Morad, M. Queer Jewish Divas. Jewishness and Queerness in the Life and Performance of Barbara Streisand, Bette Mideler and Olga Guillot. 2016

8/16/2019 Morad, M. Queer Jewish Divas. Jewishness and Queerness in the Life and Performance of Barbara Streisand, Bette…

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For use by the Author only | © 2016 Koninklijke Brill NV

Mazal Tov, Amigos! Jews and Popular Music

in the Americas

Edited by

Amalia Ran and Moshe Morad

|


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Contents

Acknowledgements List of Figures

List of Contributors

Introduction 1

Amalia Ran and Moshe Morad

1 Is “White Christmas” a Piece of Jewish Music? 11

Ellen Koskofff

2 The Musical Worlds of Jewish Buenos Aires, 1910–1940 25

Pablo Palomino

3 Tristes Alegrías: The Jewish Presence in Argentina’s Popular Music

Arena 44

Amalia Ran

4 Jacob do Bandolim: A Jewish(-)Brazilian Composer 60

Thomas George Caracas Garcia

5 Walls of Sound: Lieber and Stoller, Phil Spector, the Black-Jewish

Alliance, and the “Enlarging” of America 78

Ari Katorza

6 Singing from Diffference: Jewish Singers-Songwriters in the 1960s

and 1970s 96

Jon Stratton

7 ¡Toca maravilloso! Larry Harlow and the Jewish Connection to

Latin Music 109

Benjamin Lapidus

8 Roberto Juan Rodriguez’ Timba Talmud : Diasporic Cuban-Jewish

Musical Convergences in New York 122 Nili Belkind


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9 Yiddish Song in Twenty-First Century America: Paths to

Creativity 142

Abigail Wood

10 Fight for Your Right to Partycipate: Jewish American Rappers 153

Uri Dorchin

11 Gypsy, Cumbia, Cuarteto, Surf, Blah Blah Blah: Simja Dujov

and Jewish Musical Eclecticism in Argentina 171

Lillian M. Wohl

12 Queer Jewish Divas: Jewishness and Queerness in the Life andPerformance of Barbra Streisand, Bette Midler, and Olga Guillot 188

Moshe Morad

13 Third Diaspora Soundscapes: Music of the Jews of Islam in the

Americas 208

Edwin Seroussi

Closing Notes: The Soundstage of Jewish Life, North and South 237

Judah M. Cohen

Index 249


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© , , | ./_


Queer Jewish Divas: Jewishness and Queerness

in the Life and Performance of Barbra Streisand,Bette Midler, and Olga Guillot

Moshe Morad

The divas have to make us believe that they live in their own sphere

and that the norms and conventions that apply to everyone, do not applyto them.

The intersection of Jewishness and queerness has been investigated by sev-

eral Queer theorists. This essay looks at a particular musical/cultural aspect

of this intersection—the great American Jewish divas—who became “gay

icons” and subjects of female impersonations in drag shows. In the following

pages, I will present three such Jewish divas who have risen from and become

immersed in the two popular music cultures that this volume looks at—the

North American and the Latin American. This essay explores their popularity

and particular “gay appeal” covering the entire spectrum of American popular

music. From the United States, Barbra Streisand and Bette Midler, both in their

seventies now, are global divas and gay icons idolized and drag-impersonated

in both Latin and Western cultures; less known for her Jewish roots due to the

particular circumstances of her Cuban background is pan-Latin bolero diva

Olga Guillot.

All three divas have a life story and performance that resonate well with

Mira’s descriptions of the diva and “the way she inhabits her own myth.”

Camp, drama, and “over-the-top performance” are typical of the stage perso-

nas of all three divas, from Streisand’s vocal melodrama, via Midler’s outra-

geous comedy and camp, to Guillot’s heartbreaking boleros and quivering lips.

Vanessa Knights, “Performances of Pain and Pleasure (Divas Sing the Bolero),” paper

presented at the Institute of Popular Music Seminar Series, University of Liverpool,

November 15, 2001, 4–5. http://www.ncl.ac.uk/sacs/POP/papers/divas.pdf. (accessedMarch 12, 2008). My translation from Spanish.

Many of them of Jewish descent, such as Judith Butler, Eve Kosoy Sedgwick, and Daniel

Boyarin.

In Knights, 4–5.


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But there are other common factors relating to their biographies, careers, and

interaction with the audience that make them typically “Jewish” and “queer.”

I begin this essay by reviewing the historic connection between queerness

and Jewishness and by studying the cases of the three Jewish divas who becamemajor gay icons in their respective cultures. My objective is to examine and

to compare issues of gender, social acceptance, Diaspora, Jewish fatalism

and camp, religious and political non-conformism, and queerness.

Jewishness and Queerness, Judeophobia and Homophobia

In the introduction to their edited volume Queer Theory and the JewishQuestion, Boyarin, Itzkovitz, and Pellegrini draw an interesting comparison

between Jewishness and queerness and claim that they are “bound up by one

another in particularly resonant ways.”

