SOURCE: "Angels, Monsters, and Jews: Intersections of Queer and Jewish Identity in Kushner's Angels in America," in PMLA, Vol. 113, No. 1, January 1998, pp. 90-102.

In this essay, Freedman analyzes Angels in America as "the most powerful recent attempt to interrogate the complex interrelation between inscriptions of Jewish and sexual otherness."

The foreignness of Jews is a kind of difference unlike others. They are "those people " whom no label fits, whether assigned by the Gaze, the Concept or the State.… [F]or Jewishness, the type is the exception and its absence the rule; in fact you can rarely pick out a Jew at first glance. It's an insubstantial difference that resists definition as much as it frustrates the eye: are they a people? a religion? a nation? All these categories apply, but none is adequate in itself.

Alain Finkielkraut (164)

The french jewish critic Alain Finkielkraut neatly encapsulates the conundrum that...