Who else but Naomi Seidman could give us in one chapter brilliant readings of such varied texts as the autobiographies of Salomon Maimon and M. A. Günzburg, Avraham Mapu's Love of Zion (1853), Y. L. Gordon's narrative poem “The Tip of the Yud” (1878), S. Y. Abramovitsh's novella “The Travels of Benjamin the Third” (1878), Erica Jong's novel Fear of Flying (1973), and Woody Allen's film Love and Death (1975)? This is exactly what Seidman does in the fourth chapter of her intellectually stimulating and beautifully written new book. At the heart of the book is an investigation of love, marriage, and sexuality in Jewish literature and Jewish modernization. It considers the move from the traditional Jewish system of arranged marriage to the modern concept of romance. The book begins with a pointed question: When did this transition take place, or, when did Jews in Europe fell in love with love? In Pauline Wengeroff's memoir—with which Seidman's book opens—the answer seems to be exceptionally clear-cut: between 1848 and 1849. But of course, the answer is far more complex. Wengeroff explained the move away from arranged marriage as resulting from the fact that men in her town of Brest-Litovsk began to study “alien books” and that girls like herself began to read poetry and novels, thus highlighting the crucial role of literature in the process of Jewish modernization, which went hand in hand with embourgeoisement and secularization. Literature not only represented these changes, but also provided a form of “sentimental education” in the “rules” of romance and courtship.

Seidman's book explores the “intersection between literature and romantic practices, studying the effects of European literary and sexual conventions on Jewish sexual structures, analyzing the literary character of Jewish sexual modernity” (6). Seidman follows the footsteps of scholars of Jewish history and culture from Jacob Katz and Saul Stampfer to David Biale and Daniel Boyarin, but she also returns to Ian Watt's classic The Rise of the Novel (1957). Watt elegantly showed how the new genre came into prominence in eighteenth-century Europe with the rise of the middle class and the rise of literacy. Seidman shows that parallel processes took place in Jewish society in Europe during the nineteenth century. However, Jewish adoption of European romantic ideologies was always partial and ambivalent, forming a distinctively Jewish approach to sex, love, and marriage. Because these new conceptions—the “love religion”—were rooted in traditions of Christianity and chivalry, the Jewish attitude toward it was suspicious, tempered by the pulls of family and community that could still be found in nineteenth-century Hebrew and Yiddish literature of the Haskalah. While Jewish writers such as Mapu, Abramovitsh, and Sholem Aleichem wrote in the genre of the roman (the word Hebrew and Yiddish designated for the novel, linking it to romantic love), they struggled with its adaptability. Sholem Aleichem declared that writing a Jewish romance presents a unique challenge, as “the circumstances under which a Jew falls in love, and declares his passion, are altogether different from the circumstances which control the lives of other men” (44).

But this is not the end of the story Seidman tells us. By the beginning of the twentieth century, the traditional Jewish approach to love and marriage seemed to have been completely abandoned, yet modernist Jewish writers such as S. Ansky and S. Y. Agnon discovered or reinvented “tradition,” finding inspiration and pleasure in traditional concepts and practices of matchmaking, intergenerational ties, and sex segregation. This process continued in surprising ways in the writing of Jewish figures such as Sigmund Freud, Bernard Malamud, Grace Paley, Erica Jong, Philip Roth, and Tony Kushner. Thus, Seidman claims, in the twentieth century “a full-fledged Jewish counter-discourse” emerged. By focusing on literature that deals with love and sexuality in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the book offers a fresh way to approach what Dan Miron has called “the modern Jewish literary complex.” Seidman's study moves gracefully between texts written in Hebrew, Yiddish, German, and English, and shows that writers sometimes far removed from each other in place, time, and language wrestled with similar issues and fashioned texts with similar attitudes towards love and sexuality.

This approach dictates the structure of the book. After the first chapter, which sets the stage for the rest of the study, each chapter closely follows a particular Jewish sexual practice and the way literature represented and shaped it. Each chapter begins with texts of Haskalah literature and ends with early and late twentieth-century texts, literary, theatrical, and cinematic. The second chapter is devoted to the institution of matchmaking and the shadkhn. Seidman shows that modern Jewish literature emerges from the Haskalah movement's rejection of arranged marriage, but paradoxically also with the partial recovery of the matchmaking system. The third chapter turns to yiḥus, the traditional Jewish concept of lineage or pedigree, which was derided in the literature of the Haskalah, but found afterlife in a wider range of meanings—from mystical eroticism that links romance with intergenerational ties to the notion of “queer kinship”—in modern Jewish literature. The fourth chapter, perhaps the liveliest in this stimulating book, deals with the choreography of courtship, and the rhythms of sexual maturation, attraction, and consummation. Here, Seidman shows how Jewish texts and cultural productions form a counterdiscourse to the notion of gender complementarity on which European romance rested. The fifth chapter moves to the process of “nuclearization” of romantic love and marriage, which reduced the role of parents and extended family, showing the persistence and cultural productivity of alternative models of kinship in Jewish literature from the late nineteenth to the late twentieth century. The final chapter explores the crucial topic of sex segregation, a practice that was denounced most vehemently by Haskalah literature, while later Jewish texts by S. Y. Agnon, Sholem Asch, Dvora Baron, and Isaac Bashevis Singer discover the erotic pleasures in sex-segregated, homosocial spaces and a sense of camaraderie.

The book culminates with a provocative proposal that Jewish writers not only challenged European norms by articulating a Jewish counterculture, but also played a crucial role in the overthrow of the modern religion of romantic love. Jewish writers contributed to “the formation of a modern sexual counter-narrative” that “has moved into the center of the ways we understand sex” (69). This is a bold claim that invites disagreement and productive dispute. I find it interesting that a study that begins with attention to a Hebrew text such as Mapu's Love of Zion ends with a claim that seems to be most relevant to contemporary American culture, rather than to Zionist and post-Zionist culture in Israel. It might be necessary to read Seidman's book alongside studies about love, marriage, and sexuality in Hebrew literature and Israeli culture, and ask whether American Jews are in line with what Israeli Jews from Ashkenazic or Mizrahi background (or post-Soviet Jews, for that matter) have been writing and producing in the last decades. I suspect that such an investigation will show the divergent cultures of contemporary Jews, but perhaps also surprising points of contiguity and contact. The Marriage Plot will surely be a foundational text for future studies of Jewish sexuality and modernization, as well as for deciphering contemporary Jewish cultures.