Love + Marriage = Death

The essays in this collection, written by a pioneering interdisciplinary scholar, deal with the roles of images in the construction of stereotypes and the categories of difference as represented in textsin high literature, in medical literature, in artfrom the last fin-de-sicle to our own. Intensely engaged in the cultural politics of everyday life and conscious of how texts reflect and shape our social practices, they deal primarily with representations and self-representations of Jews in the past one hundred years and focus on the question of the constructions of the Jews body in art and literature. The title essay, Love + Marriage = Death: STDs and AIDS in the Modern World, however, studies the image of sexually transmitted disease from Shakespeare to Martin Amis. It sets the tone for an understanding of this collection as a book about Jews and their representation, but not as a special, isolated case. The first essay, the largely autobiographical Ethnicities: Why I Write What I Write, serves as an introduction to the collection. The other essays are: Max Nordau, Sigmund Freud, and the Question of Conversion; Salome, Syphilis, Sarah Bernhardt, and the Modern Jewess; Zwetschkenbaums Competence: Madness and the Discourse of the Jews; Otto Weininger and Sigmund Freud: Race and Gender in the Shaping of Psychoanalysis; Sibling Incest, Madness, and the Jew; R. B. Kitajs Good Bad Diasporism and the Body in American Jewish Postmodern Art; and Who Is Jewish?: The Newest Jewish Writing in German and Daniel Goldhagen.