Yosef Haim Brenner's Breakdown and Bereavement begins with an accident:

In an ironic tone, the narrator reports on the “disaster”: Hefetz, who came from Europe to Eretz-Israel to work the land, collapses under the strain. His body's betrayal prevents him from completing his mission. Similar accidents stand at the center of Michael Gluzman's Ha-Guf ha-Ẓiyoni: le'umiyut, migdar u-miniyut ba-sifrut ha-Ivrit ha-ḥadashah (The Zionist Body: Nationalism, Gender, and Sexuality in Modern Hebrew Literature). This book demonstrates the complexities inherent in the narration and representation of the Jewish body. It focuses on moments of irony and self-reflection of Jewish and Israeli male writers who dealt with the betrayals of a body that failed to do what was assigned to it. Gluzman intends to show that rather than being marginal, these poetic moments have constituted an integral part of modern Hebrew literature since its emergence. Arguing for a new historiography of Hebrew literature from the late nineteenth century until the end of the twentieth, The Zionist Body offers an alternative model of reading that goes beyond the evolution of the literary forms, styles, and relationships between Hebrew literature and the “Zionist master-narrative.” Working within the field of cultural studies, Gluzman employs queer as well as feminist theories, psychoanalytic approaches, and poststructural thought. In following Michel Foucault's seminal work on the history of sexuality as well as Roland Barthes's insights on desire in writing, he presents a fascinating reading of works of Hebrew literature that have been part of a national discourse within which the Jewish body and Jewish masculinity have been reshaped and reformed.

The political discourses on the Jewish body and the Jewish male in particular can be traced to nineteenth-century Europe, and they are the subject of a broad field of research.Footnote ² Gluzman mentions the influence of scientific innovations on the formation of an antisemitic medical discourse that emphasized the negative physical character of the Jew and regarded his body as feminine. The defeminization of the Jew, however, revealed a psychocultural mechanism—hatred and self-hatred—that urgently called for repair and correction.Footnote ³ This evocation of the new body emerged in different forms, as well as in Zionist discourses that were marked by antisemitic arguments and stereotypes, such as Max Nordau's call for the reshaping and progressive formation of the Jewish body (“muscular Judaism”) at the Second Zionist Congress. The remedy for the Jewish deformation in exile—a victim of pogroms, fear, and suffering—was the state. In this sense, the “return to history” was perceived as a return to the body: the only way the Jew could finally become a real man, which also meant—on the collective level—to become a nation.

The longing for sovereignty found poetic expression in works of Jewish and Hebrew writers who experimented with the ideological call for revival and improvement of the Jewish “physicality.” The Zionist Body is dedicated to their work. Gluzman explores the figurations of this physicality—its emergence and collapse, reconstruction and fragmentation, and what it should have been and what it failed to be. This failure was imprinted from the very beginning, for, as this book impressively shows, while Hebrew literature embodied the possibility of the negation of Diaspora and the ideological commitment to the project of the new Jewish body on the one hand, it also embodied self-criticism, irony, and an ambiguous perspective on the other.

The first chapter deals with Theodor Herzl's Altneuland (1902). Written in German, this novel that resonates with the Dreyfus Affair depicts the private exodus of an Austrian Jew from Vienna to Palestine. According to Gluzman's reading, the Jewish state—an Old New land—is a sexual and gender utopia, a colonial site of redemption in which the feminine Jewish male becomes sovereign and is finally cured of his neuroses, such as melancholy, death wishes, and homoerotic desires. The cure, however, is selective, as shown in the contradiction between the suffrage ideal and the patriarchal politics, as well as in the altruistic relationship to the Arab population.

