Jewish Queer Art and Writing in the Twentieth Century

The Art and Politics of Jewish Queer Identity

The twentieth century saw an expansion of art and writing relating to themes, issues, and experiences of Jewish people whose lives were marked by sex and gender nonconformity. Their work was shaped by political sensitivity and carried its own political force, but the art and politics of queer Jewish identity cannot be collapsed into each other. Jewish LGBT artists struggled to reconcile belonging to communities that at times accepted and at times excluded them. Themes that informed the Jewish history of this era—historical trauma and its intergenerational legacy, the challenges of assimilation, family relationships and alternative kinships—therefore expressed themselves uniquely in the works of queer Jewish artists and writers.

Trans and Gay Jewish Writing in Weimar Germany

The first organized gay rights movement, which originated in late nineteenth-century Germany, reached its peak during the Weimar republic. One of its central figures was Magnus Hirschfeld, a gay Jewish physician and sexologist whose public advocacy for reproductive rights, anti-racism, and gay rights made him and his research institute a target of the German right. Hirschfeld was active across multiple fronts of advocacy, including the arts: he funded and appeared in one of the first films to depict gay experience, Different from the Others (1919), and saw art as a vehicle for reaching the widest audience in order to change public perceptions. Hirschfeld also stood out for his employment of transgender people at his institute, his support for early forms of gender-affirming medicine, and his advocacy for tolerance of what he then termed the “third sex.”

Hirschfeld’s relationship with Karl M. Baer, who published under the pen name N. O. Body, is a case in point. Baer was a social worker and a suffragist who was involved with B’nai B’rith and the German women’s movement; later in life, with the assistance of Hirschfeld, he underwent gender transition and lived as a transgender man. Baer’s memoir, Memoirs of a Man’s Maiden Years, grew out of his connection to Hirschfeld and became a bestseller, adapted twice into film in 1912 and 1919.

In this memoir, Baer discusses his gender transition through exploring his relationships with his mother, siblings, and wider society. Hirschfeld’s epilogue for the memoir considers it a “valuable addition to the scientific literature,” harnessing the prestige of science to advocate for transgender experience as a normal variant of the human condition rather than a pathology. The memoir is a striking record of the vocabulary and ideas available to transgender people in the early twentieth century for explaining themselves, both to themselves and to the wider world.

Both Hirschfeld and Baer became refugees in the years following the Nazi rise to power. Hirschfeld’s institute was ransacked by Nazi-sympathizing students in May 1933, its library burned days later during the nationwide book burnings. Hirschfeld died in exile in France in 1935. Baer emigrated to British Mandate Palestine with his wife in 1938 and worked as an accountant, dying in anonymity in 1956 outside Tel Aviv. It would take several decades before similar attempts at public advocacy and artistic expression took place, in Germany or Israel.

Israeli Queer Poetry

In the 1950s and 1960s, a conservative backlash set in across Europe and North America. The earlier gay advocacy movements that had risen and then collapsed in the interwar period faded from view. While after the war, networks of activists did regroup quietly in West Germany and in North America and kept working toward their goals—most notably, the repeal of anti-homosexual laws—openly queer art became extremely rare.

In Israel, where many queer Jewish refugees from Europe had settled, informal networks of social life also existed but remained largely hidden from view; the first Israeli gay organization would not form until 1975, partly a result of efforts by Americans who had immigrated there. Though in popular entertainment drag culture had a surprising heyday in the mid-1960s, the literary sphere remained almost entirely the domain of straight men.

Against that backdrop, the poetry of Yona Wallach was radical on more than one front. Part of a new wave of Israeli poets writing in a more direct, colloquial Hebrew, Wallach was also unusually frank in her treatment of gender and sexuality and in her challenge to heterosexual norms. Writing in the first person, Wallach wrote openly about homosexuality and about crossing gender lines; one of her best-known poems, titled in English as “Another Sex,” later became something like a popular anthem within the Israeli LGBT community and lent its name to an LGBT studies conference (Sex Acher, an annual conference for LGBT studies and queer theory).

Her poem “Yonatan” draws on the biblical story of Jonathan and David to give voice to an experience of social difference and exclusion. The poem resonated with many queer readers, who latched onto the homoerotic undertones of the biblical duo’s love story and Wallach’s use of a cross-gender speaking voice (a recurring motif in her poetry). In the absence of an LGBT political movement at the time, Wallach’s art remained highly personal. All the same, her writing opened new spaces for debating and exploring sex and gender nonconformity in Israeli society.  

Queer Jewish Theater and Photography in London

The 1970s saw the emergence of the gay liberation movement, beginning with the 1969 Stonewall uprising in New York and spreading unevenly across the globe from there. For the first time since the interwar period, a mass movement openly advocated for gay rights, and Jewish activists were prominent participants. A defining element of that movement was the call on gay people to “come out.” In the arts, this translated into a move from the implicit to the explicit in dealing with queer themes. Different artistic networks emerged in response to the scarcity of queer representation and the negativity of the little that existed.

Bent, a play by gay Jewish American playwright Martin Sherman, marked a turning point for gay representation on stage. Sherman wrote the play, which opened in London in 1979 starring Ian McKellen, out of his long-standing involvement with the British theater company the Gay Sweatshop, established in 1975 with the aim “to counteract the prevailing perception in mainstream theatre of what homosexuals are like,” as stated in their founding manifesto. The play, set during the Holocaust, told the love story of two gay concentration-camp prisoners, one of them also Jewish. The play’s mainstream success, and its quick transfer to American stages, helped change how a broad public understood queer and Jewish experience together.

