature tempered romantic love with the claims of family and community, and treated the rules of gender complementarity as comedic fodder. Twentieth-century Jewish writers turned back to tradition, finding pleasures in matchmaking, intergenerational ties, and sexual segregation. In the modern Jewish voices of Sigmund Freud, Erica Jong, Philip Roth, and Tony Kushner, the Jewish heretical challenge to the European romantic sublime has become the central sexual ideology of our time.
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Reviews
"Seidman is a nimble, curious, omnivorous reader, with whom it is a pleasure to spend time. She moves freely among Hebrew and Yiddish texts and is well-versed in social history. We are prepared to extend credit to her big ideas because we trust the quality of her exegesis of small examples. She uses critical theory rather than being used by it, and she always writes with a clarity that signals a g
Jewish Review of Books
"Naomi Seidman has written a provocative and important study that deftly theorizes Jewish secular modernity through the lens of sexuality. Moving beyond the paradigms of queer and postcolonial studies, The Marriage Plot locates a changing sexual world that articulated its own sexual and gender norms through an erotic recovery of Jewish tradition. In her lively and insightful readings of the modern
Vanderbilt University
"Once again, Naomi Seidman has given us a beautifully written book that is equally illuminating about traditional texts and contemporary performances. The Marriage Plot is a foundational work for anyone interested in Jewish literary and cultural studies, in questions about gender and translation, and in understanding how Jews 'fell in love with love' in the mid-19th century."
University of Michigan