A Creole "Judith of Bethulia" in Ukrainian Breeches?: The Jewish Interracial Drag of Adah Isaacs Menken (1835-1868)

• In Event: Gender and Performance Studies

Abstract

Adah Isaacs Menken (1835-1868), a racially ambiguous Louisiana-born stage performer and poet, self-identified as Jewish and achieved international fame, in part, through her dramatic portrayal of male roles including that of Ivan Mazepa, a legendary Ukrainian military leader. Engendering much public speculation about her own background and personal orientations, she often shifted identities rapidly within the course of a single performance, challenging dominant ideas about gender, sexuality, and race. In her poetry, she imagined herself as a voice of the Jewish people, once even adopting the perspective of Judith of Bethulia, who uses seductive powers to defend her nation. Michael and Barbara Foster's biography of Menken introduces her as "the original superstar," a prototype for later figures like Marilyn Monroe and Elizabeth Taylor, an artist who revolutionized show business through her "modern flair for action, scandal, and unpopular causes, especially that of the Jewish people" (xiii).

In this paper, I offer a visual and textual analysis of how Menken's Jewishness, varyingly gendered and racialized within Victorian public discourse, was constructed and represented in the late nineteenth-century popular press, in her own writings, and in the secondary literature that surrounds her short but monumental career. I draw from the existing scholarship on Menken, as well as from playbills, drawings, photographs, obituaries, and other materials from Menken's archives at the Harry Ransom Center and the New York Public Library's Performing Arts Center. My paper explores how Jewishness functioned for Menken as both a collective allegiance and a creative point of view. It argues that Menken's public association with Jewishness facilitated connections within apparatuses of the nascent industry of American show business and exemplified qualities Andrea Most has described as characterizing a particularly Jewish theatrical sensibility that prioritizes improvisation and fluid notions of the self. On the other hand, it argues that Menken's public association with Jewishness and with interracial figures fueled critics' racialization of her body and condemnation of her expansive gender performances in relation to dominant ideals of white Christian femininity. Menken’s controversial and celebrated legacy thereby also helped shape an enduring archetype of the celebrity icon as a boundary-crossing provocateur.

Author

• Golan Moskowitz, Tulane University