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- Title
Muscle Jews and Airplanes: Modernist Mythologies, the Great War, and the Politics of Regeneration.
- Authors
Presner, Todd
- Abstract
This article explores a quintessential modernist mythology, namely flying and aviation fantasies, in the context of Jewish body culture and the hopes for corporeal regeneration as it uses a different trove of cultural sources. On the analysis of World War I, the catastrophe at the heart of much of the modernist imaginary, the article analyzes the transformation of the Jewish body of muscle into a body of steel. Expanding on the cultural history of the figure of the muscled Jew, the author shows how the Great War became the proving ground for Jewish masculinity and how Jewish aviators embodied, however fleetingly, the modernist mythology of flight in all its dialectical manifestations of nationality and war, muscularity and militancy, heroism and conquest.
- Subjects
JEWISH mythology; JEWS in literature; AERONAUTICAL flights; MODERNISM (Literature); JEWISH participation in World War I; AERONAUTICS &; civilization; AERONAUTICS in journalism; MILITARY air pilots; AEROSPACE writers
- Publication
Modernism/Modernity, 2006, Vol 13, Issue 4, p701
- ISSN
1071-6068
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1353/mod.2006.0091