For over two decades, we have seen the impact of feminist theory and gender studies in modern Hebrew literary studies, with a particular focus on Jewish masculinities in Europe and Palestine around the turn of the twentieth century. This is no accident, since the male Jewish body clearly became a fraught battleground in the latter part of the nineteenth century. While proponents of scientific racism and theories of degeneracy depicted male Jews as diseased and effeminate, Jewish thinkers advocated for reform through productive labor and physical exercise.

Now Philip Hollander sheds light on developments in Hebrew literature at the turn of the twentieth century that complicate and enrich our understanding of this period. Eschewing any simple equation of literary representation with masculine role modeling, Hollander identifies a cluster of male writers as advocates for “Self-Evaluative” masculinity. He takes the phrase from a 1914 essay by Yosef Ḥayim Brenner and uses it to designate the open-ended work of four writers—Brenner, S. Y. Agnon, L. A. Arieli, and Aharon Reuveni—who aimed to provoke introspection and self-critique in their contemporaries through their literary work.

Unlike their Zionist contemporaries, these writers did not repudiate diasporic Jewish culture. As Zionist conceptions of masculinity found no models in the Jewish past, the public sphere of prestate Palestine offered little in the way of cultural institutions to support conceptions of a new Jewish man. Hollander's research draws attention to the liminality and indeterminacy of prestate Jewish culture in Palestine. Within this context, he argues that the Self-Evaluative writers he studies drew on a rhetoric of male impotence, “common in East European Jewish politics and literature, where writers deployed it to advance masculine forms they considered most conducive to a better Jewish future” (4). Thus, for example, the schlemiel offered these writers something of a positive prototype, a figure whose weakness constituted a kind of incorruptibility and resistance to “seduction by might's brutalizing potential” (111). In effect, these writers found ways of working indirectly towards reform by connecting with the lived experience of the Jewish polity.

In Hollander's reading, this project of self-reform relied on the underlying support of male homosocial relationships that promoted a shared sense of purpose. Arguing for the social impact of Hebrew literature at the turn of the twentieth century, he writes: “The act of reading became a central process by which Jewish men internalized masculine norms that cemented their identification with the New Yishuv, pushed them to withstand difficult conditions, and kept them dedicated to a collective effort whose fruits they were unlikely to savor” (107). Hollander concludes that the Self-Evaluative writers he studies portrayed Jewish men as effeminate as part of a plan to stimulate their readers to collaborative reflection and positive change.

Brenner is the key figure in this movement, known, of course, for his uncompromising project of self-critique. As Hollander puts it, Brenner “asserted the need for Jews to forgo a positive and stable sense of self. By beginning a process of ‘self-evaluation’ grounded in critical appraisal of individual and collective character, Jewish men could tap into self-understanding and understanding of the surrounding world as resources for bettering turn-of-the-century Jews’ lives” (15). This reading works most persuasively in the case of Brenner, whose ethos it clearly reflects. Hollander further discerns in Agnon's, Reuveni's, and Arieli's narratives of masculine failure the impetus to stir self-reflection in each writer's male readers. In his reading of Agnon, Brenner, Arieli, and Reuveni the lens is focused on male relationships as the homosocial grounding for a collective project of self-critique and self-reform. Hollander responds to and corrects the characterization of these writers as “decadent,” making a substantive case for reading their work as the stimulus to collaborative projects of change.

Demonstrating a nuanced appreciation for literary dynamics, Hollander makes the case for recognizing the political dimensions of Hebrew literary texts. There is a careful historicism at work here that results in some thoughtful revisions of recent work in Hebrew literary studies, diverging from studies of the impact of the Zionist emphasis on “curing” the male Jewish body. Noting the influence of Georg Mosse's studies of nationalism and the male body on the turn to masculinity studies in Hebrew literature and Israeli culture, Hollander parts company with critics such as Shachar Pinsker, Yigal Schwartz, and Mikha'el Gluzman, who have explored the implication of the male Jewish body in emerging conceptions of national identity. He also takes issue with Yaron Peleg's argument for Arieli's work as paving the way for the gay literature of the 1960s, using close reading of Arieli to demonstrate instead the writer's stigmatizing of homosexual bonds.

My one reservation concerns Hollander's depiction of all four writers as motivated by a shared set of goals: he sees them as self-consciously aware of the need to motivate their peers to engage in productive self-examination through homosocial alliances. This observation is more Hollander's historical conclusion than a didactic goal or ideological imperative that these writers consciously shared. To take several examples, Hollander finds in Agnon's early Hemdat stories evidence that the writer sought to “prod his readers to examine Hemdat's lifestyle and literary approach more closely, reject them, and adopt a lifestyle, and potentially a literary approach, more attuned to national needs” (49). While I have no wish to identify the would-be writer Hemdat with Agnon the author, Hollander's reading risks imposing too great a burden of conscious awareness and intentionality on the youthful Agnon, still in the throes of his own literary (and personal) formation. Further on, Hollander characterizes Agnon and his fellow writers as “demonizing elements of Jewish identity” that they “believed needed to be overcome for a better Jewish future to be achieved” (132). So, too, he characterizes Reuveni as “direct[ing] attention to the psychological issues he saw preventing the Palestinian Jewish community and its male members from realizing their goals” (162). These characterizations risk overstating the case, picturing all four writers as motivated by a shared set of goals. Hollander's readings verge at such moments on the programmatic, imputing intentionality to the writers he studies. If we adjust the frame just slightly, one might argue instead that Hollander has discerned a particular dynamic at work in these writers, concerning shared anxieties and conflicts regarding expectations of masculinity and the challenge of forming a new society. Probing these concerns, their writing opens up ground for self-reflection, without necessarily promoting a specific project of reform. We can credit Hollander with broadening the reach of gender studies in Hebrew literature with this exploration of dilemmas of masculinity in the work of four Palestinian Jewish writers at the turn of the twentieth century.