An interesting aspect of this queer/Jew connection is discussed by Boyarin

in a 1997 study entitled Unheroic Conduct: The Rise of Heterosexuality and the

Invention of the Jewish Man, in which he identies expressions of “soft” Jewish

masculinity in the Talmud and succeeding rabbinical texts, and claims that

a certain kind of male efffeminacy helped maintain Jewish self-affrmation

against the hegemonic gentile (Roman at the time) virtues of male masculinity.

This “soft” Jewish masculine tendency continued throughout the history of life

in exile and, according to Boyarin, was challenged by Herzl and the Zionist

movement with their idealized “muscular Jew,” which later became part of the

macho ethos of the State of Israel.

This “soft masculine” behavior and presentation became one of the trig-

gers for the “feminization” and “queerication” of the Jew, as presented by

European Judeophobes. Another factor was circumcision: “. . . little boys hear

in the nursery that Jews have something cut offf their penises and thereby con-

clude that they are men who become women.” This “lack of penis” is another

trigger for contempt toward Jews, associating them with femininity, deviance,

and homosexuality.

Daniel Boyarin, Daniel Itzkovitz, and Ann Pellegrini, eds., Queer Theory and the Jewish

Question (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), 1. See in Daniel Boyarin, “Homophobia and the Postcoloniality of the ‘Jewish Science’,” In Queer

Theory and the Jewish Question, Daniel Boyarin, Daniel Itzkovitz, and Ann Pellegrini, eds.

(New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), 95.

Boyarin, 169.


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Historian Diane Owen Hughes describes this Jewishness/deviance connec-

tion in Italy, during the Renaissance, when Jews and prostitutes in the city-states

were forced to wear earrings: “a deliberate and powerful campaign of degrada-

tion and re-marking.” However, at the same time, these two minority groups were “conated into a single class,” “a single sumptuary category . . . construed

for the service of the state.” This “special role” of Jews and deviants in society

can be found in many cultures; for example, the role of Jews as musicians in

early twentieth century Iraq, or the role of homosexuals in religious practice

in Afro-Cuban santería.

In his essay about Marcel Proust, Jonathan Freedman pinpoints the n

de siècle and the early years of the twentieth century as the period in which

“Jewish and sexually transgressive identities were molded in each other’simage.” Just as the gure of “the homosexual” “came into full crystallization

in the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in psychiatric and sexo-

logical discourse,” so too did “the Jew” as a new social type, “not as [a member]

of a religion . . . or a culture . . . or a nation but in pathological terms that served

the purpose of managing the proliferation of ambiguities from which the very

concept of ‘the Jew’ emerged.”

It is no historical coincidence that both the “modern Jew” and the “modern

homosexual” emerged in the same period of time, and that both anti-Semitism

and homophobia ourished simultaneously, culminating in both bearers of

pink triangles and yellow Stars of David being sent by the Nazis to concentra-

tion camps.

Marginalization and discrimination led to the emergence of resistance

movements and academic disciplines investigating their sources and sub-

jects, and strengthened the groups’ identities and agendas, also in a similar

timeframe. Anti-Semitism led to the Jewish emancipation movement and to

Wissenschaft —the science of Judaism—from which modern Jewish studies

have emerged. Likewise, lesbian and gay studies evolved in the United States

Marjorie Garber, “Category Crises: The Way of the Cross and the Jewish Star,” in Boyarin

et al., Queer Theory and the Jewish Question, 28.

Garber, 28.

Diane Owen Hughes, “Distinguishing Signs: Ear-Rings, Jews and Franciscan Rhetoric in

the Italian Rennaisance City,” Past and Present 112 (1986): 47.

Moshe Morad, “Kol Hashalom Mi’Baghdad” (The Voice of Peace from Baghdad), Musaf

Haaretz, February 1, 2008: 52. Morad, “Invertidos in Afro-Cuban religion,” The Gay & Lesbian Review Worldwide 15, no. 2

(2008): 26–28.

Jonathan Freedman, “Coming out of the Jewish Closet with Marcel Proust,” in Boyarin

et al., Queer Theory and the Jewish Question, 335.

Freedman, 336.


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following years of discrimination, marginalization, and homophobia. In both

cases, there is a “closet”—assimilation and a tendency on the part of group

members to hide their ethnicity or sexual inclination—as well as a “coming

out of the closet” process, which can be personal and/or social/political. Visual and Environmental Studies scholar Marjorie Garber takes the queer/

Jewish connection even further and draws a connection between transgen-

derism and modern Jewishness in her essay “Category Crises: The Way of the

Cross and the Jewish Star.” According to Garber, both are subjects of a “category

crisis; . . . a failure of denitional distinction,” which allows “boundary crossing

from one (apparently distinct) category to another”; male to female, black to

white, and Jew to Christian. Garber looks at the case of Yentl, as one of “category

crisis.” Streisand’s performance in Yentl is discussed further in this essay.The connection between Jewishness and sexual deviance was a theme

exploited by the Nazis in their anti-Semitic propaganda; for example, when

excerpts from the 1927 lm Der Fürst von Pappenheim—in which a famous

German Jewish actor plays a vaudeville entertainer who performs in drag—

were used to show that Jewish men “minced about in women’s clothes.”

