“I'm neither one nor the other”

The musical film Yentl (Streisand, 1983) draws from multiple traditions—Yiddish literature, theatre, and cinema, and Shakespeare&s;s Twelfth Night —to tackle complex intersections of ethnoracial-religious identities and trans experiences in the Diaspora during the twentieth century. The film Yentl —as well as Isaac Bashevis Singer&s;s story, “Yentl the Yeshiva Boy,” and Leah Napolin and Singer&s;s play, Yentl , that Streisand adapts—employs these traditions in ways that destabilize the binaries that underlie reductive binary conceptions of race and gender. These adaptations extend the challenge initiated in Shakespeare with gender to the ethnoracial-religious, thereby questioning dichotomies of race and gender in their exploration of Jewish identities and trans experiences. Interestingly, all versions of Yentl appropriate Shakespeare to delve into this complicated, nuanced relationship between trans experiences and ethnoracial-religious identities, though with significant differences and to varying degrees. Although these versions of Yentl were created post-1960, they look backward to examine pre-World War II Jewish identities in the insulated shtetls of Eastern Europe and, especially with Streisand&s;s film, forward to consider contemporary Jewish American culture. They all draw from the deep well of Jewish tradition to explore ethnoracial-religious identities, connecting them in complex ways to trans expressions and experiences.