Valley Beit Midrash

A virtual event presentation by Dr. Golan Moskowitz

Please note event times are listed in MT

ABOUT THE EVENT:

From the Yiddish stage to ballrooms, pageants, and reality television, Jewish performers have long shaped, and been shaped by, the art of drag. In this talk, Golan Moskowitz explores the entangled histories of Jewishness and drag performance in America, tracing figures from Pepi Littman and Bessie Thomashefsky to Harvey Fierstein and Sasha Velour. Drawing on his forthcoming NYU Press book, Moskowitz examines how ideas of conditional whiteness, disidentification, and "detachable ethnicity" illuminate the ways Jewish performers have used drag to negotiate visibility, difference, and belonging. Part cultural history and part meditation on performance itself, the talk asks what drag reveals about the long, complicated project of American Jewish identity.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER:

Golan Moskowitz is a Sizeler Family Professor in Judaic Studies at Tulane University in New Orleans and a core faculty member of the Stuart & Suzanne Grant Center for the American Jewish Experience. He is the author of Wild Visionary: Maurice Sendak in Queer Jewish Context (Stanford University Press, 2020) and has published several articles and book chapters on post-Holocaust memory and Jewish literature, art, and film. Dr. Moskowitz serves as Book Review Editor for Holocaust and Genocide Studies and as Director of the annual Jewish American & Holocaust Literature (JAHLit) Symposium.