“Jew-as-woman” (or as an efffeminate man) is an archtype that has other

aspects, too. One that is particularly relevant to the subject of this essay is the

voice. According to Garber, “the way Jews supposedly spoke, with a break in the

voice and a sing-song manner, set Jewish men apart, and linked them to femi-

nized men or castrates.” The voice-identifying stigmata were used both in the

context of Jews and homosexuals in the nineteenth century, further associating

Jewishness and perversion: “The voice became itself an indication of unmanli-

ness, a kind of aural clothing that linked Jew and ‘woman’, Jew and emasculated

man, Jew and degenerate male homosexual.” According to Garber, this “femini-

zation of the Jewish man—the voice, the shrug, the small hands, the extravagant

gestures, the ‘Oriental’ aspect—manifests itself in the lexicon of cross dressing.”

This typecasting can explain, or comprise, the background to the Jewish/

queer diva connection—larger-than-life Jewish women or rather “women” with

extravagant gestures and performance, who became gay icons and subjects for

female impersonations. In our case, the Jewish queer divas are maybe outcasts

due to both their religion and their controversial behavior and “over the top”

Obviously, unlike African or Asian ethnicity, Jewish ethnicity can be “hidden,” as can

homosexuality. Garber, 19.

Garber, 27.

Garber, 29.

Garber, 30.

Garber, 30.


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performance/musicality, but this is what makes them such important musical

gures in their respective cultures.

Hysteria is another common connection associated with both Jews and

homosexuals, and with the performance of our three divas. Pioneering Frenchtheorist of hysteria Jean-Martin Charcot, who inspired Freud’s work, men-

tioned “the especially marked predisposition of the Jewish race for hysteria.”

A similar deviant cross-gender stigma has been attributed in the United

States to Jewish women, namely, in the “Jewish princess” stereotype, where

“the fantasized Jewish woman crosses over into the space of ‘masculinity’

which is put in question by the ambivalent cultural status of the Jewish man.”

The “Jewish princess” is not only spoilt and demanding, but pushy, bossy, and

neurotic—as are divas, especially Jewish divas.Streisand is described by theater and performance scholar Stacy Wolf as

“the diva of divas with a well-publicized terror of live performance, Streisand

is gossiped about equally as an egomaniacal, control-freak perfectionist . . . and

as a frail, anxious slip of a girl.”

Wolf mentions that as Streisand’s career has evolved:

[H]er star-self takes on increasingly more masculine signs. Like [Sarah]

Bernhardt, Streisand is bossy, and as each acquired money and power she

was seen as voraciously ambitious, egotistical, and acquisitive, the epit-

ome of the avaricious Jew . . . Like Bernhardt, Streisand’s inappropriate

femininity was seen not only to be a sign of her “Jewishness” but to be

caused by it.

Midler, likewise, has a reputation for being diffcult to work with or, as she puts

it: “I am a bitch!”

The History of Jewish American Divas

“Divas” are an important and characteristic component of performance arts

(theater, ballet, and vocal music) in the cultures of both Americas (and world-

wide). There have been the opera divas (such as Maria Callas and Montserrat

Garber, 20. Garber, 33.

Stacy Wolf, “Barbra’s ‘Funny Girl’ Body,” in Boyarin et al., Queer Theory and the Jewish

Question, 246.

Wolf, 260.

Mark Bego, Bette Midler: Still Divine (New York: Cooper Square Press, 2002), 98.


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Caballé), as well as divas in popular music, and theater and comedy divas—

many of whom were Jewish and, not surprisingly, based their “diva-ness” on

humor, mostly self-humor and self-ridicule, from Sophie Tucker, Belle Barth, and

Totie Fields, to Joan Rivers, Bette Midler, and Barbra Streisand. Nevertheless, inthis essay I concentrate on three “musical” divas known for their voices, as well

as for the drama, humor, and “camp” incorporated into their performance.

While looking at the history of “Jewish vocal divas” in America, it is impor-

tant to mention two sets of “sisters” who predated and inspired the female

vocal group phenomenon of early 1960s’ Motown—the Andrews Sisters and

the Barry Sisters in the late-1930s and the 1940s. The Andrews Sisters were not

Jewish (but daughters of Greek and Norwegian immigrants; I will relate to the

immigration/Diaspora factor in the following pages). Yet, their rst and biggesthit was an English version of the 1932 Yiddish song “Bei Mir Bist Du Schön” (To

me you are beautiful), which became a Jewish-American hit and, subsequently,

a pan-American hit, especially among the American troops in World War .

Following the success of “Bei Mir Bist Du Schön,” Jewish musician and com-

poser Sam Medofff started his Yiddish Melodies in Swing program on New York’s

radio station and introduced to the American public two Jewish siblings:

the Barry Sisters, who from 1937 until the mid-1950s performed jazz and popu-

lar songs in Yiddish.

The biggest post-1960s’ musical Jewish American divas are undoubtedly

Barbra Streisand and Bette Midler, who “just like Sarah Bernhardt embody and

enact the irresolvable but culturally useful contradictions of a queer, Jewish

femininity.”