Another example of “exile negation” that is translated into gender and sexual complexities is found in Chapter 2. Inquiring into questions of fiction and faction, poetry and historiography, Gluzman retells the story of the national poet, who in 1903 was sent to Kishinev in order to write a report on the pogrom. Chaim Nachman Bialik stayed in Kishinev for a few weeks, heard survivors' testimonies, and witnessed the destruction. Yet instead of a documentary report, he returned with a poem, “In the City of Slaughter,” that demonstrated an ambivalent relationship to the victims. Gluzman reads the collective story in light of a private one that took place some years earlier. According to this reading, the repression of an early traumatic experience—the poet as a subject of violation and humiliation—returns through the meeting with the female victims, this time, however, in the form of the violator, an over-identification that generates poetic distance and aggressive protest. The revealing of a hidden gender narrative that associates helplessness with femininity indicates the processes of identity within which the consolidation of a masculine subject demands the rejection of the feminine.

A poetic imagery that interferes with the model of the new masculine body is explored in Chapter 3, on The Wanderings of Benjamin III (1878), a work that was first written in Yiddish. Deterritorialization, gender reversals, and role transitions that characterize the two travelers (the novel's protagonists) manifest criticism of and identification with traditional Jewish society. Gluzman shows how in the Carnival of Abramovich, where a Jewish Don Quixote dispatches his unfulfilled desire ahead of him, not only the stereotypes of the exilic body but also its new national incarnations are called into question.

The return of Diaspora as pathology is discussed Chapter 4, which deals with Brenner's Breakdown and Bereavement (1914). Once again, sexuality is associated with territory; however, the remedy becomes a disease in the form of an oppressive mechanism that submerges its subjects. Brenner's criticism of the Zionist body is not nostalgic, for indeed, the exilic experience imprinted in distorted bodies requires repair. Yet the promised correction through the reshaping of a new masculinity appears to be no less destructive.

Manifestations of the “new” are embodied in different figurations of the Sabras. This Israeli native, who had not been contaminated by the life experience of the Diaspora and was shaped as a militarist body, appears in Moshe Shamir's novel He Walked through the Fields (1947). By opposing scholars who argued for an affirmative narrative, Gluzman tends rather to expose its fractures and to claim the existence of contradictory stories. According to his reading, the novel's protagonist is haunted by anxiety and fear, insecurity and a death wish. Instead of demonstrating a new masculinity, heroism, and self-sacrifice, his characteristics contradict and subvert the image of the “living-dead,” a celebrated national allegory. The protagonist's feminine body cannot be redeemed or repaired, not even on the battlefield.

The battlefield or army service—itself a formative experience of the “melting pot” ideology—is also called into question by Yehoshua Kenaz. Reading Infiltration (1986), Gluzman shows how femininity associated with “illness” is relegated to the margins of the national discourse dominated by “healthy” masculinity. The homogeneous national narrative imprinted in the male body imposes restrictions and regulations on the subject until its destruction. Some of Kenaz's literary bodies, such as the artists, refuse to be written into this narrative. They pose an alternative that cannot, however, be fulfilled. In the same way, the narrator himself, a witness of sexual and identity processes, documents moments of distortion in the birth of Zionist bodies.

The last chapter is dedicated to The Book of Intimate Grammar (1991) by David Grossman, a work, according to Gluzman, that already demonstrates the post-Zionist body. The novel's protagonist is another dissenter, one whose body rejects the masculine poetics, and his intimate language interferes with the collective discourse dominated and manipulated by national agendas and hegemonic politics. And yet the concept of “post-Zionism” seems rather questionable in light of the claim for a new historiography—one that attempts “not to discover the roots of our identity but to commit itself to its dissipation.”Footnote ⁴ After all, the power of this book lies precisely in the way it captures contradictory aspects and desires of literary creation that respond to both the marvelous and the dreadful moments of Zionism.

The Zionist Body brings together a detailed engagement with texts, a theoretical framework, and a wide scope of interdisciplinary scholarship. Gluzman's insightful findings on the fascinating role of gender and sexuality in the construction and destruction of national narratives indicate that the Zionist enterprise with its physical embodiments and cultural ramifications encompasses not only the ideal but also its deformed, failed implementations.