Bent was provocative on two counts. Gay victims of the Holocaust had received little recognition of their suffering in the postwar decades. Anti-gay laws remained on the books in much of Europe until the late 1960s, so gay men were still, technically, criminals in the eyes of the law, and gay Holocaust survivors were thus largely excluded from receiving reparations. These survivors’ histories went untold until the first generation of gay historians began recovering them in the 1970s. Bent brought this work into the mainstream.

The play also complicated how the wider gay movement thought about Jews. Weimar Germany and the persecution of gay men under Nazism were increasingly viewed as the roots behind gay liberation as a “second gay movement”; the pink triangle became gay liberation’s most visible symbol of that inheritance. However, the use of Jewish suffering as a symbol often came at the expense of engaging with actual, living gay Jews and learning their perspectives. By putting a gay and Jewish character at the play’s center, Sherman pushed back against that separation.

Nan Goldin, an American Jewish photographer, also played a major role in bringing queer and Jewish experiences into the mainstream. Her decade-long photography project The Ballad of Sexual Dependency (1976–1986) chronicled her intimate life and relationships with what she called her “tribe” in New York’s East Village, London, and Berlin in the 1970s and 1980s. Her use of snapshot photography and her focus on the intimate had a lasting impact on photography. Goldin's work grew less out of an explicit political mission than Sherman’s, though her photography too reflected the social worlds that emerged from the upheaval of gay liberation and the sexual revolution, documenting the mundane and the beautiful in the lives of those living on the outskirts of respectable society.

Goldin’s personal and artistic draw toward the counterculture was entwined with her Jewish biography: she grew up in a middle-class family in the suburbs of Boston. The presence of Jewishness in The Ballad of Sexual Dependency appears mostly through the presence (and absence) of her family of origin: her parents and her older sister, Barbara, who died by suicide when Goldin was eleven. This formative tragedy shaped her as a young person and led her to leave home at fourteen. A major theme in her work is that of chosen families, the alternative kinship created by queer people, sometimes in place of their families of birth. Goldin’s choice of an alternative family was also a rebellion against the constraints of her middle-class upbringing and her parents' assimilated, Americanized Jewishness.

American Jewish Queer Reckonings

The 1980s and 1990s saw Jewish queer advocacy mature into settled communities across North America, Europe, and Israel, with dedicated audiences of Jewish queers and growing space for queer and Jewish themes within broader national narratives. The works of poet Adrienne Rich and playwright Tony Kushner reflect that maturity: both address the reality Rich named “split at the root,” multiple axes of belonging that often pull against each other.

Rich was a leading poet, activist, and theorist of the Women’s Movement, and also a Jewish lesbian. In her essay “Split at the Root,” she reflects by writing in the first person on her identity as the daughter of an interfaith marriage, tracing the intergenerational trauma in her Jewish family and its legacy: a “loyalty to assimilation” she understands as protection against antisemitism. Her move toward loving women, and the parallels she draws between her two minority identities, surface with her inability to settle into just one of them. Appearing in Nice Jewish Girls (1982), the first anthology to bring Jewish lesbian writers together in a single collection, her essay argued that Jewish and lesbian identity need not be at odds, even when Jewish and lesbian communities alike had at times made them feel that way. It addresses a gap that Bent had only gestured toward: how Jews related to the gay and lesbian movement as Jews, and to the Jewish world as gay men and lesbians.

Tony Kushner’s play Angels in America, first staged in 1992, was as much about the AIDS epidemic as about America’s racial politics, Cold War inheritance, and the compromises Jewish assimilation could demand. Its most memorable character, Roy Cohn, a closeted, self-hating, and ferociously powerful Jewish lawyer based on the historical figure, embodies the play’s harshest verdict on what it costs to choose power and self-denial over an honest life. Where Bent built its case for gay dignity around sympathetic victims, Kushner risks the presentation of an unsympathetic, self-hating antagonist and stages the conflict between Jews of sharply different worlds. And if Bent’s trauma is the Holocaust, Kushner’s is the Cold War and the fraught place of Jews within it: how far a gay Jewish man could rise by denying who he was, and what that denial demanded of everyone around him.

The play sets Cohn against its protagonist, Louis, the son of left-wing Jewish parents who nonetheless rejected him for his homosexuality. In one scene, Louis is asked to recite the Kaddish over Cohn’s corpse, an irony given Cohn’s lifelong refusal of both identities: the gay man who stayed closeted to the end, and the Jew who prosecuted Jews and courted the era’s antisemites. Thus, Cohn’s role in prosecuting Julius and Ethel Rosenberg in the 1950s figures strongly, with Ethel’s ghost joining the room for the prayer, one outcast presiding over another.

Working across different decades, media, and genres, the artists discussed here shared a productive tension, one of moving back and forth between poles of inclusion and exclusion, belonging and alienation. This was true not only in terms of the subject matter—the changing affinity with the communities they were a part of—but also in terms of approach. Theirs was art that drew heavily on political commitments and aimed not only to respond to reality but also to change it; yet it was rarely art in the service of a movement, and its focus often remained personal, at times highly personal. The tension of belonging was then not so much a problem to solve as a theme to untangle, complicate, or simply voice.