Barbra Streisand: Queer Representations and Diva-ness, from

Funny Girl to Yentl

According to Wolf, Streisand represents “gay men’s love for American musicals,

post- feminine mystique ambition, and above all, late twentieth-century Jewish

It is also rumored to have become a favorite of the Nazis, until it was discovered that

the song was in fact Jewish. It was also a popular song enjoyed in secret among Jewish

inmates in concentration camps. This information was given to me as hearsay, and alsoappears in an uncited source in Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Andrews_

Sisters), (accessed January 2, 2015). So I refer to it as “rumor.”

From “The Rise of Yiddish Swing.” http://www.yiddishradioproject.org/exhibits/ymis/

(accessed January 2, 2015).

Wolf, 261.


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American femininity.” This “Jewish femininity” portrayed” in body (her nose),

voice (frequent yiddishisms), and behavior (aggressiveness)” contradicts the

feminine ideal in American culture, and is therefore “queer.” According to New

Testament and Jewish studies scholar Amy-Jill Levine, the Jewish woman “onstage” is “more and less than ‘woman’,” and, as stated by art historian Carol

Ockman in her essay about Sarah Bernhardt, she represents a “womanhood

gone awry.” Consequently, “this is exactly what makes American gays identify

with Jewish women and love the Jewish divas, from Sophie Tucker to Barbra

Streisand.”

Moreover, “Jewishness is what Barbra does” claims Wolf, albeit a “Jewishness

with a diffference.” Her refusal to have a “nose job”—much publicized

in the mid 1960s—was seen as an act of resistance to “the desire of invisibility,the desire to become ‘white,’ [which] lies at the center of the [Diasporic] Jew’s

ight from his or her own body.” This insistence on maintaining the “mark

of diffference” and resistance to assimilation is reminiscent of the gay-rights

movement’s ght for visual recognition, with the waving of the rainbow ag,

defying the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy, and further—the queer movement’s

insistence on visuality, even if it is outside the male-or-female norms.

In the 1968 lm Funny Girl , Streisand plays the role of early twentieth-century

vaudeville star Fanny Brice, and “knits together queerness and Jewishness to

create a ‘woman’ who, in body, gesture, voice, and character, is indeed a ‘funny

girl’.” Via the story of Fanny Brice, the lm looks back at the history of the

American musical theater (in its earlier form; the Vaudeville), and sheds light

on the queerness of the genre and its queer/Jewish connection.

Wolf, 246.

Wolf, 247.

Amy-Jill Levine, “A Jewess, More and/or Less,” in Judaisn since Gender , Miriam Peskowitz,and Laura Levitt, eds. (New York: Routledge, 1997), 151.

Carol Ockman, “When Is a Jewish Star Just a Star? Interpreting Images of Sarah Bernhardt,”

The Jew in the Text: Modernity and the Construction of Identity, Linda Nochlin, and Tamar

Garb, eds. (London: Thames and Hudson, 1995), 138.

Personal Interview: Joel Cohen, a gay American Jewish actor, 2014.

Wolf, 251.

Sander Gilman, The Jew’s Body (London: Routledge, 1991), 235.

Wolf, 251.

Wolf, 247. The use of “woman” in quotation marks here, and on other occasions in thisessay, is not incidental. In Notes on “Camp,” the 1964 essay by Jewish-American writer

Susan Sontag, who dened camp as a gay sensitivity celebrating articiality and exag-

geration, Sontag writes: “Camp sees everything in quotation marks. It’s not a lamp, but a

‘lamp’; not a woman, but a ‘woman’.”


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It should be noted that the twentieth-century American musical theater

genre, known as “the musical” was created by Jews (with the exception of Cole

Porter who was not Jewish, but was gay). The genre as a whole “offfers queer

spectatorial interventions,” with “overt displays of vocal aptitude and physicalprowess, that is, by its own pleasure in its own performativity.”

The “gayness” and gay appeal of musicals is articulated by gender studies

and communication scholar Alexander Doty who writes about their “femi-

nine,” or “efffeminized,” aesthetic, camp, and emotive genre characteristics

(spectacular décor and costuming, intricate choreography, and singing about

romantic yearning and fulllment), with reference to the more hidden cultural

history of gay erotica centered on men in musicals.

In between Funny Girl andYentl , in 1979 Streisand took a step further into“gay territory” and strengthened her connection with the global gay commu-

nity with a disco hit; a duet with disco diva Donna Summer, which became an

instant gay club anthem—“No More Tears (Enough Is Enough),” a sentimental

ballad intro, which turns into an over-dramatic, pulsating dance-oor hit. She

has never performed this song live with Donna Summer, but it became one of

her best-selling hits and added another dimension to her musical gay appeal.

In the 1983 musical lm Yentl , Streisand took the Jewish/queer connection

further with a story involving cross-dressing/cross-gender in the Orthodox

Jewish sphere. Based on Isaac Bashevis Singer’s short story “Yentl the Yeshiva

Boy,” Streisand plays a Polish Jewish girl who decides to dress and live like a

man so that she can become a yeshiva boy and study the Talmud.

In this connection, Boyarin, Itzkovitz, and Pellegrini raise the ultimate

queer question relating to the historic stereotypes described above: “If a Jewish

woman can pass as a man, [is] this . . . because, at least according to stereotype,

she is already a man? . . . or, perhaps, and just as well, a Jewish girl can be a

Jewish boy, because Jewish boys are already girls?”

