Queer Theory and the Jewish Question by Daniel Boyarin, Daniel Itzkovitz, Ann Pellegrini

been at the same time a man and a woman, wearing both a woman’s bodice and a man’s fringed garment. . . . Only now did Yentl grasp the meaning of the Torah’s prohibition against wearing the clothes of the other sex. By doing so one deceived not only others but also oneself ” (Singer, 169–70). With consternation, Anshel (as Singer refers to the cross-dressed protagonist throughout his tale) finds herself/himself proposing to Hadass, and only afterward rationalizes the proposal as something that she (or he) is really doing for Avigdor.
    After the wedding the bride’s parents, according to custom, inspect the wedding sheets for signs that the marriage had been consummated, and dis- cover traces of blood. As the narrative informs us, with an infuriating lack of specificity, “Anshel had found a way to deflower the bride.” “Hadass in her in- nocence was unaware that things weren’t quite as they should have been.” This cool, almost detached tone is quite different from Streisand and Irving’s highly eroticized scene of displaced instruction. Meanwhile “Anshel” and Avigdor continue to be study partners, taking up—all too pertinently—the study of the Tractate on Menstruous Women (Singer, 179).
    But all is not perfect. Anshel begins to feel pain at deceiving Hadass, and, besides, “he” fears exposure: how long can he avoid going to the public baths? So Anshel stages a scene of self-revelation to Avigdor, proclaiming “I’m not a man but a woman,” and then undressing in front of him. Avigdor, who at first doesn’t believe a word of this story, and indeed begins to fear that the disrob- ing Anshel “might want to practice pederasty” (Singer, 183), is swiftly con- vinced by what he sees, though when Yentl resumes her men’s clothing Avig- dor thinks for a moment he has been dreaming. “I’m neither the one nor the other,” declares Yentl/Anshel. (Compare this to Théodore’s declaration, “In truth, neither sex is really mine.”) “Only now did [Avigdor] realize that An- shel’s cheeks were too smooth for a man’s, the hair too abundant, the hands too small” (Singer, 185). “All Anshel’s explanations seemed to point to one thing: she had the soul of a man and the body of a woman” (Singer, 187). “What a strange power there is in clothing,” Avigdor thinks (Singer, 188). He, and later others, even suspect that Anshel is a demon.
    In Singer’s story, Anshel sends Hadass divorce papers by messenger, and disappears. Avigdor, who had been married to someone else (but that’s an- other story), also obtains a divorce and, to the brief scandal of the town, he and Hadass are married. When their child is born, “those assembled at the cir- cumcision could scarcely believe their ears when they heard the father name his son Anshel” (Singer, 192).
    One crucial difference, then, between the story and the film is that in the film “Anshel” disappears and Yentl escapes, travels, traverses a boundary—in
    this case the ocean dividing Old World from New. In Singer’s story, “Anshel” is reborn as the child of Avigdor and Hadass. In both cases, however, “Anshel” is an overdetermined site of desire. Both Amy Irving and Mandy Patinkin de- clare their love to Streisand; she is not , as was the original plan, merely a trans- ferential object for Hadass, but is instead the chosen beloved. In Singer’s ac- count, both Avigdor and Hadass are full of sadness rather than joy on their wedding day. Speculation about why Anshel had left town and sent his wife divorce papers runs riot. “Truth itself,” observes the narrator, in a Poe-like statement that reflects directly on cross-dressing in the text, “is often con- cealed in such a way that the harder you look for it, the harder it is to find” (Singer, 192).
    But what of the child, “Anshel”— this Anshel demonstrably a boy, since his naming occurs at his circumcision? This boy, both addition and substitu- tion, replaces and does