“Jews have always found ways to enrich, com­plex­i­fy, sub­vert, or open­ly resist ortho­dox­ies and fun­da­men­talisms: since the dias­po­ra, and maybe before it, these strate­gies have been an essen­tial com­po­nent of Jew­ish sur­vival and the improb­a­ble, remark­able intel­lec­tu­al and cul­tur­al growth of the Jew­ish peo­ple in the face of mur­der­ous oppres­sion. This book marks a glo­ri­ous new install­ment in that his­to­ry of coura­geous, even out­ra­geous Jew­ish thought; between its cov­ers is a gath­er­ing of one of the lost tribes (per­haps the thir­teenth?): midrashists of the body and its texts, close read­ers and the­o­riz­ers of sex­u­al appetite and gen­der. It use­ful­ly sit­u­ates some of the cen­tral fig­ures of queer the­o­ry in a Jew­ish con­text and simul­ta­ne­ous­ly dis­plays them at their sharpest, explor­ing the inti­mate­ly, inex­tri­ca­bly inter­twined lega­cies of oppro­bri­um of Jew­ish­ness and queer­ness, their gen­er­a­tive dia­logue of anal­o­gy and antag­o­nism, and the man­i­fes­ta­tion of that dia­logue in cul­tur­al pro­duc­tion, both main­stream and mar­gin­al, and in mod­ern his­to­ry, com­i­cal, far­ci­cal, trag­ic. It’s illu­mi­nat­ing, huge­ly infor­ma­tive, and sexy as only rig­or­ous and play­ful intel­li­gence applied to trans­gres­sive sub­jects can be.” ‑Tony Kushner