Streisand as Yentl added another dimension of queerness to Bashevis’

story. In her own Jewishness and stage persona as described above, Streisand

constantly portrays the non-typical American woman; “a self-made phallic

woman, the one who refused to decapitate or castrate herself”. Furthermore,

in Yentl , Streisand proves that she can be not only a phallic woman but also a

Wolf, 248. Alexander Doty, Making Things Perfectly Queer: Interpreting Mass Culture (Minneapolis:

University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 10.

Boyarin et al., 7.

Garber, 24.


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cute boy, as Hollywood producer Howard Rosenman once told her: “You were

fabulous as a boy. Anshel was very sexy.”

The Divine Miss M

Bette Midler started her musical career as an entertainer in the Continental

Baths—New York’s notorious gay sauna—in 1970, well before the era,

performing to gay men wrapped in towels in between their sexual activities.

The gay patrons made Bette a cult gure.

Midler describes how, in order to keep the attention of the boys in towels,

she mixed her singing with high camp comedy. In what was meant to be a nega-

tive review, Arthur Bell of the Village Voice wrote that she resembled “a woman

impersonating a man impersonating a woman.” Still, “most patrons loved her

sense of humor and were raving about the Jewish girl in the baths who spoke

Graber, 21.

Interview with Bette Midler by Roger Ebert, 1980. http://www.Rogerebert.Com/Inter

views/Interview-With-Bette-Midler (accessed January 2, 2015).

.

Barbra Streisand, 2003. Manns

Bruin Theater / Westwood, , .

: / /

.


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our language.” In an interview Midler says: “When I was working at the baths

I could go there and feel right at home. I picked up the gay sense of humor,

almost like a sponge.” In another she said: “I think I just have a queer eye.”

It is no coincidence that Jack and his fellow patrons at the ContinentalBaths described her as “the Jewish girl.” Midler was and remained a typical

“Jewish girl,” mixing a Jewish sense of humor with a camp/queer one. When

I went to see her performance in New Jersey in 1993, the audience was clearly

divided into two distinctive groups: middle-aged Jews and gays. Midler played

throughout the performance, making hilarious comments on both audiences

and frequently bringing up their common connection to fate and humor. She

combined a sense of tragedy and drama in her songs with camp and humor

in her patter, interspersing Yiddishisms with “gay language.” When speakingof Streisand, Midler described her as “that over-priced yenta” ( yenta mean-

ing a “gossipy old woman” and also referring to Yentl) to the laughter of the

audience, but then quickly switched to tragic mood and began singing a heart-

breaking ballad from The Rose, her 1979 lm debut in which she portrayed a

doomed, drug-addicted, rock ‘n’ roll singer.

Midler’s “gay appeal” encompasses her full range—from vulgar/high camp

to her dramatic singing from The Rose. I have seen many drag-queens imper-

sonating both the funny “Miss M.” and her various stage characters, as well as

her powerful, heartrending performances from The Rose.

More than any other diva, Midler represents the duality (and sometimes

conict) between being an American Jew (she observes some of the religion’s

practices in her personal life) and a gay icon. In a 2003 interview on ,

Midler hesitated when asked about her views regarding gay marriage, a much

discussed topic at the time in the United States:

. . . when it comes to religion, I don’t really know what to say because

I’m—I’m in my tribe, and I try to be a good Jew, but on the other hand, I

don’t know what the—how people feel. My feeling is, well, who’s it really

going to hurt? But then, if you’re a religious person, you’re get all knocked

out because of the things that . . . [sic]

Private interview, 2011; Jack, 64 years old, a regular patron at the Continental Baths at the

time Midler performed there. Interview with Bette Midler by Roger Ebert, 1980.

Interviewed by Larry King on , 2003. http://edition.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0311/26/

lkl.00.html. (accessed January 2, 2015).

http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0311/26/lkl.00.html (accessed January 2, 2015).


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“La vida es una mentira” (Life Is a Lie): Queer Bolero and Olga

Guillot

In my doctoral dissertation and subsequent monograph about music and gay

identity in Cuba, I argue that bolero music, which had its heyday in the 1930s

and 1940s, re-emerged as an important emotional musical space among gay

men in Cuba during the “Special Period,” an extended open-ended era of eco-

nomic crisis, austerity, depression, and radical social and cultural changes,

which began in the early 1990s with the loss of nancial support due to the fallof the .

One of the greatest heroes of the genre is Olga Guillot, a gay icon and diva,

who left Cuba in 1961, due to her opposition to the Castro regime. Olga was

. Bette Midler, 2014. “It’s the Girls” album cover.


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one of the most popular subjects for impersonation in numerous drag shows

I attended in Cuba and in the Cuban gay diaspora. I found her cassettes in the

music collections of all gay bolero fans whom I met in Cuba, although they

were banned for years due to her political dissidence and “betrayal.”Spanish American literature scholar and author of “Tropics of Desire:

Interventions from Queer Latino America” José Quiroga describes the audi-

ence at Olga Guillot’s concert in Madrid in 1998 as “a sentimental commu-

nity, constructed around La Guillot as signier.” One might say that in Cuba

there exists a “virtual sentimental community” composed of a network of

Olga Guillot fans who listen to her s and cassettes in the privacy of their

homes. Cuban gays, who have never had the chance to see her perform live,

have adopted her as a symbol of escapism, fantasy, drama, and resistance tooppression. Many gay bolero fans told me that they identify closely with the

lyrics of her songs, such as “La mentira” (The lie), and “Miénteme” (Lie to me),

since they reect their way of life. Many of them “live a lie”: they lie to others

and accept that others lie to them.

During my eldwork in Cuba, I kept hearing rumors about the Jewishness of

Guillot. I could not nd any offcial evidence in the Cuban literature or press, or

in the Jewish community les. Yet many of my informants insisted that ella era

judía (she was Jewish). One of them showed me an old album cover showing

the young Olga wearing a Star of David necklace. Apparently, she wore such a

necklace many times throughout her life, both before and after leaving Cuba.

I came across various pictures of Guillot wearing a Star of David necklace,

taken in diffferent periods of her life. An uncited list of Jewish Latin American

singers on Wikipedia mentioned her, but that was about the only reference

I could nd online to Olga’s Jewishness.

It is important to understand that Cuba became offcially atheist during

the Revolution. This caused the Jewish community, as well as other religious

communities, to go “underground” for many years. Therefore, as in the case of

the Soviet Union, Jewish roots are sometimes diffcult to trace. Only recently

I came across an interview which Olga gave in 2003 to the Argentinean news-

paper Clarín, in which she clearly says that the reason she wears a Star of

David is to honor her biological father who was Jewish, and that at the age of

ten she converted to Christianity (perhaps meaning that the whole family con-

José Quiroga, Tropics of Desire: Intervensions from Queer Latino America (New York andLondon: New York University Press), 148.

The title of this section, “Life Is a Lie,” is from the lyrics of this song.

http://old.clarin.com/diario/2003/07/05/c-01601.htm (accessed January 2, 2015). Many

thanks to Graciela Dyzenchauz for bringing this interview to my attention.


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verted and obtained a Christian identity). Uncited sources in Wikipedia and

in the -Hispanic Contacto magazine (2001) claim that Guillot performed in

Israel in the early 1960s. I found out that Guillot visited Israel in 1986 as part

of a delegation of the Free Cuban Community in Exile of Miami Beach for theplantation of a forest in honor of Cuban poet José Martí.

Being of Catalan origin, it is probable that Guillot’s father (and heritage) was

Sephardi, unlike most Cuban Jews who are of Ashkenazi/Eastern European

descent. Whereas her Jewish origins are obscured and barely discussed, due

to the particular circumstances prevailing in Cuba, Guillot, like Streisand and

Midler, symbolizes a certain rebellion and dissidence against the “normative’

hegemony. In her case, it is both a political (anti-Castro) and (homo)sexual dis-

sidence, adding further appeal to Cuban gays. As Juanito, a 55-year-old Cubangay activist and drag queen told me, in a personal interview:

I always kept my cassette of Olga, even when I was hiding from the police

in the days, and still have it. It’s in my collection, together with

the pictures and love-letters from my lovers. It is in my little secret “homo-

sexual box,” a little safe storing my true identity, even when I have to pre-

tend to the outside world that I am something else.

Her Jewishness adds another layer of non-conformism and “secrecy,” as

expressed in the almost whispered comment from Juanito in my ear: “Ella era

judía.”

Sources: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olga_Guillot.; http://www.contactomagazine.com/

olga100.htm (accessed January 5, 2015). I could nd no further written or recorded evi-

dence regarding the concert in Israel. Regarding the visit, I wish to thank Graciela

Dyzenchauz and Shoshana Levin for the information, and to Sharon Freedman at the

for digging up the detail about the delegation and the plantation.

, Unidades Militares de Ayuda a la Producción (military units to aid prduction),

were notorious labor camps operated by the Cuban government from November 1965 to July 1968, as an alternative form of military service, for “anti revolutionary” Cuban men

including pacists, hippies, and homosexuals. Life in the was deccribed in Renaldo

Arena’s book “Before the Night Falls” and the lm based on it (directed by Julian Schnabel,

2000).


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Common Factors: Camp, Tragedy, Diaspora, and . . . “What-a-Voice!”

There are a number of common factors in the life and performance of our

three divas, which I will bring now as a way of conclusion. When it comes to

their “look,” none of them convey typical sexist criteria for female attractive-

ness: Streisand has her uncompromising long nose and “phallic woman” image;

Midler and Guillot were quite chubby during most of their career, portray-

ing if anything a “motherly” rather than a “sexy” image, based on both North

American and Latin American sexist “show business” standards.

Perhaps compensation for the non-conventional look, or part of it, is the

“larger-than-life” voice, full of emotion and drama, which is a factor common

to all three divas; more obviously, in the case of Streisand and Guillot, but also

in that of Midler, as demonstrated in The Rose. Wolf pinpoints a certain duality/

contradiction in Streisand’s performing vocality: “if Barbra’s spoken voice, as in‘Hello, gorgeous?’ continually reperforms her Jewishness (conated with New

York, Brooklyn, working-class, urban and East Coast), her singing voice takes

.

Olga Guillot, 2007. 8th Annual Latin

Grammy Awards, Las Vegas, , .: / .


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her elsewhere: to the blues of African American women singers, to the belting

of Ethel Merman, to the crooning of the developing rock ‘n’ roll.”

The same can be said about Midler and Guillot: a singing voice, which has

“a life of its own,” transcends the day-to-day, and the “spoken voice,” whichoften, in the case of Midler, is harsh, loud, and “vulgar”—so diffferent from her

emotional singing voice, as demonstrated in The Rose. A review of her per-

formance in the New York Daily News describes it thus: “when the current is

on and that oh-so-clever patter is offf, she is very special, for her voice goes deep

and her voice gets throaty, her voice goes folksy, and her voice goes bluesy.”

Indeed, in the cases of all three divas, the young girls growing up in immi-

grant families of European origin adopted singing voices and genres typical of

the Afro-diasporic musical heritage of their host countries—blues and soul forMidler and Streisand, and bolero for Guillot—and perfected them to a voice

with a “life of its own,” which has the ability to empower and create an emo-

tional space, so necessary for their gay audiences.

Drama and tragedy constitute another common factor in the performance

of the three singers. Tragedy is an important component of Yiddish/Jewish but

also of queer culture, with an ongoing dialogue between “Tragedy and Trash,”

as indicated by the title of Moon’s essay about the common themes of Yiddish

theater and Queer theater:

What the great tragic and comic performance traditions of Yiddish and

queer theaters remind us is that in this new millennium impulses to

curse and lament and impulses to laugh and play do not necessarily arise

at any safe distance from each other. Impulses toward grief and toward

mockery and self-mockery disorient our ordinary sense of distance and

diffference between the playhouse . . . And scenes of death and loss—

between the house of mirth and the house of mourning.

I attended a performance of Bette Midler in which she said in order to dem-

onstrate the strong connection of Yiddish culture to tragedy: “us, Jews, we love

to say how bad we feel. Do you know that in Yiddish there is only one word to

say you are happy, Freilech, and dozens of words to say how unhappy you are?”

Wolf, 251, 2. Michael LaChetta, “Not Divine . . . but Miss M Is Very Special,” The New York Daily News.

December 4, 1973.

Michael Moon, “Tragedy and Trash: Yiddish Theater and Queer Theater, Henry James,

Charles Ludlam, Ethyl Eichelberger,” in Boyarin et al., Queer Theory and the Jewish

Question, 288.


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Feeling victimized, whether justied or not, is typical of Yiddish culture and

many Yiddish songs.

Barbra Streisand is known for her melodramatic performance, as too is

Olga Guillot, with her quivering lips on the verge of crying, and tragic expres-sions, when singing about being betrayed, heartbroken, and victimized, the

typical themes of bolero lyrics. Being victimized—as in many aspects in

the life and performance of the diva—can sometimes cross from the stage to

real life and vice versa. This essay is not about the personal life stories of the

three singers, but about what they represent for their audiences. Still the title

of the previously cited interview with Olga Guillot in Clarín, quoting her as

saying Me maltrataron mucho (I was much mistreated) represents this self-

victimization cross-over.

Camp

The connection between Jewish, camp and queer has a strong presentation in

Funny Girl ; as Wolf puts it, “once Fanny’s rise to fame begins, each rise to her suc-

cess nds Jewishness undermining.” This is presented via a parody of feminin-

ity and heterosexuality, and ridiculing heteronormativity by way of Jewishness,

such as the Yiddish chicken dance version of Swan Lake (Schvan Lak ), “mocking

the ethnic normativity of a ‘white’, European, high-art form.” Interestingly, this

take-offf of Swan Lake has since become a “standard” in gay culture, with male-

only versions of the ballet, such as Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo. So, in

a way, a “Jewish” parody of the ballet turned into a queer version.

Finally, “queer” Fanny is “heterosexualized” by the “Arab prince,” Egyptian

heartthrob Omar Sharif, who reaffrms: “You are woman. I am man. Let’s kiss.”

Streisand’s own Jewish camp humor was noted by Sharif at a press conference

I attended as a journalist in London:

When Funny Girl came out, just after the Six Day War with Israel, I was

attacked by virtually the whole Arab press for kissing an “enemy” woman.

When I called Barbra to tell her about the headlines in the Arab press, her

reaction was [imitating a “Jewish princess” accent]: “Well, do you think

only the Arabs were angry? You should hear what my aunt had to say

about that.”

See the section “Like a Knife Stuck in the Heart,” about bolero lyrics, in Moshe Morad,

Fiesta de diez pesos: Music and Gay Identity in Special Period Cuba (Farnham & Burlington:

Ashgate, 2015), 193–200.

Wolf, 255.

Wolf, 255.


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Diaspora

“Diaspora is essentially queer,” claims Boyarin. The Jewish/queer connec-

tion is therefore reinforced by the diasporic factor and is strongly reected and

represented in the life stories and artistry of the queer Jewish divas. Streisandand Midler are both second generation Americans of Eastern European Jewish

origin—Midler born in Hawaii to a Jewish family who migrated from New

Jersey; Streisand, born in Brooklyn, is the daughter of Jewish immigrants from

Poland, Ukraine, and Russia.

In the case of Olga Guillot the diasporic factor is double and even triple,

constantly present in her life and psychology until her death in Miami in 2000.

Perhaps her Jewishness is doubtful but her life story ts well into the “wander-

ing Jew” image: born to immigrants of Catalan Jewish origin, migrating fromSantiago de Cuba to Havana at an early age, and then following the Revolution

to Venezuela, later moving to Mexico, and ending her life in Florida, where

she became both an icon-in-exile for gays in Cuba and an icon to Cuban

gays-in-exile.

Adding to her own life story, her music, bolero, has its own diasporic nature,

as the genre itself “migrated” from Santiago to Havana, and from Cuba to

Mexico, and onward.

Epilog: Viva La Diva Sionista!—from Dana to Madonna

A further strong connection of diva/Jewish/queer//Latino was evident

following the 1998 win of Israeli transgender singer Dana International at

the Eurovision Song Contest, with a song appropriately titled “Viva La Diva.”

Dana’s achievement gave a major boost to the gay pride and gay rights move-

ment in Israel, and had an impact, too, on European and even global gay and

transgender acceptance and rights.

The spontaneous winning night party of gay Israelis in Tel Aviv’s streets with

rainbow ags echoed throughout the gay Jewish world. Dana International,

born as Yaron Cohen in 1969 to a Jewish family of Yemenite origin, indeed

became an “international” diva and gay icon, with a particularly strong inu-

ence on Hispanic gays in the United States.

Boyarin quoted in Aisa Solomon, “Viva la Diva Citizenship: Post-Zionism and Gay Rights,”

in Boyarin et al., Queer Theory and the Jewish Question, 160.

Morad, Fiesta de diez pesos, 186–7.


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Many years after the 1998 win, the song “Viva La Diva” still is a hit in La

Escuelita, a Latino gay club in Manhattan, and Dana is the subject of endless

impersonations by Latino drag queens.

During my visit to La Escuelita in the early 2000s, I saw Latino gays watch-ing video clips of Dana with admiration, and the dance oor instantly lled

with dancers with elaborate “camp” movements when the played a dance

remix of “Viva la Diva.” Later in the evening, another highlight of audience

enthusiasm was when a Puerto Rican drag queen, impersonating Dana, mimed

a Spanish version of “Viva la Diva.” Interestingly, with Dana’s rise, the macho

Israeli image, which contradicted the “Jewish efffeminate” one as described

above, has turned into a camp/in-your-face, queer “chutzpa.”

On the gay Hispanic and Latin American scenes, Dana became a gayicon, resonating with Latin American drag queens and transgenders, with

her dark/ “Latino” look and use of Spanish, Spanglish, and Spanish/gibberish

expressions in her songs (such as “Viva la Diva” and “Loca”). Madonna added

another Jewish/queer/diva connection with her much publicized interest in

Jewish Kabbala and support of Israel. In 2004, the press announced that she

had decided to adopt the Jewish Biblical name of Esther as part of her adop-

tion of Kabbala, triggering a major wave of Jewish delight/pride and even

more gay/Jewish pride. The news about Madonna’s transformation to Esther

was also spread in the Spanish language media in the United States and Latin

America (such as the headline in the popular Mexican newspaper El Universal

on June 18, 2004: “Madonna cambia de nombre, ahora se llama Esther”). In

2009 during her concert in Tel Aviv to kick offf her “Sticky and Sweet” world

tour, Madonna/Esther wrapped herself in an Israeli ag, bringing yet another

dimension to the American/global queer/Jewish/diva connection. The

Israeli ag “wrap” was published in the media around the world, including

the Spanish media in the Americas (“La bandera israelí de Madonna enfurece

a los palestinos,” in El Mundo). As indicated in the headline, it enraged pro-

Palestinian groups around the world, but was welcomed by Jewish gay groups

in both the United States and Latin America, and even celebrated in some

gay parties I attended in both Americas at the end of 2009, with drag queens

impersonating Madonna wrapping themselves in the Israeli ag.

http://www.eluniversal.com.mx/espectaculos/53639.html (accessed January 5, 2015).

Haaretz Service, Associated Press and City Mouse Online, September 1, 2009, 9:27 pm,http://www.haaretz.com/news/madonna-in-tel-aviv-israel-is-the-energy-center-of-the-

world-1.283075 (accessed on January 5, 2015).

http://www.elmundo.es/elmundo/2009/09/03/orienteproximo/1251976330.html

(accessed January 5, 2015).


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In one such drag show at a party of Latino gays in Miami I attended,

following a drag queen impersonating Madonna, the compere presented a

Dana International-look-alike by hailing: “Viva la diva sionista!” (Viva the

Zionist diva!)

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Documents

Morad, M. Queer Jewish Divas. Jewishness and Queerness in the Life and Performance of Barbara Streisand, Bette Mideler and Olga Guillot. 2016